Federal prosecutors rushed to call a press briefing with some good news Thursday: Crime is falling in the District, and they’re continuing to bring more and more criminal charges into court.

In other words: “Get off our backs.”

United States Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves is too polite to use those exact words in a roundtable with reporters, his second such discussion in the past six months. But it was hard to miss the message. Crime is down by 12 percent compared to this time last year, with violent crime down by 15 percent and murders down by 36 percent. It’s probably a bit premature for prosecutors to spike the football before the more violent summer months arrive, but they’re certainly getting ready for an end-zone dance. It’s their first bit of truly good news in more than a year, after all.

“Some of these things are historic levels of improvement,” Graves says. “I’m not saying we’re going to end up there. But if you got to a 36 percent reduction in homicides year over year at the end of the year, you would be hard pressed to find another jurisdiction that had that much of a drop at any point in time. Anything close to that would be historical.”

Crucially, Graves believes the city was able to achieve these results without substantial changes in his office’s declination rate, which reflects how often prosecutors opt against pursuing charges against people arrested by the Metropolitan Police Department. The number has been a key target of criticism for all manner of politicians, researchers, and activists over the past few months. The USAO finished fiscal year 2023 with a declination rate around 56 percent, meaning it charged just 44 percent of arrests made by MPD. Graves revealed some modest improvements in October, and he says there since has been continued progress. In the first three months of fiscal year 2024, he says his office charged 55 percent of all suspects, good for a 45 percent declination rate, mirroring some of the improvements prosecutors made in the final months of FY2023. Just like the last time he showed off these numbers, Graves says that the number of cases prosecutors are choosing not to pursue due to “insufficient evidence” remains relatively low (though he did not have specific figures prepared this time around).

Graves believes the increase shows that his prosecutors have made important changes. But there is not nearly as much of a connection between this statistic and crime rates as many researchers believe, he claims. Again, if you’ll allow Loose Lips to translate: “We’re not the problem here, so move along.”

“We’re trying to convince you: focusing on the overall charging rate isn’t what we should be focused on,” Graves says. “We should be focused on some of the things we’ve been talking about in the media, the strategy of proactively going after individuals that we believe are really driving violence. Is the system doing everything it can to maximize the likelihood that we’re holding gun offenders accountable? Getting incarcerated, sending a message of swift and certain consequences, there’s a lot of important conversations to have around those points that are very different than the overall charge rates.”

Graves is not entirely unpersuasive here. For instance, his office worked with some criminal justice researchers to bolster one of his previous arguments about the structural factors making D.C. look like a statistical outlier: The city’s laws requiring mandatory arrests in many domestic violence cases, even in instances where victims ask prosecutors not to press charges. Graves believes it’s improper to compare D.C. prosecution rates to other cities that don’t have these laws on the books, like Philadelphia and New York City, when MPD is required to arrest people that other cops might not. The USAO found that, in the nine other states with similar laws, the average declination rate is about 46 percent, putting D.C. precisely in line with its peers. (Graves notes, however, that the researchers did not examine specific cities in those states, which might be a better apples-to-apples comparison to D.C.)

“We’re getting the outcomes you’d expect based on the systems that have been built,” he says. The problem, as LL sees it, is that critics didn’t latch on to prosecution rates to explain D.C.’s anomalous crime spike just because they want to bash prosecutors. The focus stems from research that clearly suggests that the certainty of being caught and experiencing some sort of consequence is a much surer deterrent for criminal activity than other “tough-on-crime” solutions such as longer prison sentences. D.C. was a statistical outlier on prosecution rates among its peers, just as it was an outlier in its rise in violent crime. It’s natural to connect the two.

But Graves says this is the wrong approach. He would rather people focus on the same issues his office centered during the debate over the Secure DC crime bill: The prevalence of pretrial detention for people accused of violent crimes and the likelihood that people convicted of gun crimes receive sufficiently tough sentences to deter them from committing additional crimes. 

“When the result of the prosecution, because of the way the system is designed, is that the bulk of people are not experiencing some kind of consequence, that can unintentionally send a signal that getting caught is not that big of a deal,” Graves says. “And I think we had too much of that.”

Graves seems to be overstating the case a bit here, considering that data from the D.C. Sentencing Commission shows that just over 64 percent of all people convicted of gun crimes from 2018 through 2022 served some sort of prison time. It’s difficult to tell whether D.C. is an outlier in this respect (and the Sentencing Commission is currently studying the matter in more detail, Graves says), but it is clear that the city isn’t seeing some huge surge of people committing new crimes after being convicted of prior offenses. About 21 percent of all people arrested in D.C. in fiscal year 2023 had prior convictions, per Department of Corrections data. The number of people rearrested within three years of a conviction is generally in line with other states, though this statistic is difficult to track. So it seems a bit too pat to say that people convicted of gun crimes in D.C. are cycling through the system too quickly and driving the crime spike all on their own.

Another explanation Graves offers for D.C.’s unusual outlier status: The dissolution of its crime lab two years ago. “No other city that I’m aware of had its lab implode,” he observes. (LL finds his use of passive voice a bit amusing, considering the role Graves’ office played in prompting that implosion, but, to be fair, that drama predated his time as the appointed U.S. Attorney.) The USAO repeatedly blamed its dismal declination rate on the near-total shutdown of the Department of Forensic Sciences when reporters first started asking questions about the number of arrests that resulted in charges. It’s difficult to bring cases if you have a crime lab that simply can’t process crucial evidence, the USAO has said.

Still, Graves offers qualifiers here, too. Even though the lab has gotten permission from regulators to begin testing drugs and DNA evidence once again, he isn’t expecting to start charging a ton of additional cases. He believes his office “effectively built a makeshift DFS” by contracting out work to private labs—the city’s lab coming back online may relieve some headaches, but it won’t reverse prosecution rates, he argues.

“Running this makeshift system, the contracts that we have to have in place, paying out on federal contracts, that’s like a lot of work that will go away,” Graves says. “You’d be surprised how much time we have to spend on those issues, as opposed to prosecutions. So it’ll be helpful, but it’s not going to impact the charging numbers.”

So if it’s not really the crime lab or a lack of prosecutions, then Graves sure has to hope that the changes brought by Secure DC keep driving crime rates down. It’s probably a bit much to expect Graves to blame Mayor Muriel Bowser for other factors not mentioned here, like the city’s persistent failures to coordinate a coherent crime reduction strategy, but LL still wonders whether it’s wise for Graves to put all his eggs in this particular basket. 

Perhaps the most amusing outcome would be if the data ends up showing that, for all of the turmoil over the crime bill, violence was falling in the city long before policymakers got spooked by political pressure and rushed to make these changes. Graves himself allowed that just such a thing is a real possibility. 

“No one has a crystal ball here,” Graves says. “We don’t know what the data will show at the end of the year. But I’ve always suspected that D.C. is basically on the same trend line as everybody else, just behind it by about six months to 12 months.”