In 2016, the D.C. Council passed the NEAR Act, or the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Act, setting forth a slew of initiatives to reduce community violence and incarceration using a public health approach.

The legislation – and its 20 provisions – received full funding in the 2018 fiscal year, creating entirely new government offices, task forces, and new police accountability requirements. Mayor Muriel Bowser even set up a website to track the bill’s implementation – a purported step towards accountability that was applauded by some advocates who had pushed for the bill’s full funding.

But nearly half a decade later, it appears a task force created by the legislation — called on to build a comprehensive strategy for violence reduction — has dissolved, with no clear timeline for rebuilding in the future.

Former members told DCist/WAMU that the group, plagued with membership troubles from the beginning, often felt a lack of support from the city in implementing their proposals. They also said their attempts to unify D.C.’s multi-agency approach to violence reduction weren’t treated with urgency, and were siloed away from the city’s other violence prevention efforts.

“I can truly say that it was a pleasure and privilege serving our community with this group,” said Natalia Otero, a former member of the Comprehensive Homicide Elimination Strategy Task Force (CHESTF) and executive director of DC SAFE, a crisis intervention agency for domestic violence survivors. “Unfortunately, it felt like we were struggling too hard to be heard this time. Although there seems to be momentum building to create programming and support for victims and people at risk for committing homicides, I must caution city administrators and political figures that there is a big difference between fleeting trends and sustainable systemic change.”

After compiling a comprehensive plan on homicide reduction to lawmakers and executives in 2020 that ultimately went nowhere, the group’s members decided their efforts in the violence reduction space would be better spent elsewhere. The active members of the group officially resigned earlier this year. Otero, for example, will be prioritizing her work with the DC SAFE, which she said has seen its client base double over the pandemic, as homicide rates for participants in its High Risk Domestic Violence Initiative climb.

“I had hopes that the task force would be engaged consistently over time as thought partners in solving for the issue of eliminating homicides in our city,” said David Bowers, another former task force member, and founder of the group No Murders DC. “[By 2022], I felt as though my energies could be best used in other ways.”

As written into the law, the Comprehensive Homicide Elimination Strategy Task Force was designed as a 20-person group, made up of half council-appointed individuals, and half mayoral appointees. Aside from one ANC commissioner, the group consisted of non-elected, non-governmental community members with knowledge and expertise in violence reduction.

The group first began meeting in 2018, nearly two years after the legislation was passed, but former members told DCist/WAMU that it was difficult to reach a quorum for most meetings. Some appointed members rarely showed, or had moved on to different jobs and left the city in the time between their appointment and the group’s actual convening. The task force’s page on the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice website only lists agendas for five meetings taking place between April and September 2019. (The first listed agenda on April 30, 2019 includes three items, one of which is “quorum issues and timeline.”)

In practice, the task force became a group of around only 10 or 11 individuals who actually had the capacity to meaningfully participate, according to former members who spoke to DCist/WAMU. They met regularly up through around February 2022 (although the official website for the task force doesn’t reflect this).

By the end of 2022, members were feeling frustrated and burnt out. They say it was clear the group would no longer be an effective use of time. Eduardo Ferrer, the co-chair of the task force, checked the city’s database of task forces and commission members, to see if their group was even still listed.

“When we checked MOTA’s website in December 2022, the website stated that our terms were to expire in January 2023. As a result, I had planned to just let my term expire,” Ferrer told DCist/WAMU. “However, in early February 2023, I was informed by a staff member from DMPSJ that the term expiration date was likely just a place holder in the system and that members who wanted to resign need to submit letters of resignation.”

He resigned, along with Otero and Bowers. (According to the city’s database, there are 12 vacancies on the task force currently, although the roster looks to be out-of-date; it lists Otero as an active member.)

Spokespeople for the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Public Safety and Justice and ONSE office did not return DCist/WAMU’s on the status of the mayoral appointed members of the group, or plans for the future of the task force. DCist/WAMU also reached out to At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who authored the NEAR Act, but did not receive a response.

