There have been many long hours of debate (and many thousands of words written) about D.C.’s latest crime bill, capped off by its final passage Tuesday. The inconvenient truth beneath all this wailing and gnashing of teeth, however, is that it probably won’t make much difference unless police and prosecutors don’t get better at doing their jobs.

Lawmakers across the political spectrum agree on this point. Experts see it as the defining factor in explaining why D.C. has seen a rise in crime while it has fallen in most other major cities. Yet the issue went totally unaddressed by Secure DC.

The absurdity of this situation became clear to Loose Lips as councilmembers bickered over a proposed amendment to the bill backed by Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George during a lengthy breakfast meeting Tuesday morning. She was seeking to remove a provision that would lower the threshold for felony theft cases to those involving $500 in stolen goods, down from $1,000. The bill’s lead author, judiciary chair and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, argued that prosecutors badly need this change because judges aren’t handing out very lengthy sentences for misdemeanor thefts, so they have “no incentive to prosecute” those cases.

“We’re essentially legalizing theft under $1,000,” Pinto claimed.

Lewis George found this explanation a bit absurd. Why should prosecutors decide what cases to charge based solely on the expected outcome? Even if people are sentenced to a few months in jail or are put under probation, a guilty verdict can have tremendous consequences for their lives. Isn’t it a much worse message to send if these cases aren’t pursued at all? “Are misdemeanors not important enough to them to prosecute?” wondered At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson. 

“If it’s not prosecuted, there’s no change in behavior,” added At-Large Councilmember Robert White.

But there’s nothing Secure DC can do about this dynamic, nor is there anything any piece of legislation could do to change the behavior of the city’s presidentially appointed federal prosecutor, who handles the vast majority of criminal cases in the city. Instead, the bill would simply increase the chances that minor thefts face stiffer penalties, in those rare instances where these cases are actually prosecuted.

“Our problem is not whether theft is prosecuted as a felony or a misdemeanor, our problem is that theft is not prosecuted at all,” Lewis George said, noting that recent data shows that the United States Attorney’s Office for D.C. chooses to prosecute just over half of the arrests for theft made by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Instead of doing anything to address that problem, lawmakers have spent the past few weeks squabbling among themselves (and with Mayor Muriel Bowser) about whether or not it’s a good idea to lower the theft threshold. Lewis George has mounted persuasive arguments against the move, observing that only three other states have thresholds this low and that most policymakers have chosen to raise these thresholds, not lower them, and have seen essentially no impact on their crime rates.

Bowser has argued forcefully against Lewis George’s amendment on several different occasions, writing in a letter to the Council Tuesday that “we must take seriously the effect that organized theft is having on our businesses.” Lewis George has countered that Bowser is conflating this provision with a separate part of the bill aimed specifically at addressing organized retail theft, and noting that the mayor actually proposed maintaining the $1,000 threshold as part of one of a package of crime bills she introduced a few months ago. Ultimately, Lewis George succeeded on a 12-1 vote, with only Pinto voting against her amendment.

All of this back-and-forth may be amusing to political observers like LL, but it’s not exactly productive. If anything, it serves as a distraction that helps prosecutors avoid taking accountability for their part to play. But that is, sadly, nothing new in D.C.’s confusingly structured criminal legal system, which obscures where responsibility lies for critical issues, among its many other failings.

“We’re trying to find workarounds for arrests that aren’t prosecuted,” said Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen. “And manage this with federal agencies that won’t work with us.”

U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves has promised that he has heard these calls, but despite some modest progress late last year, the numbers suggest that not all that much has changed. Prosecutions actually seemed to fall in the months following Graves’ well-publicized media briefing last fall where he trumpeted improvements. 

Graves has most frequently blamed this discrepancy on problems with D.C.’s crime lab and more restrictive standards surrounding how police can search for illegal guns. But more recently he seems focused on convincing the Council to let cops collect more DNA from people accused of crimes. It would be one thing if his focus was on, say, convincing the Council to better resource the crime lab or more effectively oversee the lab’s (still-troubled) operations. Instead, he took to the pages of the Washington Post to explain just how important it is that police be allowed to collect the most sensitive information about a person if they are simply charged with a violent crime.

“We know that this crucial law enforcement tool will help us solve violent crimes, prevent crimes and provide closure to victims and their families,” Graves wrote in his Sunday op-ed. He cited a particularly gruesome case (that Pinto also described during the Council breakfast) where a man raped someone at gunpoint, was arrested for carrying a gun, then raped an 11-year-old girl while he was on pretrial release for that charge (though Pinto said the victim was 8 years old when relaying the anecdote to her colleagues). Graves believes his office could’ve connected the dots between these various cases much more quickly if law enforcement were allowed to collect DNA from people charged of crimes, preventing the man from being released from custody in the first place. 

At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie acknowledged how “horrible” that particular case was, but also couldn’t help but wonder if it’s wise to make policy based on a case that’s such a tremendous outlier. He pressed Pinto to provide some estimate of how many cases this could really impact, and the best estimate she could come up with is that roughly 6,000 people are arrested for violent crimes each year. But there’s no telling how many shootings or murders this would actually impact, and those are the types of offenses that prosecutors have so much trouble pursuing right now.

“I don’t want to diminish the trauma of sexual assault victims … but I think we’re closing a lot more of those cases than we are of the homicides,” McDuffie said. “It’s difficult for me to vote against my conscience, to do something to 6,000 people on the chance that there might be hits.”

McDuffie ultimately failed on this issue—he and Lewis George won an amendment to strip this provision out of the bill on its first vote, but the Council approved a compromise proposal from Pinto on Tuesday by a vote of 10-3. Much like the debate over felony theft, the dispute shows how much prosecutors have succeeded in driving this process and deflecting blame away from their own shortcomings.

Patrice Sulton, executive director of the D.C. Justice Lab, observes that the USAO was able to get a provision inserted into the bill reacting to an adverse ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals, even though the policy never earned a public hearing of any kind (despite Pinto’s repeated assertions to the contrary). The change will allow parole officers to change the conditions of a person’s release, though the court raised concerns about the constitutionality of that process. But it’s what prosecutors want, and so it’s what the Council will give them.

“It’s not even just like it didn’t have a hearing: It’s literally not in any bill but this one,” Sulton says. “That’s so ridiculous.”

There may be some haggling left to come on Secure DC, but the worst is (mercifully) over. Perhaps that will allow some of the conversation to shift back to the role that prosecutors and police play in this system. 

Bowser will surely continue to use every chance she has to blame the Council for these shortcomings. (And Council Chair Phil Mendelson said Tuesday that the mayor has already pledged to send the Council another crime bill.) But maybe, now that lawmakers can tell nervous voters that they passed a hefty crime bill, they’ll be ready to push back more effectively. 

This story has been updated.