Mayor Muriel Bowser wants to make it easier to detain people accused of crimes, increase penalties for gun possession, and heighten barriers for people convicted of serious crimes to gain early release from prison.

The proposals are part of a broader package of public safety-focused legislation the mayor introduced Monday at a press conference on H Street Northeast, where police say a string of break-ins have affected local businesses. Bowser said she hopes the D.C. Council will pass the legislation into law this summer.

“We’re specifically focused on places in the law where we think there are gaps,” Bowser said Monday. “The safety of our community is my top priority as mayor… I recognize my responsibility to make this system work.”

Bowser’s bill, which she described as “common sense legislation,” articulates her vision for a way forward on the city’s public safety challenges. Broadly, it would do the following:

• Increase penalties for crimes that target certain populations, including residents with physical and mental impairments, transit and for-hire vehicle workers, transit passengers, and people at rec centers
• Increase penalties for illegal gun possession
• Make strangulation a felony assault (It’s a change that has been proposed in three different bills since 2015, but has never become law; some advocates have argued for it because research shows strangulation is a common early warning sign of a future domestic violence-related homicide.)
• Make it easier for judges to deny the petitions of people seeking reduced sentences after 15 years in prison
• Give judges more discretion to have children accused of crimes detained ahead of trial
• Increase the amount of reimbursement residents can get for installing private security cameras outside their homes
• Require the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council to release more data on the city’s criminal justice system and juvenile justice system.

“We proudly believe in second chances, but we also believe in accountability,” Bowser said, adding that some of the provisions on pretrial release and early release were included “to ensure that the experiences of victims and the discretion of the courts is given proper consideration.”

The bill Bowser announced Monday is, in many ways, her rebuttal to a council that she has painted as too lenient on crime. As homicides and carjackings have increased in recent years, debates about the proper response to that crime have intensified. While some members of the council have championed more progressive criminal justice reforms, including early release for people who have served significant amounts of prison time, Bowser has distanced herself from those reforms and opted for an approach that champions tougher sentences. The mayor, for example, clashed with the council earlier this year over proposed revisions to the city’s criminal code, arguing that D.C. needs to maintain stiffer sentences for gun-related crimes.

But Bowser is also bringing the legislation to an iteration of the council she believes might be more receptive to her ideas; during Monday’s press conference, she said that changes in council leadership made her feel it was a good time to bring her bill forward. She was likely referring to Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who tends to be more aligned with Bowser on criminal justice issues and recently assumed leadership of the body’s judiciary committee. (Last week on WAMU 88.5’s “The Politics Hour” she said she was open to considering changes to pretrial release.)

D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee said he’s glad to see Bowser’s bill. Throughout his tenure as police chief, he has repeatedly decried a lack of accountability in the courts for people accused of crimes.

“Especially as I look at the end of my career here with the Metropolitan Police Department, I’m happy to hear that we are really moving forward with respect to increasing accountability,” said Contee, who will leave his role for a job at the FBI in June. “It is unacceptable to me that the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.”

The announcement comes days after Bowser held a public safety summit with local and federal law enforcement, where she hinted at the coming legislation. Along with the bill, Bowser has charged each of her deputy mayors with submitting a plan for a “whole-of-government approach” to crime reduction. Those plans are due in 45 days.

While homicides remain well below what the city endured in the ‘90s, they remain at levels D.C. has not seen in two decades. According to D.C. police, 80 people have been murdered in the District this year – a 7% increase over last year. Overall, violent crime is up 13%. Property crimes, particularly car thefts, are also up significantly this year, according to police data.

In his remarks on the legislation at a press conference Monday, Contee noted two instances of gun violence from the last two days, both injuring children: A 10-year-old girl who was shot in Northeast D.C. on Sunday, and a 12-year-old girl hit in the leg by a stray bullet early Monday morning in Southeast.

“It is unacceptable to me that a 10-year-old little girl riding home with her mom, dad, and two siblings last night got caught in the middle of a barrage of gunfire, on Mother’s Day, and is now in the hospital fighting for her life,” Contee said. “It is unacceptable to me that a bullet from someone firing shots outside goes through the window… of a 12-year-old sleeping in her bed, and strikes her in the leg.”

One of the provisions in Bowser’s bill targets D.C.’s Second Look Amendment Act, which offers people convicted of crimes before their 25th birthday a chance to petition a judge for early release after they’ve served 15 years of their sentence. It alters the language in the D.C. code to expand the range of factors a judge can consider when determining whether someone’s sentence should be reduced. Currently, judges have to consider a person’s dangerousness to others in the community, as well as whether “the interests of justice warrant a sentence modification,” along with a host of other factors, including how much they deem the person to be rehabilitated. Bowser’s proposal expands what the court may consider — adding factors like the person’s level of remorse and the nature of the crime they’re in prison for.

