Why is America’s capital so violent?
Though he has a black belt in karate, when a trio of armed boys in ski masks threatened Henry Cuellar, a congressman from Texas, outside his Navy Yard flat on October 2nd he swiftly handed over the keys to his Toyota Crossover. It was the 754th carjacking in America’s capital this year, amounting to roughly three a day since January. And it was not the first attack on a member of Congress. In February Angie Craig of Minnesota heroically fended off a man who grabbed her by the neck in the lift of the building where she stays near the Capitol.
Violent crime in the district is up by 40% this year. A proliferation of guns has turned dozens of petty disputes into killings: for the first time in a quarter of a century, more than 200 people were murdered before October 1st. That bucks the national trend. Elsewhere the crime epidemic that came with covid-19 is ebbing. In 30 cities that make their murder counts publicly available, the Council on Criminal Justice, a think-tank, found that by July there had been 202 fewer homicides than in the first half of 2022, a 9.4% drop. In Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Rochester the murder rate fell by more than 20%. Why then is the capital of the free world on track to record its worst year in decades?
Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has an unusual amount of say in its affairs. In March Congress reversed a revision to Washington’s criminal code passed by the district council which, among many other changes, dropped mandatory minimum sentences for carjacking. It was the first time Congress had nixed a local law in three decades. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s minority leader, warned that the district’s “soft-on-crime” leaders needed “adult supervision”. By summer’s end three Republican congressmen had filed a bill to dissolve the council and mayor’s office and put federal lawmakers in charge.
2023-10-30 10:03:24
Original from www.economist.com
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