And we’ve been due one. As of Friday 9am, D.C. has reported only on new homicide this week, bringing the total for the year to 64*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 100 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 164 homicides during that time. Other crime categories bounced around this week.
As I noted last week, it’s still unclear if we will achieve another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–we saw more murders between July 1 to August 7 (20), than we did in the first three months of the year (12). To hit that mark, we will need to have, on average, one murder (or less) per week for the remainder of the year to continue the trend that began during the Biden administration.
Here’s to hoping that next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 67 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
mikethemadbiologist