Speaking in a packed room at the Busboys and Poets in Anacostia on Tuesday, D.C. activists held up large red signs with large white letters: “THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

They were holding a press conference to launch an anti-violence campaign — Thou Shalt Not Kill — by the Anacostia Coordinating Council. The signs will play a key role in the campaign, intended to help curb gun violence after another deadly year for the city.

Philip Pannell, executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, says right now the group plans to distribute the posters, including a thousand that the mayor’s office helped supply. Meanwhile, he says, D.C.’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention has offered to print yard signs bearing the phrase. Posters will be available at all of the region’s locations of Busboys & Poets for people to pick up and post or distribute.

This is a revival of a local program that began about 30 years ago, at the height of D.C.’s crack epidemic. William Lightfoot, then at-large councilmember, began printing signs reading ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill” — one of the Biblical Ten Commandments — and put them up throughout the city.

“It helped to prompt conversation,” Pannell told DCist/WAMU. He hopes that by displaying the signs again, they’ll be able to do the same.

The homicide rate back in the ’90s was about double what it is now, hovering below 500 and reaching 509 in 1991, according to data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Tuesday’s press conference comes fresh off a year in which 203 people died by homicide in the District, 18 of whom were teenagers. Ward 8, home of the Busboys & Poets location where the campaign launched Tuesday, experienced the greatest number of homicides in the city in 2022.

Pannell says the fact that 2022’s homicide numbers are lower than they were 30 years ago doesn’t make preventing violence any less urgent today. Imagine all the classrooms, he says, that 203 people could fill.

“When I hear the statisticians and criminologists tell me that crime is down, I certainly agree. Crime is right down the street,” Pannell said.

Pannell says he got the idea to bring back the program when WJLA journalist Sam Ford was reporting on a homicide. Ford mentioned that he had found one of the decades-old signs and that its message remains as relevant today as it was then. This time, Pannell says, so long as violence continues, the movement will be ongoing — it has “no expiration date.”

Lightfoot told DCist/WAMU he can’t quite measure his original campaign’s success, and there probably wasn’t much media coverage of it. But he knows that people like Pannell and Ford kept the signs as souvenirs — and he believes the message still resonates with a lot of people.

He thinks the new campaign will be more “inclusive,” with a greater variety of community groups involved, and that with social media, the campaign could have a wider reach than it did back then.

Lightfoot, who has chaired all of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s campaigns, said local government has become more involved too. He noted a recent study commissioned by the city that found that a small number of people are behind much of the District’s violence; the study is part of a D.C.-wide effort to develop a plan for reducing gun violence.

“Things can always be done better. Certainly when it comes to criminal justice, we can always do more,” Lightfoot says. “We’re now doing more.”

Pannell agrees that while posters alone won’t reduce violence overnight, they’ll make a “visual impact.” The ACC also plans to hold community meetings at Busboys and Poets every Monday, where people can discuss ways to prevent violence.

Pannell and organizers were joined at the press conference by Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, who described violence in D.C. as a “cancer” that has been neglected. Reflecting on the original Thou Shalt Not Kill campaign, White says there is now a greater sense of collaboration in the community than there was 30 years ago that could help make the new campaign more successful.

“I look around this room, and the strength of this community is very important,” White says. “It makes me feel optimistic.”

The campaign launches as community members are demanding answers in the shooting death of 13-year-old Karon Blake in Brookland. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, a resident in the neighborhood shot Blake, suspecting that he was tampering with cars on the street. On Wednesday, Bowser confirmed that Blake’s shooter was a D.C. government employee, but neither she nor MPD has released any further details. White says it’s “baffling” that MPD hasn’t identified and arrested Blake’s killer.

Andy Shallal, owner of Busboys and Poets, says almost everyone at Tuesday’s conference has seen or known someone who has been killed. Just a few weeks ago, outside the restaurant, 24-year old Mario Leonard — an employee of Shallal’s — was fatally shot. Shallal says Leonard’s legacy continues through this movement.

“We can’t let another young person be gunned down and just step over their body. It’s not enough to just draw a chalk line around them,” Shallal told DCist/WAMU. “We really have to do something that says ‘enough is enough.'”

Shallal says disparities remain deep in D.C. and that for a lot of people, violence in D.C. might seem like a distant problem. He says D.C.’s “two cities” need to come together.

“The city isn’t just Northwest,” he says. “Unless the whole city is thriving, really none of us are really thriving.”

Advocates plan to bring the signs to the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade on Monday in Southeast D.C.