This suspect punched the victim 6 times in the face, on camera, causing "fractures to the facial bones" & police arrested him for Aggravated Assault (a felony).
The @USAO_DC downgraded the charges to misdemeanor Simple Assault.
As a result the suspect was released pretrial. (1/
Here are the most recent court record entries showing that they are on pretrial release.
USA Graves talks endlessly about how it's everyone else's fault that suspects are out pretrial (& some commit new crimes) but he never takes responsibility for his own office's role.
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🚨Confirmed: The suspect who allegedly shot a woman in the head was already charged with a gun felony at the time of the shooting & had been released pretrial by the judge.
Security footage & his GPS monitor show him at the scene of the shooting & firing his 2nd illegal gun. (1/
We had a lot of attention on one pretrial release case in DC but this one allegedly resulted in a woman being shot in the head & suffering brain damage.
Remember that DC law has a default assumption of pretrial detention for these cases...the judge ruled differently. (2/
The judge found "a set of conditions to ensure the safety of the community." And "Mr. Israel was released on electronic monitoring"
As we can see he had no trouble getting another illegal gun & GPS monitoring was apparently no deterrent to him allegedly shooting at someone. (3/
DC's unelected prosecutor:
- Declined to prosecute 1/3 of gun cases
- Dropped 37% of charged cases
- Reduced 50% of convictions to just misdemeanors, usually by offering generous "golden ticket" plea bargains
If we want to tackle gun violence, we need a new U.S. Attorney. (1/
I have refrained from calling for USA Graves' removal until now. This new gun prosecution data was the breaking point.
Compared to 2018, the USAO is securing less than half as many felony convictions for Carrying a Pistol Without a License.
This is a policy choice. (2/
The new data is from the excellent DC Sentencing Commission Annual Report. Their work is rarely covered by DC media, which has helped the USAO erode prosecution in DC without accountability. (3/
If the police in DC catch you with a machine gun you have a good chance of the United States Attorney's Office letting you plead guilty to misdemeanor charges & walking away with no jail time.
Then the USAO will whine about "the system" to pass the blame for gun violence. (1/
This plea deal happened in FEBRUARY, after the Department of Justice announced a "surge" of resources to fight violent crime in DC.
The USAO seems more concerned with clearing out its caseload & blaming others than incapacitating dangerous suspects. (2/
Statistically far more people arrested with illegal guns in DC walk away with no prison time than those that face any time in prison.
92% of felony cases in DC are resolved via plea bargains...the USAO is signing off on this situation & then complaining about sentences. (3/
At the start of 2023 DC was at record lows for arrests, prosecutions & detention.
Chief Smith got MPD to make more arrests than they had in years.
Public pressure dragged the USAO to prosecute more cases.
This correlated with big drops in crime in the 2nd half of 2023. (1/
Today's post goes through how on almost every enforcement metric DC was at rock bottom by the beginning of 2023; driven by decreases in arrests and massive decreases in USAO prosecutions.
But there was no political penalty for this deterioration for Mayor Bowser or the USAO. (2/
This deterioration in enforcement meant that DC was uniquely vulnerable to any spike in crime in 2023: (3/
- The average DC homicide suspect has been arrested ~12 times prior, to include violent & gun possession offenses
- Because of USAO non-prosecution, dismissals & plea bargains they only have ~3.1 convictions
- The USAO only secures prior felony convictions against 54% of them (1/
This latest Gun Violence Analysis is well-done & repeats many of the key lessons of the (sadly unheeded) 2021 analysis.
Specifically, many of DC's murderers are being caught for crimes BEFORE the murder & the system is failing to stop them. (2/
The arrest volumes show that MPD is trying to disrupt these highest-risk criminals from engaging in further violence.
But the huge attrition from arrests to actual prosecutions to felony convictions is sadly a very familiar story for people following the USAO in DC. (3/
MPD's Detective pipeline is important. A law enforcement source told me to check this out & compared to NYPD our police department in DC:
- Allocates a much smaller % of officers to detective work
- Solves a much smaller % of crimes
This correlation deserves some attention. (1/
There is a TON of research that shows that allocating more detective resources to crimes increases clearance rates (i.e. solves more crimes). This is intuitive but the data supports the common sense intuition. (2/
We also see some correlation in DC's own data. Over the past few years MPD has shifted $ (which usually correlates with officer hours) out of the Homicide Branch (even when the overall MPD budget grew) & this coincides with decreasing clearance rates. (3/