jonetta rose barras: Comprehensive public safety failure in DC

The DC Council this week unanimously approved the appointment of Pamela Smith as the new chief of the Metropolitan Police Department. That vote came despite glaring experiential deficiencies. Still, Mayor Muriel Bowser was pleased.

“I am proud to have Chief Smith at the helm of MPD as we continue engaging and working with community stakeholders and our partners on the Council and in the criminal justice system,” she said in a prepared statement issued after the legislature’s vote. She noted also that Smith is the first Black woman to lead the agency on a permanent basis.

“I have had several conversations with Chief Smith,” at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds shared during the council’s discussion before the vote on her nomination. “I feel her passion for the community and for serving people.”

Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Smith is an ordained Baptist minister, for Christ’s sake.

At-large Councilmember Christina Henderson called Smith “an accomplished leader.”

While the banner written and waved since her nomination in July 2023 might be that Smith comes with 25 years in law enforcement, the indisputable truth is that she lacks comprehensive knowledge and experience dealing with the type of violent urban and juvenile crime that has racked the District for the past three years. 

Smith’s primary work in policing has been with the U.S. Park Police, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior. In fact, at the time her appointment was announced, she told reporters that she had shifted her career direction to law enforcement after seeing an officer in New York from the mounted horse unit. In 2021, she made it to the rank of chief of the Park Police before retiring the next year.

In 2022, she was hired by MPD to head its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, a newly created position born of the national and local protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the demand for an end to institutional racism. Further, MPD’s equity campaign came in the wake of a lawsuit filed by 10 Black female officers who claimed discrimination; that case is still pending.

Earlier this year, in April, Smith was named assistant police chief in charge of MPD’s Homeland Security Bureau. In appointing Smith acting chief of the entire department just three months later, Bowser passed over Morgan Kane, an assistant police chief and former First District commander with a 25-year history in MPD and DC.

Have mercy.

Since the opening of this third mayoral term in January, Bowser has made baffling moves while seeming to dance in circles. That’s OK in ballet but not for an executive managing a $19 billion public corporation, responsible to nearly 700,000 stockholders. 

Bowser has circled back, picking up managers from previous administrations or shifting existing managers from one agency to another agency much the way DCPS uses old, vacant buildings as swing spaces. She appointed Delano Hunter, head of the Department of Parks and Recreation, to lead the troubled Department of General Services (DGS). 

Keith Anderson, who had been director of DGS, was named interim deputy mayor for planning and economic development (DMPED); later she named him deputy mayor for operations and infrastructure. 

Meanwhile, Bowser pulled in former federal General Services Administration official Nina Albert to become the new acting DMPED. She famously asserted to reporters that DC has always been a “federal city,” which is a poor and politically foolish assessment from someone assigned the task of reviving the local economy. That was all the more surprising given that she worked at DMPED, the office she now heads, earlier in her career.

Around all of that Bowser nominated Melinda Bolling to head the Department of For-Hire Vehicles. From the start her confirmation had disaster written all over it, given her lousy performance from 2015 to 2018 as director of the Department for Consumer and Regulatory Affairs; as evidence of how bad it was, the council divided DCRA into two separate agencies, hoping that would save it from complete demolition, which might well have been the better course of action.

Bolling faced a buzz saw of council disapproval, led in no small measure by Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau. The far-left leaning legislator and I being in agreement seemed as rare as a solar eclipse or something.

Before Bolling got rejected, she asked Bowser to withdraw her nomination for the permanent position. The mayor obliged. Smart move for both — albeit in hindsight.

Can the city afford hindsight in dealing with its current crime crisis?

The criticism around elected officials’ handling of the rise in crime has reached fever pitch. Ward 2’s Brooke Pinto, head of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, and Ward 4’s Janeese Lewis George, Ward 8’s Trayon White and at-large member Robert White are among the legislators up for reelection in 2024. Already many residents have accused them of creating the conditions that have allowed seemingly small lawless acts — fare gate jumping in Metro stations, illegal sales of marijuana — to metastasize into full-on crime sprees, daylight murders and brazen carjackings.

