As of December 28, 159 people had been murdered in the District in 2018, a significant uptick in homicides. In fact it’s  a 39 percent increase over last year, when there were 114 homicides total in the city, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

The increase has been apparent since the first half of the year. Mayor Muriel Bowser deployed additional resources at the start of the summer to places in wards 7 and 8 that had been experiencing spikes in violent crime. By mid-May, Bowser and Police Chief Peter Newsham were addressing what was then a 41 percent spike in homicides year over year.

“Just like when we had a spike in shootings and violence in 2015, we got all the agencies of the government coordinated to respond. We were able to drive that crime down then and we will do it again,” Bowser said during a Ward 4 “crime walk” in May, during which she spoke with residents about their crime concerns.

“We’re going to stop this little uptick in violence. Investigators are making significant progress in some of the recent violent cases we’ve seen in our city, so you’re going to see, we’re going to end up having a good summer here in the District,” Newsham said during the same walk.

Despite their efforts, the uptick persisted. A spate of high-profile murders have drawn even more public attention to the problem. In July, ten-year-old Makiyah Wilson was murdered when a group of gunmen drove into the courtyard of a Northeast apartment complex and started shooting. In September a man stabbed and killed 35-year-old Wendy Martinez as she was running in Logan Circle in what appeared to be a completely random attack. Just this month, a group of masked gunmen chased down and killed a 15-year-old Anacostia High School student in a Southeast apartment complex.

By late August, there had been 100 homicides in the District already, compared to 74 at the same time in 2017. A month later, there had been more homicides this year than in all of last year, with more than three months left to go in 2018.

Both Newsham and Bowser have blamed the uptick in violence on illegal guns in the District. At a press conference in September, Newsham admitted that the current penalties for possession of an illegal gun didn’t seem to be an effective deterrent. “The consequences of illegal firearm possession in our city is not changing the behavior. We’re arresting sometimes the same folks over and over again for carrying illegal firearms in the city,” he said. MPD has also faced some criticism this year for using aggressive police tactics in its efforts to get guns off the streets.

Even as homicides have gone up this year, other violent crime has decreased by seven percent. Assaults with a dangerous weapon, sexual abuse, and robberies are all down.

Homicides in D.C. have fluctuated greatly over the last two decades, from a high of 262 in 2002 to a low of 88 in 2012. Numbers in more recent years, however, have begun going up again.