The D.C. Council was already a few hours into its first debate over Secure DC, lawmakers’ latest stab at a sweeping crime bill, and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto was getting testy.

The bill was undeniably Pinto’s baby, crafted by the judiciary committee chair over the past few months as she faced pressure from Mayor Muriel Bowser (and nervous voters) to do something, anything about rising violence in the city. So her growing frustration during the Feb. 6 gathering was perhaps understandable, as her colleagues offered up tweaks and changes to her omnibus legislation. At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, generally aligned with Pinto on many other issues, was proving to be a particular problem for her, as he sought to limit one of Secure DC’s key provisions.

Specifically, McDuffie moved to include a sunset date for the bill’s expansion of pretrial detention, the practice of holding people in jail before they’ve been convicted. Secure DC would make permanent the changes included in the Council’s emergency summer crime bill, allowing judges to hold anyone accused of a crime of violence, a move framed by Pinto (and Bowser) as a necessary way to stop people from committing new crimes while they’re awaiting trial. However, McDuffie countered that it would be better to revisit the practice after 225 days, giving city agencies a chance to study whether it’s actually proven to be effective at reducing crime.

This did not go over well with Pinto.

“What would you propose happens after day 225?” Pinto wondered on the dais. “Should everyone be released if we do not extend this?”

A crowd of activists assembled to protest the bill scoffed at Pinto’s facetious suggestion that failing to embrace this policy would set loose violent criminals rather than simply protecting the rights of people who haven’t been convicted of anything. “I don’t want to be short with you,” McDuffie said, plainly frustrated in his own right. “I think this arms us with the data and evidence to make this permanent. So it is not my intention to have everybody released.”

McDuffie’s proposed change passed easily: He chose to move it as an oral amendment, a move that some observers speculated to Loose Lips was intentional in order to keep Pinto off balance. But, as Secure DC nears its second and final vote Tuesday, this particular spat has become the talk of Wilson Building watchers and advocates lobbying on this bill. If McDuffie’s amendment survives, it sets up an interesting dynamic roughly a year from now, forcing lawmakers to revisit the issue. There’s precious little evidence, so far, that the pretrial detention expansion has made any real difference. The jail’s population increased by about 42 percent between March and December of 2023, yet crime continued climbing.

“If this was passed permanently, then it gives the Council the opportunity to pass it and forget about it,” says Melissa Wasser, policy counsel at the ACLU’s D.C. chapter. “Do we want to have more people held pretrial at all? No, but this is a better way for us to then look at the data and go to the Council and say, ‘If you’re trying to make people in D.C. safer, expanding pretrial detention is not the way to do that, and here’s the data to back that up.’ And that’s something that I think we’ve been missing.”

There’s no guarantee the Council listens, of course, especially with Bowser pushing back. “It was a verbal amendment, it’s never a good idea to do that,” she admonished during an appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Politics Hour Friday.

The Mayor’s Office of Community Relations and Services also began urging community leaders last week to show up to Tuesday’s Council meeting to argue against the pretrial detention sunset. “This was already passed on an emergency basis last summer; after it went into effect, we saw a decrease in crime,” a MOCRS rep wrote in an email forwarded to LL, making some spurious connections between the city’s modest reductions in some crimes and the policy. “When a person is caught committing a violent crime in our city, commonsense requires that we ask our judges to first consider keeping that person off the streets as they await trial.”

So far, she has not been successful. Pinto left the sunset provision untouched in her latest version of the bill released Monday and most Wilson Building sources who spoke with LL don’t expect members will tinker with it. At-Large Councilmember Robert White notes that the amendment passed with a robust 10 votes—only Pinto and Council Chair Phil Mendelson voted against it, while Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin voted present. McDuffie didn’t respond to LL’s requests for comment on the provision.

Some racial justice advocates are urging the Council to go even further and strip the pretrial measure out completely. Although that seems unlikely, many have nonetheless spent the past few weeks lobbying on that point (and others) with plans to once again stock the Council hearing room with a large crowd of supporters Tuesday.

“[The pretrial limit is] better than nothing,” says Dennis Corkery, counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “I think we’re all clear that this bill is going to pass, so I’d rather have things that are better than nothing. But when folks take a look at it again, I hope they’re taking a look at it from the perspective of: What does it mean to be incarcerated in the jail?”