In an interview, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson told DCist/WAMU that he understood members of the group have been frustrated with the lack of resources afforded to the task force, and a sense that they were not “taken seriously.”

But Mendelson said he does not know what the future of the task force might look like.

“I’m not sure I want it to die out, I think we have to let the dust settle and then figure out where we go,” Mendelson said. “There’s not much point in making 10 appointments to a commission that has 20, if the mayor’s not going to make her 10, or support it. So I think we have to see how this settles out.”

Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who currently chairs the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, told DCist/WAMU in a statement that she and the chairman are “working to ensure [the task force] has enough positions filled to meet quorum and continue its important work.”

“I am taking a critical look at all entities that have influence on public safety – including the Homicide Elimination Task Force — to ensure there is proper coordination and follow through on its recommendations,” Pinto said.

According to former members of the group, the problem wasn’t that the executive branch never coordinated or engaged with the task force. (Ferrer, the task force’s former co-chair, told DCist/WAMU the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Office’s staff were frequently invited and attended the task force’s meetings, and the group also met a few times with gun violence prevention director Linda Harlee Harper, following her appointment.)

Instead, it seemed as though the city did not meet the group’s mission with urgency, especially as homicide rates increased in the years following the act’s passage. The city also failed to fold their efforts into already existing work or initiatives at city agencies, several members said.

“While I am proud of the commitment and the recommendations of the task force, I wish we could have done more. Significant work remains to develop and implement a coordinated, cross-agency, cross-sector public health approach to eliminating homicide in the District,” Ferrer told DCist/WAMU. “Unfortunately, this will not happen until the government is willing to meaningfully collaborate with community partners to address the root issues and systemic inequities that contribute to violence.”

In 2021, D.C. recorded 227 homicides – the highest number since 2003, and a continuation of a four-year climb beginning in 2017. In 2022, the homicide rate fell by 10% from 2021, but the city saw an uptick in youth killings. And while overall violent crime is down 5% from this point in 2022, as of March 21, 2023, the number of homicides is up 7%% from last year. (These rates still fall well below the violence levels recorded in D.C. in the 90s; between 1990 and 1995, the average number of people killed in the city was 435.)

To former member David Bowers, the group’s dissolution exemplifies a long pattern in the city when it comes to its violence reduction efforts: a task force, or pilot, or new initiative ultimately fails to achieve its stated goals – or the results of newly introduced programs don’t deliver on promises.

“This city, Washington, D.C., in my 20-plus years of doing volunteer work in this space, has not seen a comprehensive, sustained approach to ending homicide in our city,” he said. “We should all collectively commit to and insist upon with each other the need for that kind of sustained approach, recognizing that short-term initiatives that come and go, short-term programs that come and go, that change depending on who the mayor is, change depending on who’s in the council… that does not get us to solving the problem. It hasn’t, and it won’t.”

The task force did manage to compile a comprehensive strategy for violence reduction, which they presented to lawmakers in Dec. 2020. The white paper, reviewed by DCist/WAMU, recommended the city create a unified hub – consisting of government and non-government entities – to address violence, dubbed The Office of Homicide Elimination, Violence Prevention, and Community Empowerment. Under the proposal, the task force would serve as the office’s board (in addition to new members with expertise in the field), performing oversight and leadership.

Bowers referred to this office as a “Peace Room.”

“The goal of this recommendation is not to create additional or needless bureaucracy,” reads the letter. “The focus…is the creation of a team of individuals at the highest level of government that can develop and coordinate a cross-agency, cross-sector approach to eliminating homicide in the District.”

Nothing directly resulted from the proposal – at least in any explicit capacity. In an interview with DCist/WAMU, Bowers said he envisioned a hub that expanded beyond the ONSE office, and existed as a large, centralized collaboration between government agencies, community members, nonprofits, and faith groups. To avoid the quorum issues that beset the task force, he said the centralized hub would have a more standardized meeting process, with mandated attendance – everyone was expected to be at one place at one time every week. (He referenced a program like Omaha 360, a large, cross-agency, cross-sector network in Nebraska that’s become a model for other states.)

