Violent crime lessons from D.C., as it faces spike in carjackings
Jeremy Lott | September 5, 2025
Business brought me to America’s capital city last September. One digital sign on 14th and K streets had three rotating messages in all caps, aimed squarely at motorists: “LOCK YOUR DOORS”; “DO NOT IDLE”; and “TAKE ALL ITEMS IN YOUR CAR.”
The sign warned people to watch themselves and take precautions for good reason. A rash of car thefts, carjackings, murders and other crimes have bedeviled Washington, D.C., over the past several years. Citywide, there were 957 carjackings, 77% involving guns, and a total of 262 cases closed in 2023, according to the city’s official carjacking dashboard.
That turned out to be a high water mark for carjackings, but the tide of criminality continues to be substantial. The years 2018-2019 saw an average of 150 carjackings, with fewer than 70% of those involving guns, and more than one-third of those cases cleared. But then things began to go up, up, up. The District had 360 reported carjackings in 2020, 424 in 2021 and 484 in 2022. More than 70% of those carjackings involved guns.
The numbers for 2024—497 carjackings with a mere 70% involving guns—have been touted as an improvement, and that is technically true. But absent the 2023 numbers, last year would still have been the highest number of annual carjackings in the carjacking dashboard’s database.
To go from numbers to people, last January, 28-year-old Artell Cunningham allegedly entered an occupied car on 4th and K Street, 10 blocks from the future warning sign. He demanded keys from the driver, former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission worker Michael Gill, 56, and shot Gill before fleeing on foot in what CNN characterized as a “deadly string of carjackings.”
D.C. hasn’t been a safe place relative to the rest of the country for quite some time. Boosters pointed out that it had been getting gradually better, yet we’ve seen real regress over most of the 2020s. The capital’s residents, businesses, and politicians have been quarreling over what to do about it.
A Manhattan Institute report by Charles Fain Lehman with the title, “Doing Less With Less,” dives deeply into recent crime numbers and what the D.C. city government is doing about it. It is a discouraging read.
The report highlights homicides of D.C.’s African-American males, who make the lion’s share of victims. Homicides among this group “roughly tracked the national norm until the late 1980s, when the emergence of violent crack cocaine markets made D.C. the nation’s ‘murder capital,’” the report states. There was some decline in murder in the 1990s along with the rest of the country. But the homicide rate “in this particular at-risk population remained elevated above the national rate,” and it has spiked again.
Homicide deaths in D.C. have climbed “from a low of 104.5 deaths per 100,000 population in 2014 to a peak of 298.8 per 100,000 in 2023, a 186% increase,” the report states. Here is the meaning underlying those numbers: “It is roughly as dangerous to be a young black man in the District today as it was 25 years ago.”
What is driving the carnage? A big part of it is gang activity. “In D.C., homicide is overwhelmingly driven by conflict within and between gangs and related social groups,” the Manhattan report states.
These findings draw from previous studies by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. The NICJR further found that the struggle for reputation among gang bangers has been boosted by social media beefs.
“There is a deadly mix of group/crew/gang members making music videos taunting or disrespecting their rivals that are posted on social media, and those videos spark or further inflame neighborhood conflicts that escalate into shootings,” NICJR reported. “Other comments and pictures posted to social media by group members also lead to shootings.”
The size of D.C. police force should not be the problem. The Metropolitan Police Department is America’s sixth-largest police department covering what is only the 22nd largest U.S. city by population. And yet MPD has struggled where many other police forces have recovered.
Using three indicators—annual stops by police, juvenile arrests, and arrests of adults—we can see how wrong things have gone with MPD. As the COVID lockdowns began, “rates of all three plummeted to 25%-50% of pre-pandemic baseline,” the report states.
The number of MPD investigators fell by about 50 from before COVID. Worse, they have had little support to build cases, as the D.C. crime lab lost its accreditation from 2021 through most of 2023. Even basic tasks, such as serving bench warrants, has seen significant foot dragging by many of MPD’s finest.
D.C.’s three-term Mayor Muriel Bowser takes the rise in crime seriously and her support for MPD has made a difference. In an April press conference touting recent positive trends in property crime, violent crime and carjackings, Bowser rightly insisted, “These are not just statistics. These are saved lives, families who are more protected, and communities gaining peace of mind.”
Unfortunately, in D.C. city government, Bowser has largely been going it alone. During last year primaries and the general election, voters in many cities, from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Portland took a harder line on crime than they had for a long time. That more incarceral mood mostly passed D.C. by, with pro-law-and-order challengers easily bested in the primaries.