Destiny Fulwood-Singh, co-executive director and attorney at the Second Look Project — which represents D.C. Code offenders seeking early release under the Second Look Amendment Act — questioned whether the changes to the law will actually improve public safety. She said that people released under the law reoffend at lower rates than the general population. And she argued that asking judges to consider the nature of a crime — the one thing these petitioners cannot alter no matter how much they commit to change – goes against the science on youth brain development.

“I think this is more about an appearance of safety – an easy fix so people feel comforted, instead of really looking at this population and the statistics that come out of this population,” Fulwood-Singh told DCist/WAMU. Fulwood-Singh said her clients — who are often as old as 40 or 50 by the time they petition for resentencing — are completely different people than they were when they were convicted. Ignoring that reality, she argues, is out of line with neuroscience and Supreme Court precedent, which argues that juvenile offenders are less morally culpable for crimes than adults. “[The Second Look Amendment Act] is about rehabilitation. [It’s] about change. It’s based on neuroscience and not feelings.”

Another provision tackles the portion of D.C. law that tells judges when to detain children as they await trial. The existing law, which was amended in 2016 through a slate of juvenile justice reforms passed by the council, says judges should generally detain young people for serious crimes like gun possession, and violent or dangerous crimes involving real or imitation guns (unless, the law states, there is compelling evidence in favor of not detaining them). But Bowser’s changes would expand the universe of crimes where judges should be assumed to rule in favor of detention, broadening it to include other offenses like robbery and attempted robbery. It would also allow judges to detain a child for that child’s own protection.

According to Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director at Georgetown University’s juvenile justice clinic and initiative, this could mean in practice that judges could detain young people pretrial for crimes as minor as “a cell phone snatch in the Metro, taking or trying to take a dollar from a classmate at school, or taking a boyfriend or girlfriend’s cell phone from them because you want to look through the text messages” — all robbery cases he has seen as a youth defender.

Bowser’s changes essentially bring the city’s pretrial juvenile detention policy back to where it was before 2016. But Ferrer argues this would not help reduce juvenile crime, because youth arrests were actually 50% higher in 2016 than they are now. As D.C. started locking up fewer kids ahead of their trials, Ferrer argues, youth arrests actually fell — until the pandemic, when certain categories of juvenile crime went up nationwide.

“We tried a very similar approach to detention prior to 2016, and the council wisely made changes because that approach was ineffective, harmful, and counterproductive,” Ferrer said. “The reality is that we have failed our children on a number of levels coming out of the pandemic, and now, some of us are seeking to punish our children for our collective failures as adults.”

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is expected to introduce the legislation on Bowser’s behalf on Tuesday, after the body conducts its first of two votes on next year’s budget (it is customary for the chairperson of the council to introduce legislation at the request of the executive).

“Part of the issue [Bowser is] concerned about is pretrial release. It’s an important aspect of public safety when police have cause to arrest somebody,” Mendelson told DCist/WAMU on Monday, adding that he hadn’t spoken to the mayor’s office about the bill in advance of its release. “We need to take seriously whether that person is a threat to the community or risk of flight that they should be held. I welcome the opportunity to look at that.”

According to D.C.’s pretrial services agency, which supervises people ahead of their trial, 92% of people arrested in D.C. last fiscal year were not rearrested while out awaiting trial — and only 1% of people were rearrested for crimes categorized as violent. When asked to provide data on the number of people rearrested for violent offenses while released pending trial, Bowser officials did not answer but argued that even one violent rearrest is too many, and even small numbers of rearrests affect community perceptions of safety.

On Monday, Bowser told reporters she expected pushback from some members of the council on her bill. She has clashed with more progressive members of the body a number of times on criminal justice issues, including when she vehemently opposed a council decision to phase police out of schools, for example.

Tensions between Bowser and the council were also on full display during recent debates over a wholesale revision to the city’s criminal code. The council approved a sweeping rewrite of the code, which proponents argued made overdue and common-sense changes to the city’s criminal laws. But critics of the changes, including Bowser, opposed the rewrite because it reduced several maximum sentences; Bowser, for her part, said the reductions sent the wrong message at a time when gun-related crime is up in the District. In the end, the debate spilled over into the halls of Congress, where Republicans spearheaded a charge to block the changes, and Democrats – including President Joe Biden — got on board, too.

On her latest bill, Bowser said Monday that she hopes D.C. lawmakers will give it due – and speedy – consideration. She is pushing for the council to pass the bill before its summer recess — which means the body would have to debate the legislation and hold two votes on it before mid-July.

“We need them to not sit on it,” Bowser said. “We need to have a public hearing.”

Asked Monday about passing the bill before recess, Mendelson told DCist/WAMU “that would be difficult.”

“These are complicated issues,” said Mendelson. “There ought to be the chance for a public hearing and for us to get it right.”

This story was updated with comment from Eduardo Ferrer.