Washington, D.C

Crime is way up in DC because US Attorney Matthew Graves won’t do his job

Published

2 years ago

February 8, 2024

Crime is way up in DC because US Attorney Matthew Graves won’t do his job

Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, must be grateful that the Justice Department will “surge additional law enforcement tools and resources” to tackle violent crime and carjackings in the nation’s capital. But he should also be embarrassed. The announcement is a tacit admission that the city’s chief prosecutor has failed abysmally at tackling crime.

In the department’s press release, Graves is quoted as saying, “We have been surgically targeting and prosecuting those driving violence within our community.” That’s a lie, and everyone knows it: from police and community members to prosecutors in his own office and those who, disgusted by his policies, have left for other employment. One of us (Stimson) testified before the House Judiciary Committee last August about Graves’s appalling record and what needs to be done to protect visitors and residents.

Last year in Washington, D.C., there were 274 homicides (a 35% increase over 2022), 3,470 robberies (a 67% increase), 6,829 car thefts (an 82% increase), and 13,349 thefts (a 23% increase). Overall, violent crime was up 39%, and all crime was up 26% year over year.

Carjacking is a huge problem in Washington, D.C. Last year, there were 958 carjackings — 77% of which involved guns — and the police closed only 260 cases, resulting in 173 arrests. Sixty-two percent of those arrests involved juveniles, the majority of whom were 15 or 16 years old, yet Graves refuses to prosecute most violent juveniles as adults.

Despite this crime tsunami, Graves’s office of 330 prosecutors has a declination rate of 67%. Graves tries to blame everyone but himself for this problem, from the crime lab to the courts to the police, the latter of whom he says bring weak cases to his office.

The police aren’t buying it. Robert J. Contee III, the district’s former police chief, said his officers are not to blame, calling Graves’s finger-pointing “BS,” adding, “I can promise you, it’s not MPD holding the bag on this.”

Under Graves, cases are now “no papered” (i.e., rejected) at the intake stage if those cases are essentially not trial ready the day after the arrest. That makes no sense whatsoever, as virtually no case is ready for trial the day after an arrest. As he well knows — or certainly ought to know — further investigative steps are necessary in most cases to get them ready for trial, including locating other potential witnesses, forensic evidence testing, and the like.

Contrast that 67% declination rate with the San Diego district attorney’s office, which also has 330 prosecutors. That office had a 22.6% declination rate from 2000-2019 involving over 500,000 cases; meaning they charged 77.4% of the cases that were brought to them by law enforcement authorities during those two decades.

And just to be clear, this isn’t a resource problem. San Diego County has one prosecutor for every 9,927 residents of the county; Washington, D.C., has one for every 2,035 residents.

The real problem is Graves. He refuses to prosecute every case to the fullest extent of the law, pure and simple. As long as his charging policies remain the same, sending his office more prosecutors from Justice won’t make a difference. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by a few hundred armed career criminals who act with impunity because they know the local prosecutor won’t put them in prison for their crimes. Full stop.

The quickest way to tackle the gun crime problem in Washington, D.C., is for Graves to prosecute every single felon in possession of a firearm in federal district court under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), under which most, if not all, felons would get prison time.

According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, of the 64,142 cases prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) in fiscal 2022, 97.4% were sentenced to federal prison. The average sentence for all section 922(g) offenders was 63 months, just over five years. The length of sentence depends in large part on the criminal history category of the defendant. Some 15% of section 922(g) offenders were convicted of one or more statutes with a mandatory minimum penalty.

But instead of taking gun crime seriously, Graves directs his prosecutors to send gun cases, including those committed by convicted felons, to the Superior Court for the District of Columbia. They bargain those cases down to next to nothing, and most criminals end up with probation instead of the years behind bars that would have resulted had he taken them to federal district court. This is a policy choice which Graves could change today.

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By hiring woke social justice warrior pseudo-prosecutors, refusing to send felon-in-possession firearms cases to federal district court, forcing his prosecutors to decline cases at intake because they aren’t “trial ready” the day after an arrest, and refusing to prosecute every violent gun-toting juvenile as an adult, Matt Graves has failed as the city’s chief prosecutor.

What Graves needs is a spine. The Justice Department can’t give him that.

Zack Smith is a legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Cully Stimson is the center’s deputy director.

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Washington, D.C

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

Published

3 hours ago

April 19, 2026

Press Room

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

4 things to know about the weather:

Chances of rain in the morning
Gusty Sunday
Chilly Monday
Temps will rise again through the work week

Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.

After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.

The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.

Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.

However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.

QuickCast

SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s

MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s

Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.

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Washington, D.C

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

Published

1 day ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.

In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.

“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”

Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.

Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.

“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.

“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”

Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”

A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.

Rachel Reeves posted this image on Instagram from Washington DC on Thursday with the message: ‘Friends that run together – work together.’ Photograph: Rachel Reeves/Instagram

Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.

Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.

But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.

“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”

At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.

The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.

Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.

For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.

“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”

For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.

In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.

Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.

“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”

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