Police arrested 48 people and recovered three guns in a three-day operation targeting defendants released until trial or people on probation who weren’t following the rules that go with that freedom.
Federal and local officials described Operation Trident as a response to something many D.C. residents have voiced deep concerns about: offenders returning to the streets to commit more crimes.
“If you are in one of these release statuses, you have to be compliant, you can’t be committing more crimes or you could get rearrested,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said.
“MPD along with the Court Services and Offenders Supervision Agency, known as CSOSA, and the Pretrial Services Agency noticed a spike in arrests and gun-related offenses by supervised defendants,” acting Chief of Police Pamela Smith said.
“The individuals that were recommended for arrest under this particular project within pretrial were those who were at highest risk of rearrest,” said Pretrial Services Agency Director Leslie Cooper. “They were not facing a new charge.”
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves described challenges related to his office’s prosecution of gun crimes.
“So our most common charge for an individual who is illegally carrying a firearm is carrying a pistol without a license,” he said. “Under the D.C. code, there is a rebuttable presumption that if we establish that an individual committed that offense by probable cause, they will be held pending trial. In our experience, even though we routinely seek that hold, those individuals are held less than 10% of the time.”
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