The number of homicides dropped again last year in the Washington region, including in the District, which grew in population and yet recorded the fewest killings in a half-century.
As of Monday evening, the District had 88 killings in 2012, a
milestone for D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, whose long-standing
goal has been fewer than 100 homicides. As recently as 2009, the District had 140 killings. In 2011, there were 108.
In Prince George’s County, where crime dropped in nearly every category,
there were 63 homicides, down from 97 in 2011, a harkening back to the
1980s, when the county had more farmland than urban centers or upscale
subdivisions.
Police point to several reasons for the decrease,
which has been part of a years-long national trend in some major cities
across the country.Authorities have broken up dozens of violent gangs,
seized thousands of guns, used technology to monitor the streets and directed additional resources to high-crime areas.
Read on...
I look closely at investigative stories written by The Post. Investigation is a key competency of The Post and should remain so, not just because of the Watergate legacy but because this is one of the prime functions of newspapers — holding government and institutions accountable. I hear this from readers all the time; they want fact-based, hard-hitting investigations that keep people honest.
One recent investigative story was Cheryl W. Thompson’s front-page article on Feb. 19, “The trick to D.C.’s homicide closure rate.” It had no factual inaccuracies — all the statistics in it are true — but in its language and tone, it seemed to tell a story more of gotcha than of scandal. I don’t think D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier used trickery in her reporting of statistics to mislead the public about the solving of homicide cases.
Rather than suggesting that Lanier was fudging numbers, I think the story would have worked far better as a straightforward explanation of how the Metropolitan Police Department, other major police departments and the FBI keep homicide statistics — and of some of the pitfalls in that method.