Earlier this month, he re-upped the group’s proposal while testifying before the council in a gun violence roundtable, not wanting the work the group put into researching and developing the proposal to be lost.

“Part of the logic behind this recommendation was that the city needs to institutionalize the consistent, on-going work to explicitly end murders in our city,” Bowers testified. “This should not be an initiative or a pilot program that is here today and gone tomorrow.”

Bower’s position – and the task force’s proposal for a more unified response to violence prevention – is one of the most enduring critique’s of the city’s approach. A 2022 report by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, commissioned by the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, stated that D.C. has the money and talent to reduce gun violence, but lacks a cohesive strategy and political commitment. In a series of roundtables earlier this month on community violence, residents voiced many of the same criticisms, alleging that the results of government initiatives are not as visible as the press conferences announcing them.

The city runs violence multiple violence prevention programs through multiple offices: ONSE, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and the Department of Youth and Rehabilitation Services (DYRS). Since its creation, the ONSE office expanded violence interruption efforts, employing members of the community to build relationships with individuals at-risk of committing or being a victim of violence. Other city agencies like DYRS, and the D.C. Attorney General’s office, also run credible messenger and violence interruption efforts, respectively.

Meanwhile, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, created in a multi-million dollar violence reduction investment called Building Blocks DC, largely funds violence interruption efforts and strategizes about solutions. Bowers said the OGVP’s mission shares similarities with the task force’s proposal, but that the city is still lacking the coordinated response he and the task force envisioned and a daily, centralized operations center. (Such a centralized operations center was supposed to be a part of Building Blocks DC, but in the year after its launch, the plans were scrapped and the initiative took on a more amorphous, coordinating role.)

For the city’s part, officials are aware of the poor coordination between agencies, and have begun implementing recommendations outlined in the 2022 strategic plan to end murders. Linda Harlee Harper, tapped by Bowser in 2021 to lead OGVP and who now also directs the ONSE office, has touted improvements on the issue, from twice-weekly meetings between violence interrupters and city agencies, to making same-day behavioral health services available in the aftermath of violence.

In a roundtable for her upcoming confirmation vote, Acting Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah said she saw her office as the focal point of a network of partners.

“My role is the primary person responsible for making sure that, as a hub of the wheel, that we are all talking,” Appiah said. “We are communicating, we are collaborating. And we can recognize we are not always going to agree, and that’s okay.”

Still, former members say gaps persist in the city’s strategy. Otero with SAFE DC said that while she felt the task force uplifted gender-based violence violence reduction efforts, she doesn’t see l that same push reflected city-wide.

“A gender-based violence lens brings a crucial perspective to the table and with that, I felt very welcomed in the [task force],” Otero said. “However, I am not sure that there is enough of a cognizant conversation being had regarding the broader context of homicide prevention and gun violence.”

The Comprehensive Homicide Elimination Strategy Task Force isn’t the only NEAR Act provision whose implementation has lagged – or failed to live up to – its original mission. The law also required the Metropolitan Police Department to collect extensive records of all police stops. It took years of litigation and a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union for the department to comply with the law and release its stop data. (The most recent data available on MPD’s website currently covers stops up to June 2022 and was published at the end of January, 2023.)

It’s unclear where – if rebuilt – the task force will fall within the tapestry of city agencies, or what lawmakers or the executive branch will ask of its second iteration. In the meantime, the former members say they’re still going to be working for the same goal of reducing homicides – just in different capacities.

“I will continue to engage members of the administration and council to help further the concept of building up a ‘Peace Room’ infrastructure that has the mandate, resources and authority to coordinate a sustained, strategic approach to ending murders in D.C.,” Bowers told DCist/WAMU.