We can’t punish or police away crime

Do we care more about the 1 or the 99?

According to The New York Times, homicides soared 16% over the last year in a sampling of 20 large cities, including D.C. In fact, D.C.’s increase is a higher 24%. (The 2019 number was already a 10-year high.) In this month alone, 23 people have needlessly lost their lives to gun violence. Crime is ravaging (mostly black, low-income) communities and the residents don’t feel safe in their own homes. The neighborhood where I grew up is at the heart of this area; I get it. This has to stop!

But the knee-jerk response of Mayor Muriel Bowser and the chief of police (like so many politicians elsewhere) is to double down on the same “tough-on-crime” practices (more police, harsher sentences) in effect for the past 50 years. They haven’t worked and they cause untold damage to many more individuals and families in the process. It’s time to exercise some imagination (just as the “defund police” initiatives ask us to do) and instead take a more holistic approach to crime: addressing the social ills that cause people to commit crimes in the first place, and creating conditions in prisons and jails that truly rehabilitate rather than dehumanize (thus contributing…