With the books finally closed on 2007, we can take an official look at the crime statistics for the year. The Washington Post did so yesterday and found that, as expected, violent crime in the District was up last year as compared to the previous year.

You can view some of the District’s 2007 crime data at the MPD’s site over here. It shows that 2007 saw 181 murders, up 7.7 percent from 2006, which saw 168 murders. Nonfatal shootings and other gun crimes were also up in 2007.

An increase in violent crime is by no means good news, but we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again — it is actually important to remember that this is the fourth year in a row that had fewer than 200 murders. The 168 homicides recorded in 2006 was actually a 21-year low. We’ve come a long way from the early 1990s, when more than 400 people were being killed every year thanks in large part to the crack cocaine trade.

All that said, we can expect Chief Lanier to take some amount of heat for the uptick in violent crime during her first year in charge of the MPD. But will it be enough for her to consider revising her increasingly unpopular “All Hands on Deck” weekends strategy in favor of a new crime prevention scheme? We doubt it — the strategy did manage to provide big bumps in the number of arrests periodically throughout the year, and at no real overtime cost.