A while ago, some asshole with a blog noted:

As Joe Friday notes, on the criminal justice side of things, D.C. has seen a precipitous drop in murders this year (down thirty percent), and all of that happened before Congressional interference or the D.C. Council’s new crime bill. So what happened? Well, the MPD decided to start arresting people for violent crimes and the federally-appointed federal prosecutors decided to prosecute some of them*. Violent crime arrests increased 121 percent. The key thing is there was no change in staffing (if anything, staffing dropped by three percent). This was the MPD deciding to do their jobs. Likewise, the federal prosecutors actually prosecuted more than 33% of their cases. The question is why wasn’t this done sooner–and, again, the Council has very little role in these kinds of decisions.

Well, the D.C. Auditor appears to agree (boldface mine):

A long-awaited study of the issue, managed by D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson and released Thursday, suggests that D.C. has pretty much all the patrol officers it needs to effectively police the city. MPD could use 65 additional detectives to solve crimes, the study’s authors argue, but it found little need for the sort of aggressive hiring surge pushed by Bowser, Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray, ex-Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, and a host of other reactionary voices convinced that D.C.’s 2023 crime wave was attributable to its smaller police force. Instead, the study—compiled by a trio of consulting firms with law enforcement experience—presents alternatives for civilianizing more of the police force or outsourcing work to other city agencies in order to free up MPD to focus on the nuts and bolts of closing cases.

MPD and its boosters have never presented strong evidence for why more officers would solve the city’s problems as opposed to, say, allocating resources to high crime areas or committing to a “focused deterrence” approach that emphasizes the arrest and prosecution of the small number of people who commit the most crimes in the community. However, the study will nonetheless provide a powerful piece of evidence to policymakers as they confront the relentless drumbeat from Bowser and her allies to steer more funding toward police hiring at all costs…

Moving forward, the Council has an opportunity to take these recommendations seriously and try to force change in these calcified institutions. Many lawmakers urged patience as they awaited the study’s release and before making serious decisions about the size of MPD. Now that it’s finally out in the world, will they listen?

I’m guessing they won’t, and Congress certainly won’t, but at least someone in D.C. government is talking about how to reduce crime in a way that will actually work.