Photo by Adam Gerard

This post has been updated.

A bit more than halfway into the year and overall crime is down three percent, a fact that Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier touted at a press conference this afternoon where Mayor Muriel Bowser announced two initiatives to boost staffing levels at MPD. However, assault with a dangerous weapon is up eight percent—accounting for a 3 percent rise in violent crime, according to MPD data.

Assault with a deadly weapon is “not just shots fired, it is a very broad range of what an assault is,” Lanier said, citing examples of firing a BB gun or being hit with a gun, when asked about the increase.

(Via MPD)

Homicide and sex abuse cases are down 8 and 7 percent, respectively. And Lanier particularly pointed to the robbery rate—which is even with last year’s total, but marks a marked decline since December. “Every week, robbery numbers have gone down steadily from the beginning of the year,” Lanier said, citing a 20 percent drop since December.

The Washington Post points out, however, that the baseline from last year is much higher than it has been in years past, writing, “The District had experienced a spike in robberies involving guns and an historic surge in homicides that made crime a top public concern for the first time in almost a decade.” And overall robberies are actually up when compared to the same period last year (which is generally how the statistics are reported) by 6 percent, according to the Post, due to an increase in robberies with a gun of 24 percent.

Part of the reason for the decline since the beginning of the year, according to the chief, is the efforts of a task force that identifies patterns in robberies that she launched on December 11, 2015.

In the month before a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer was shot and killed in Bloomingdale, the group had the “normally very safe” neighborhood on their radar. Still, it remains unclear if the homicide was a botched robbery attempt or not. Police are searching for two black males wearing dark clothing who were in the area, but they don’t have an additional information about their identities or if they were involved in any way.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the sniper attack in Dallas, D.C. police officers are continuing to work in pairs.

“We all realize that as hard as we work, as engaged as we are, as supportive as our community is, if someone takes action like in Dallas, it could happen anywhere,” Lanier said.