By Kenyan McDuffie
I grew up in a Northeast neighborhood of DC called Stronghold, where I live with my wife and am raising my two daughters. I know what it means when a community feels unsafe, when families absorb that ambient dread as just part of the landscape. I know what it’s like to go to sleep with blood stained streets and to wake up to yellow tape on the sidewalks. I never want anyone to go through that living in our city.
In the past few months, DC has experienced a significant uptick in violence. Seven homicides were reported in just five days in April. Two boys, 14-year-old Tyale Coates and 12-year-old Mhilo Young, were shot and killed outside a convenience store on Kenilworth Avenue NE in the middle of the afternoon, after police said two shooters opened fire on a group of young people. Last month, 18-year-old Brady Flowers Jr. was fatally shot in broad daylight and just down the street from Jackson-Reed High School, about a month before he would have walked across the stage to graduate. And as we all saw on social media, diners and workers in Navy Yard were forced to run, hide, and take cover when violence erupted inside Chipotle.
What has happened across our city is horrifying, and it echoes a recurring theme of the violence that continues to plague our city. This should shake every resident and elected leader of this city.
Claims that crime numbers in DC have improved significantly since the peak in 2023, with reportedly 274 homicides, mean nothing to the family of a teenager who was shot and killed a month before his high school graduation. We cannot govern or pat ourselves on the back by comparing data to our worst year on record and calling it a job well done, particularly as homicides remain far above the record lows achieved in the 2010s.
Over the course of my life, I have seen public safety from every angle. I grew up in DC during a time when too many families lived with the daily reality of violence, fear, and instability. It’s the reason I spent my career working as a local prosecutor, as a civil rights trial attorney in President Obama’s Justice Department, and as the Chair of the DC Council’s Committee on Judiciary, which oversaw the District’s public safety and justice system, including police, fire and EMS, 911, corrections, juvenile justice, the Attorney General, victim services and emergency management.
My Approach
Those experiences shaped my view that safety is not accomplished by a single measure. It requires accountability, prevention, trust and resources that collectively are directed at the source long before a crime is committed. That is why I authored the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act, which built a public health infrastructure for violence prevention and placed behavioral health professionals alongside police officers in situations where their tools actually fit the challenge. The NEAR Act has become a national model, but it only works when it is fully funded and faithfully implemented. As Mayor, fully funding the NEAR Act and ensuring our violence interruption programs are effective, accountable, and results-driven will be among my top priorities and central to my Safer for ALL DC plan.
At the same time, a public health approach towards crime does not replace the need for accountability. Right now, our Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is operating with 3,144 sworn officers, down from 4,000 in the mid-2000s, when homicides reached a low of 88 in 2012. Equally troubling, our vacancies stretch beyond our police department to our Fire and EMS Department and 911 call center. These staffing failures are entirely fixable and addressing them could save the District nearly $150 million per year that DC is required by law to pay in mandatory overtime to meet what’s at a minimum required to keep communities safe. With the MPD, Fire and EMS, 911 call center, and other public safety agencies stretched thin, I will strengthen cadet programs, double signing bonuses to competitively recruit first responders, improve retention and promotion pathways, and implement a credible strategy to add 1,000 officers over four years while strengthening community policing and accountability.
Beyond increasing our community policing efforts and maximizing the efficacy of MPD, illegal guns are the central driver of the gun violence that plagues our neighborhoods. Getting them off the streets will require federal cooperation, aggressive prosecution, and community partnership working together, and as Mayor, I’ll be focused on ending the gun violence epidemic on day one.
Coucilmember Lewis George’s Record
My primary opponent, Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, has repeatedly opposed common-sense public safety measures. She voted against expanding pretrial detention for violent offenders. She blocked an extension of the youth curfew at a time when teenagers were being victimized and pulled into violence, including last month in Navy Yard. She also stopped her colleague on the DC Council from extending our recreation centers’ hours, only to advance her own woefully underfunded plan that would amount to just 30 extra minutes per recreation center per year. Most concerning, she voted against classifying as a felony the crime of strangulation - one of the clearest warning signs that domestic violence can turn deadly - and cast the lone vote against allowing landlords to evict dangerous tenants who pose an imminent threat to their neighbors.
Defending Home Rule
There is also the elephant in the room, an additional factor at stake that only adds to the urgency that this moment requires. The Trump administration has spent the past year and a half using this city as a prop. They have deployed the National Guard on our streets, attacked our local laws, and treated DC’s self-governance as something to be suspended whenever it is politically convenient. Congressional Republicans have dedicated significant time this session to advancing legislation that would strip away our ability to enforce our own public safety laws, and they will continue to look for any opening to justify further incursions.
And let me be clear: DC’s public safety should be entirely in the hands of MPD, and not ICE, HSI, or any other federal law enforcement agency. On Day One as Mayor, I will end MPD cooperation with ICE. I will also carry out our own government’s most important responsibility - keeping residents safe - to ensure we eliminate the unconscionable intervention by President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress.
But if DC fails to meet the basic test of public safety, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress will use it as an excuse to undermine Home Rule. We cannot hand them that argument. The strongest defense against federal interference is a city that works: a 911 system that answers when residents call, neighborhoods where people feel safe, and a government that proves every day that DC can govern itself.
I am mourning the young men and women who have lost their lives to senseless gun violence, but their families deserve more than thoughts and prayers, let alone political dissent, from the people asking to run this city. Every DC resident deserves a mayor who will bring a sense of urgency that public safety requires right now and exhausts all available resources for crime reduction and the prevention of violence before it begins.
That is the ultimate pledge I am making to this city.
This is a brilliant and thoroughly-stated case for the singular importance of public safety - which is not to be confused with *escalation* - at a precarious moment for the District’s future growth and well-being.