“I need her to succeed because we are in a public safety crisis,” Robert White said on Tuesday prior to the legislature’s vote to approve Smith’s confirmation.

If anyone is looking for even minor miracles from Smith, forget about it. 

Certainly, there has been a flurry of much-needed crime-preventing and crime-fighting legislative proposals, including the mayor’s Addressing Crime Trends Now Act and Pinto’s Addressing Crime through Targeted Interventions and Violence Enforcement (ACTIVE) Amendment Act of 2023. The latter bill was the subject of a public hearing on Wednesday.

Truth be told, the DC government lacks a comprehensive, coordinated public safety ecosystem that links and mandates sustained cooperation among key agencies while targeting important populations — particularly juveniles, who are both antagonists and victims in DC’s latest violent crime drama. That, along with either wholly incompetent or marginally qualified but high-priced employees, are major government deficits. 

In 2021, an investigative series published in The DC Line that was based on interviews with key officials, experts and advocates uncovered multiple problems and found that far too many children and youth in DC were neglected, abused, and in some cases murdered by family members or friends of the family. The city’s child welfare system, led by the Child and Family Services Agency, was not providing sufficient protections, and few elected officials seemed concerned enough to mount a true reform campaign.

Nothing much has changed. 

In fiscal year 2023, the CFSA received 17,267 calls on its hotline reporting various offenses against the city’s children. It screened out 13,068 of those. However, it accepted for investigation 3,065 of those complaints. Some were about children unsupervised or neglected by their parents.

It isn’t shocking to me, therefore, that officials from the DC Office of the Attorney General indicated in response to my request under the Freedom of Information Act that between Jan. 2 and Oct. 10 the MPD had referred 1,479 juvenile cases to its office. Only 828 of those had been “petitioned” — that is, charges had been filed. I am waiting to learn what happened to the other 651 juveniles.

By law, the OAG may prosecute all crimes for which the perpetrator is being charged as a juvenile. The office can also prosecute misdemeanor crimes committed by adults. Since January the agency has “charged 1,636 adult defendants with 3,754” crimes.

It’s unclear how Smith and her team have been working with OAG or how they plan to work with AG Brian Schwalb. He has shown a troubling reluctance to prosecute, in the view of many residents. There also has been minimal effort between agencies to deal with parents who allow their children to break the city’s juvenile curfew, providing an opportunity for some as young as 12 and 13 years old to commit crimes, and for one or two of them to be killed in the act.

Chief Smith has said her No. 1 priority is to drive down crime. That doesn’t seem to be working, although council members boasted during their voting that she has created a “robbery suppression initiative” and a “violent crime suppression initiative.”

Bowser said in her statement earlier this week that “Chief Smith hit the ground running in July, sharing her story and vision, making sure she was accessible to residents and businesses, and prioritizing common-sense solutions to long-standing challenges.”

That may be true. However, as of Nov. 9, all crime in DC is up by 27% compared to the same period last year, according to MPD statistics. Homicides are up by 32% this year (from 178 in 2022 to 235 in 2023); robbery is up by 68% (from 1,791 in 2022 to 3,003 in 2023); and motor vehicle theft is up by 100% (from 3,034 in 2022 to 6,055 in 2023).

In other words, the problem is enormous for someone who, for all intents and purposes, could be described as an urban policing novice, with a dwindling police force and other insufficient resources.

Pinto was emphatic in her support for the chief: “I believe that she has the ability, the experience, and the commitment to do this job well,” she said earlier this week. However, I heard a hint of worry in the comments of some other legislators. 

“We are all rooting for her success,” said Ward 6’s Charles Allen, who, ironically, in his former role as chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety pursued policies that may have been a prime driver in the decision by the last two police chiefs to resign.

No one necessarily wants that fate for Smith — unless, of course, my assessment that she lacks the massive skills to drive down or break DC’s crime wave is accurate. I hope, however, that she and the Bowser administration prove me wrong. District residents need relief from the fear gripping so many of them, including children.

---

jonetta rose barras is an author and DC-based freelance journalist, covering national and local issues. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.