Mayor Muriel Bowser on Saturday hosted a frank and nuanced summit on crime and public safety in D.C. with dozens of neighborhood officials, noting that while overall rates of violent crime have been declining, guns have become a growing driver of both real incidents and the perception that the city has become more dangerous.

The meeting at the Deanwood Recreation Center with over 150 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners followed a similar gathering Bowser had with school leaders earlier this month, as well as a high-profile fight with the D.C. Council over a sweeping revision of the city’s criminal code, highlighting how crime and public safety have become priority issues as she starts her third term in office.

“I grew up in a town that had more than 400 homicides in the city,” said Bowser, referring to the period in the 1990s when D.C. was referred to as the “murder capital” of the nation. “How I feel now when I go around the city… I feel almost greater anxiety than I did at that time.”

That admission of anxiety — which was shared by some ANCs, who said they feel “frustrated,” “concerned,” and “scared” — comes against a backdrop of conflicting crime trends in D.C. While homicides have been steadily rising in recent years, they saw a 10% drop in 2022 relative to the year prior. Violent crime has also been decreasing over the years; while there were 6,387 recorded violent offenses in Bowser’s first year in office in 2015, that number in 2022 stood at 3,830, down 7% from the year before.

D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III noted that disconnect. “When you hear that,” he said of the data on violent crime rates, “it goes against what people are feeling.” He said the likely culprit in the overall feelings of fear is the increase in gun-related offenses, the number of which jumped in 2021 and 2022 to their highest levels since Bowser took office and stand 25% above where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. (In 2022 there were 2,202 gun-involved crimes; in 2019 it was 1,616.)

“A bullet to the left [or] a bullet to the right could be the difference in someone losing their life,” he said, referring to the growing number of shootings in D.C. There were 135 fatal and 557 non-fatal shooting in 2019, he told the crowd, rising to 174 and 710, respectively, in 2022.

“When we talk about how people feel about crime, they hear those gunshots,” said Bowser.

Contee also said that gun recoveries were fast on the rise, with police taking 2,310 off the street in 2021 and 3,152 in 2022. (“In my 30 years of law enforcement I haven’t seen this many guns in our city,” he said.) And he grew animated when describing another troubling trend: the number of kids involved in violent offenses involving guns. The number of kids killed last year was double the year prior, and Contee said more kids are jumping directly into gun-related crimes instead of starting with minor skirmishes with the law.

“What I’m starting to see… our babies are starting to show up different. Our children… their first offense is for a violent crime with a gun,” he said, growing emotional. “Time and time again, I’m standing over kids. I’m getting out of my bed and leaving my kids to stand over a [dead] kid… and he’s got a gun. There’s something going on within the culture of our young people that’s different now.”

Both Bowser and Contee said the reasons for the current crime trends are many and complex; the mayor noted that kids and adults were cut off from needed support systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they both argued that police staffing and policy changes by the D.C. Council were impacting the public safety “ecosystem.”

Contee said there are now 3,376 police officers in MPD, a 20-year-low. Both he and Bowser have pushed for 4,000. Bowser also said she continues to push for the council to revisit its decision last year to pull officers out of schools through 2025, and said concerns over crime had prompted her to veto both the overhaul of the criminal code (it will take effect in Oct. 2025) and the 2018 bill that decriminalized fare evasion.

When given a chance to share their own opinions, some Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners did say they wanted more police officers, while others said they’d like to see officers walk their beats more often instead of staying in their cars or for MPD to open more police sub-stations in neighborhoods.

Other commissioners said they want D.C. agencies to be more responsive to their requests and concerns, and suggested that the city conduct a gun buy-back program, increase mental health resources, more quickly shut down open-air drug markets, expand vocational options and offer modified diplomas for graduation, increase enforcement of speeding and expired temporary tags on cars, and address the concentration of poverty and the racial wealth gap.

Ward 8 ANC Commissioner Amanda Beale asked Bowser to increase funding for violence interruption efforts, saying that they could accomplish what regular police officers cannot. “We cannot walk up to a gangster… and say, ‘Hey, don’t retaliate,'” she said. (Linda Harllee Harper, the director of the D.C. Office of Gun Violence Prevention, said the city spent $100 million on a range of violence prevention efforts last year. But Bowser said measuring the success rates of violence interruption can be “elusive.”)

One recurring point of discussion was recreation opportunities for kids, with some commissioners complaining that their neighborhood rec centers were still not operating at pre-pandemic hours and that they were not offering the kind of programming that would attract kids.

“We do not have an open recreation center or Boys and Girls Club,” said Commissioner Denise Blackson, who represents a portion of NoMa. “[Kids are] into videoing and gaming. They’re into singing and rapping. These are some things that youth have asked for.”

Bowser said D.C. was bringing rec center hours of operation back to pre-pandemic levels this year, and agreed that it’s not just a matter how how many rec centers are available, but also what they are offering. “There is a disconnect between what we’re offering and what people are taking advantage of. It may be it’s not what the young people want. Some people say that when they walk into a recreation center they feel like it’s not for them,” she said.

Bowser encouraged ANC commissioners to become more engaged during the upcoming budget-formulation process, saying that’s where they could have the most impact. And she made clear that as she did last year, she would continue pushing to hire more police. “We need more police, and we’re going to go into this budget cycle with the appropriate request and what we think we can hire safely,” she said.