Recent comments in /f/washingtondc

PhillyMila215 t1_je2qww0 wrote

Reply to Attempted Kidnapping by EllieAntsRAwesome

Just wishing you well. I am so sorry this happened to you, but I am glad you are safe. I am sure this has shaken you, there are still good people out there. Get well soon.

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SquishWindow t1_je2mkds wrote

Reply to comment by Sufficient-Job-1013 in D.C. leaders prepare for GOP grilling in hearing on crime, policing by EastoftheCap

> I’m deeply frustrated and disappointed with the Council because they are doing NOTHING

I guess I just think it is silly to focus your ire on the Council, especially to the exclusion of everyone else responsible for public safety in this city. The Council voted last year to approve $20,000 signing bonuses for new MPD officers to hire 350 more officers. And despite the extremely stupid debate surrounding the RCCA, it really was not designed to be some soft on crime giveaway, and in many ways was supposed to make it more straightforward and easy to prosecute a variety of crimes, including gun crimes that are currently difficult to prosecute. It's just false that the Council is trying to turn the city into some soft on crime communist utopia. If your main reason for being angry at the Council is that they aren't pursuing policies to just wantonly lock people away and throw the key away for the rest of their lives, fine, but then stop talking shit about the GOP because you're sounding an awful lot like Nixon & Reagan.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that the Council is the main or biggest problem. It's a huge problem for the city if almost 2/3 of MPD arrests don't get prosecuted by the USAO. Maybe that's a problem with MPD officers doing a shitty job of collecting evidence that will hold up in court, maybe that's a problem with DC's forensic lab being a shitshow that lost its accreditation and being unable to process evidence to make cases, maybe that's a problem with many MPD officers being shitheads who the USAO can't credibly put on the stand, maybe that's a problem with USAO not pursuing crimes that they consider too low-level. Almost certainly it's a combination of all of those things. But - while surely the Council can play some role in fixing those problems, there are a bunch of people who are more directly responsible for fixing them who aren't being hauled in front of Congress for a stupid fucking fascist circus this week - unless you want to count the president of DC's police union, lol. It's also a huge problem if, as many of the crimepost idiots on this sub love to claim, USAO not papering MPD arrests is leading MPD officers to just not actually do police work anymore.

Similarly, it's a huge problem that our courts are understaffed and that USAO resources are stretched too thin to give local DC prosecutions adequate time and attention. The Council can't do much about those things. Maybe they can be better advocates for DC, maybe they could help raise public awareness of the ways federal policy could help make things better in DC / the ways federal policy is a bottleneck, and maybe that would create more energy for positive change at the federal level. But again, Council members are going to be "grilled" this week by fascist fuckheads who don't actually give a shit about improving public safety in DC and will not be interested in the slightest in hearing about anything constructive they could be doing besides a televised clown show.

Edit and, ask any police officer in this city, and they will tell you that one of the biggest changes they have seen is the number of guns in this city in the last few years. The crimebrained idiots on this sub will never admit it, nor of course will the fascist monsters holding the hearing this week, but our national addiction to guns and aversion to actually curbing gun supply in this country is a gigantic cause of violence in the District. The Council can also do absolutely nothing about that.

The "worst" thing the Council has done is to propose that some criminal sentences get marginally shorter than they were, and make it possible for some people who have already been in jail for many years to get out of jail. On the first point - again, that's now a policy that never took effect, was never going to take effect before 2025, and now will never take effect at all, so blaming DC's crime problems on it is a stupid. On the second point, OK, I understand if you think it's bad for some people to get out of prison earlier than what they were originally sentenced to. I'll agree to disagree. But I'd remind you that if you are anywhere to the left of, say, Sean Hannity, as of like two years ago you probably would have admitted that our country has an insane problem with mass incarceration, driven by decades of politicians pandering to citizens who mindlessly demanded harsher sentences whenever given the option. That continues to be the case today, and personally I think it's embarrassing for so many people to quickly fall into the trap of sentencing can only move in one direction, it can never get shorter than what it has historically been. That sort of thinking is just so dis-spiriting, our country has actually learned absolutely nothing from the failures and moral atrocities of mass incarceration. I'm not a prison abolitionist, but American mass incarceration is a monstrous and destructive approach to public safety; and the DC Council never proposed ending mass incarceration, they just proposed and implemented some very modest reductions in criminal sentences that absolutely do not deserve the breathless outrage that they receive.

There are real problems with public safety in this city, caused by a lot of different things. Training all the anger on the Council is for people who have an irrational, single-minded, and destructive hard-on for maximizing prison sentences and have little interest in using any other tools, including good policing, to improve safety.

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