Corkery notes that his group is one of several to sue the city over poor conditions at the D.C. Jail over the years, urging policymakers to consider how it might impact people to be held there pretrial. A stint in jail can disrupt a person’s job or their custody of a child, or it can lead to physical (or mental) trauma that can never be undone. “It’s hard for me to watch [Pinto] talk about safety and victims, and we have someone dying at the jail every month,” says Patrice Sulton, executive director of the D.C. Justice Lab.

Effectively, the pretrial change means that the city is risking people’s lives for no clear societal benefit, Sulton says. It’s difficult to measure whether more pretrial detention is preventing crime, since it’s “hard to prove a negative,” Corkery says. There’s no way to know whether people accused of one violent crime were going to go on to commit another.

But policymakers can look at the existing data about what people do when they’re released before trial, and the numbers are pretty clear. According to figures maintained by the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, only 8 percent of people released while awaiting trial between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sept. 30, 2023, went on to be arrested for another crime. Of those 1,120 arrests, 18.8 percent were for “violent or dangerous” crimes. 

Federal prosecutors, however, have insisted that the changes to pretrial detention have helped them hold more people that judges otherwise might have released. United States Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves said in September that the changes made in the summer crime bill helped him hold about 50 people pretrial who he otherwise couldn’t have—and that was just in a roughly two-month-long span.

Sulton says she’s heard these claims, too, but she notes that the summer crime bill’s changes have only been in effect for a few months, so it’s difficult for it to have affected too many cases just yet. And when she’s asked Pinto and others for examples of cases where the pretrial expansion has made a difference, she’s found that judges already had the discretion to order these people held in jail.

“We already have enough authority in our bail statute,” Sulton says. “So it’s just too soon to know if it’s doing anything. … It’s good to look at data. But what good is looking at the data if people are just going to lie about what it says?”

While the pretrial provision appears to be all but set in stone, despite Sulton’s objections, the fate of another, related measure is more fluid. Pinto was also hoping to expand the ability of police to collect DNA samples after suspects are arrested, instead of after they’re convicted of a crime. This proposal drew rebukes from some lawmakers under similar logic: People would not only be locked up despite their presumed innocence, but they could have their most sensitive personal information deposited in massive databases, too. 

McDuffie and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George successfully backed an amendment last month to strip this provision out of the bill entirely by a 9-4 vote. But Pinto is seeking to revive a compromise version of it in an amendment she circulated Monday, which may garner some support. White, for instance, said he’d be open to allowing DNA collection for people accused of sexual assault, even though he supported the McDuffie-Lewis George amendment. Pinto’s change would still be broader, allowing for DNA collection of people accused of violent crimes once a judge found probable cause that the cases against them could advance. Still, even her compromise proposal strikes most experts as a bad idea.

“These people are still innocent, and if they get convicted, you can get their DNA anyway,” says Joshua Miller, research and advocacy director with Open City Advocates. “And you’d be giving thousands of pieces of evidence to a crime lab that only just got back on its feet and got re-accredited. It’s a real capacity issue.”

The good news for opponents is there’s a bit more time for horse trading than they’d originally expected. 

Large parts of Pinto’s bill have been assigned a dreaded fiscal impact by Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee. He estimates it will cost more than $42 million over the next four fiscal years to implement. The pieces of the bill with a price tag attached can’t go into effect until they’re funded. Bowser has pledged to steer funding to many of them in her 2025 budget proposal, set to be released March 20, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to find money for the whole package in a difficult budget year. 

Accordingly, Pinto has taken a chunk of measures that Lee says are cost-free and stuffed them into emergency legislation, which can go into effect as soon as the Council passes it. The rest will be folded into a temporary bill, which will require another vote, perhaps giving advocates more time for haggling with lawmakers. Consider that the pretrial detention change, for one, is estimated to cost a little more than $10 million over the next four years, so it can’t take effect until it’s funded.

“One of our critiques of this process has been people have not had enough time to read and figure out what is even in the bill,” Wasser says. “So we are glad, at least, to have a little more time here.”