Photo by M.V. Jantzen

The Examiner has an interesting pair of crime stories today, both of which note dramatic decreases in certain types of crime in the District this year. First is a story that reports the number of carjackings is way down in D.C.: there have been about 200 carjackings in the city this year, compared with approximately 600 in all of 2008. Next is a piece of speculation about whether the correlation of having an oddly cool summer season has been one of the contributing factors to this year’s decrease in homicides, both in D.C. and in other American cities.

In both cases, law enforcement officials naturally attempt to take credit for the decreases. The FBI credits the carjacking drop-off to its new nine-person task force that has paired MPD detectives with federal agents. The task force says their work has led to the indictment of 14 carjackers since January. And in terms of the weather, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier scoffs at the notion that the MPD can’t take full credit for this year’s dramatic decrease in homicides.”It’s idiotic,” she told the paper of the weather-related theory. “We’re working really hard.”

Is it really so idiotic, though? Not necessarily the weather theory, though it sounds like the making of an interesting master’s thesis, but the idea that law enforcement efforts can’t and shouldn’t be credited with the totality of crime statistics. Surely if homicides in the District were seeing a slight uptick this year as opposed to a decrease, Lanier wouldn’t be blaming her department for the failure. In fact, that’s precisely what happened last year, when Lanier blamed the small increase in homicides between 2007 and 2008 on random statistical anomalies.

The perplexing question of the root causes of crime is something experts write entire books about without coming up with concrete, satisfactory answers. As D.C.’s crime stats appear to be going down (and also if they go back up), it’s important to remember that law enforcement will try to take credit for the good and point the finger elsewhere for the bad, every time. Attempts to figure out the larger context of the current crime landscape, whether that includes gains in education, extended unemployment benefits, or yes, cooler temperatures, shouldn’t be scoffed at. The efforts of D.C. police to curb violence this year are to be applauded, but considering no one really seems to understand what it means when crime goes way up or way down, we’ll take those efforts, like we do every year, as just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.