Your Tax Dollars Not At Work

You're paying federal prosecutors in crime-ridden DC mostly to look out the window.

In my last entry, I was pretty hard on the Washington Post for its deceitful coverage of criminal justice reform. But this time, I need to give it credit for remarkable candor. Here’s the headline of its story today: “D.C. U.S. attorney declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested. Here’s why.”

The DC US Attorney is a direct appointee of President Biden, so there’s no dodging responsibility here. The difference, for purposes of thinking about personal safety, is that Biden has a security detail. Do you? And if at your job you took a pass on two-thirds of the work, how long would you have that job?

As the District grapples with rising crime and increasing attention from federal lawmakers over public safety issues, a startling statistic emerged in recent weeks.

Last year, federal prosecutors in the District’s U.S. attorney’s office chose not to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested by police officers in cases that would have been tried in D.C. Superior Court.

That figure, first reported earlier this month on the substack DC Crime Facts, nearly doubled from 2015, when prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute 35 percent of such cases.

The unseriousness of Biden’s US Attorney’s Office — in the face of surging crime — is difficult to put into words. Of course, describing it isn’t the main problem. The main problem is having to live with it, and the outcroppings of that are disproportionately borne by DC’s black residents.

The increased number of declined cases has sparked frustration among city leaders who are already under a national microscope from members of Congress for their crime fighting efforts. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is scheduled to hold a hearing Wednesday where Republicans will examine management of D.C., particularly on crime and safety. Earlier this month, the Senate joined the House of Representatives in voting to reject an overhaul of the city’s criminal code, in part because it called for reducing penalties for certain crimes, including carjacking.

When the Democratic-controlled Senate votes overwhelmingly to reject a new penalty structure as too soft, you know things have come to a sorry state. But of course the penalty structure doesn’t even come into play for the cases — two thirds of them — that aren’t prosecuted at all.

How is this not a major scandal?

In an interview, Matthew M. Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District, said his office was continuing to prosecute the vast majority of violent felonies. He said prosecutors were declining less serious cases for myriad reasons, including that the city’s crime lab remained unaccredited…

It “remained” unaccredited? The Biden administration been in power for more than two years, and it doesn’t have an accredited crime lab for the nation’s capital?

Robert J. Contee III, the District’s police chief, said his officers were not to blame.

“I can promise you, it’s not MPD holding the bag on this,” Contee said. “That’s B.S.”

….[E]ven compared to a local prosecutor’s office, a 67 percent declination rate is high. For example, in Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, the prosecutor’s office reported declining 33 percent of its cases last year. Prosecutors in Philadelphia declined 4 percent and prosecutors in Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, declined 14 percent, according to data from those offices.

Takeaway: The work of the Biden-controlled US Attorney’s Office is pathetic even when compared with those citadels of serious law enforcement and public safety, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Well then. What’s obviously needed from the US Attorney, Mr. Graves, is immediate and rigorously focused improvement a chipper explanation of why it’s not really that bad.

Graves said the declinations are mostly coming after arrests in cases such as gun possession, drug possession and misdemeanors — not in violent crimes. He said his office last year prosecuted 87.9 percent of arrests made in homicides, armed carjackings, assaults with intent to kill and first-degree sexual assault cases. According to figures provided to The Washington Post, that percentage is higher than the 85.7 prosecuted cases in 2021, but down from 95.6 percent of prosecuted cases in 2018.

Three observations. First, how odd it is to see Biden’s US Attorney downplay the importance of gun possession cases when the White House keeps telling us that too many guns is a catastrophic problem. Second, how comforted are we supposed to be that 12% — about one in eight — of violent crime cases are given a pass? Third, could someone remind me of who was President in 2018 when the percentage of prosecuted violent crime cases was much higher?

Because D.C.'s Department of Forensic Sciences lost its accreditation in 2021, prosecutors have to pay to have evidence for DNA, firearm and fingerprint analysis sent to outside laboratories, Graves said. Prosecutors, he said, prioritize doing so for violent offenses.

“We are now entering year three of DFS being shut down without any clear plan of coming back online,” Graves said. “We have to prioritize violent felonies and make sure we are doing the forensic testing for those cases. Our office is often bearing the cost for this analysis.”

Prosecutors in the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, which handles juvenile crime and most misdemeanors in the District, and similarly has had to use outside laboratories, declined to prosecute just 26 percent of its cases last year, according to data from that office.

Mr. Graves talks about this appalling state of affairs in the jurisdiction in which he is supposedly in charge as if it’s an out-of-body experience to him. He’s not responsible; some ghost that looks like him is responsible.

Deborah Sines, a retired federal homicide prosecutor in the District, said the U.S. attorney’s office is hampered by “poor police work,” but also prosecutors and supervisors “who only want to try slam-dunk cases.”

“I would get angry when I would see defendants in homicide cases in front of me who had previous gun possession charges that a prosecutor had previously dismissed,” Sines said. “Some cases are going to be challenging, yes. But that’s your job. Do your job. Don’t just dismiss it just because the evidence is not everything you want it to be or think it should be.”

Yes, it’s all true. Sometimes work involves, well, work.

Still, we wouldn’t want to be excessively alarmed, because the situation is getting under control………….oh…..……..wait………….

As of Tuesday, overall crime was up in D.C. by 23 percent over the same time last year, fueled in large part by a spike in motor vehicle thefts, according to D.C. police data. Homicides were up 19 percent, though violent crime was even with last year because of drops in robberies and assaults with a deadly weapon.

This is what the Biden administration is doing in a city where its highest ranking officials live and work. You don’t want to think about what it’s doing in the city where you have to live and work.