Last week we joined forced with Greater Greater Washington and PoPville to launch Let’s Choose D.C., a website dedicated to exploring the candidates vying for the At-Large D.C. Council seat in the April 23 special election and their stances on the issues. Every week we’ll pose a question to the candidates, post their responses and allow readers to judge whether they were on point or evasive.

Given the recent focus on the city’s historically low homicide rate, this week we decided to ask the candidates what they think needs to be done to tackle other crimes that remain high: “Chief Lanier and Mayor Gray have made a lot of the drop in homicides, but other crimes—assaults, robberies—remain stubbornly high. How should DC police deal with those challenges, and do you have an opinion on how many officers MPD needs?”

Nine candidates replied; read their responses here. We’ve also started building profile pages for all the candidates where you’ll be able to find basic background on them and all of their answers. To access those pages, simply click on the images of the candidates in the upper left-hand corner.

Voting on the first question, about candidates’ vision for the future, has ended; we will tally the results and post them later this week.