D.C.’s new police chief knows she’s facing huge challenges when it comes to staffing and spiking crime in the city.
Chief Pamela Smith said she wants to deploy more officers to spots in the city dealing with increased crime. The News4 I-Team found some of those neighborhoods have seen a shrinking police force. According to D.C. police’s own crime reports, parts of the city with the most violent crimes have fewer officers than they did a year ago at this time, while some with less gun violence got increased police presence.
The I-Team recently visited a summer safety initiative in Southeast D.C. put on by Ward 8 D.C. Council member Trayon White. It didn’t take long to find someone touched by gun violence: Tressy Conyers lost her daughter in a shooting.
"That’s my heart; that’s my best friend,” she said.
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It happened nine years ago but still feels fresh to her.
"The pain,” she said. “That pain I wish that pain on nobody. It hurts.”
Standing, next to her Jasmine McPherson, a mother of two young children, said, “It’s unsafe. It’s affordable, but it’s unsafe.”
She’s trying to find a way to move out of this neighborhood where she says gunshots are so common, sometimes police aren’t called.
"No. I mean, it’s become a version of like a normal thing,” she said.
D.C. police report the neighborhood in the city’s farthest southeast corner is home to the most gun crime in the city. Forty-one shootings or homicides with a gun have occurred since January in Police Service Area (PSA) 708. That’s 16 more than this time last year.
“People have got a spirit of lawlessness where they are shooting in front of the police,” Councilman White said. “Oh, you can see it every day.”
But despite a rising number of shootings, the I-Team found there are fewer police officers there. According to most recent staffing report from D.C. police, 25 officers are assigned to patrol that corner of the city. A year ago, there were four more.
The I-Team found seven of the highest crime PSAs in D.C. lost officers or at best kept the number of officers they had last July.
At the same time, six of the PSAs with the least amount of violent gun crime gained officers compared to this time last year.
As D.C. police deal with a shrinking force, the I-Team found nearly half of PSAs have fewer officers than last year.
McPherson, the mom of two young children, said she wants more officers.
“Yes. More help would be nice,” she said. “These are people, too.”
White said he’s asked for more officers “each and every day.” But the council member isn't certain more cops would stop crime there by itself.
It's layered. He and longtime residents say it's more than just officers. Jobs, new homes and investment are needed to help the community, as well as officers who have time to do something other than move from awful call to awful call.
"It's bad for public safety and it's bad for community relations, because a tired officer is not going to be as effective as a fresh officer,” said Will Pelfrey, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
He said D.C. is fighting an all too familiar battle in American cities: too much crime and not enough people willing to be police officers to stop it.
"Officers sometimes say we don't want to work there, we don't want to work night shift, we don't want to work in these parts of the city, and police agencies have few options right now because they're so desperate for people,” Pelfrey said. “So, they may be allowing officers to make requests or submit requests that they would not otherwise field because they're down so many people."
The I-Team sent questions to D.C. police weeks ago asking what was leading to fewer officers in some of the most violent parts of the city, but they didn’t offer any answers.
That’s something Tressy Conyers said she’d like to know, too.
“I think they need more police, more of these out here,” she said. “I think they need more.”
A D.C. police spokesperson suggested it was important to expand the view beyond just comparing this month to last July, so the I-Team looked at the past year. PSA 708 is at its lowest number of officers in any month in the past year, and police districts east of the river lost a combined 65 officers – the most in number and percentage.
Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.
