There were 16 homicides in D.C. during the first week of August, a brutal start to the month that brought the total number of people murdered in the city this year to 161 – a 28% increase over this time last year.

Killings in the District, most of them committed with guns, remain at levels not seen in two decades. Two shootings just last weekend, one in Adams Morgan and another on Good Hope Road in Southeast, resulted in six people dead.

The unrelenting summer violence has alarmed and traumatized residents, particularly in the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River where the shootings have disproportionately occurred. Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White called on Monday for extreme measures, including potentially asking for the National Guard to assist D.C. police.

“I am tired of burying our children,” White – whose ward includes the location of the shooting that killed three people Saturday on Good Hope Road – wrote in a press release late Monday. “We are too comfortable with the state of our city. We must take action to gain control and protect our residents.”

White’s call for National Guard intervention echoes that of a previous D.C. Mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, who asked the president for National Guard assistance (and was rejected) at a time when the city was seeing more than 400 murders a year.

The pleas for military reinforcement also come as city leaders are increasingly focused on carceral punishment for people who commit crimes.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser spent the spring pushing a package of crime legislation that would increase penalties for certain gun crimes, tilt the law more heavily in favor of pretrial detention for both children and adults, and increase police and prosecutors’ ability to get GPS evidence from ankle monitors, among several other provisions; In the end, the council passed a narrower emergency version of Bowser’s bill by a vote of 12 to 1.

Bowser and other members of her administration, like Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah, have emphasized that the bill does not mean her administration wants a return to “the bygone era of tough on crime rhetoric and practices of mass incarceration.” But they have argued in some cases that criminal justice reforms of recent years have gone too far.

“When you do reform…it’s important to then always evaluate it,” Appiah said in an interview earlier this summer. “We need to be willing as reformers to make the type of pivots and adaptations that will help us to keep young people safe.”

The Bowser administration funds violence interrupters through its Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, but the mayor has rarely emphasized their work in her numerous recent press conferences on her plans to reduce crime. She also has not placed much emphasis on the strategic plan for gun violence reduction the city commissioned and published last year; the plan’s recommendations ranged from ways to increase police’s homicide clearance rate to strategies for offering life coaching, safe housing, and trauma support for the D.C. residents at highest risk of shooting someone or being shot.

Other leaders have shared Bowser’s focus on pretrial detention and penalties: This year, leadership of the council’s judiciary and public safety committee transferred from Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen to Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto. She quickly held a hearing on Bowser’s bill and advocated for the passage of an emergency bill that included some of its proposals, along with some of Pinto’s own proposals from a bill drafted with the U.S. Attorney for D.C.

At the same time, some lawmakers – including Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, the lone vote against the emergency crime bill — have argued that the legislation doesn’t address a number of glaring issues, including failures at the city’s crime lab which have hampered prosecutors’ ability to hold gun offenders accountable, forcing them to outsource DNA and ballistics testing to private labs. And amid another violent summer, advocates working in communities most traumatized by gun violence have questioned whether Bowser’s administration is committed to crime prevention work that lies outside of the criminal justice system, including helping people change their lives and circumstances before they get arrested or shot.

Residents remain divided on solutions to violence, with many who testified at a hearing on Bowser’s crime bill calling for more aggressive prosecution of people who commit crimes and many others calling for violence prevention strategies that don’t involve the traditional criminal justice system. In some cases, residents are asking for all of the above: increased investment in the residents of D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, along with a more concerted focus on enforcement. But no matter their opinions on solutions, the violence, which D.C. residents experience in their neighborhoods and see daily on TV news, has residents exasperated.

“We live in a very wicked time,” said Northeast D.C. resident Kenny Jones at a community event in Rosedale last week. Jones told DCist/WAMU he has three sons – ages 14, 12, and 8 – “so you can imagine the fear that I have.”

Gloria, another Northeast D.C. resident who declined to provide her last name, said she felt like when she was growing up in D.C., “people feared God, and people feared the police.”

But now, she said, “they just don’t care.”

As the violence has continued this summer, supporters of the council’s emergency crime legislation say they believe it will help.

Last week, speaking at a National Night Out event in Northeast D.C., Ward 2 Councilmember and public safety committee chair Brooke Pinto said she was “confident that we are going to see some major improvements in public safety in our city this summer, and this year.”

At the same event, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves – the city’s top prosecutor for adult crimes – said if the law forced judges to detain more people accused of crimes ahead of their trials, he believes some of the violence in the city could improve.

“I think we are pretty comfortable, given some of the recidivism we’re seeing, particularly with the violent crime and the gun offenders, that if we can keep some of these people incarcerated for the period of time between their arrest and trial, that that will help break up the cycle,” Graves said in an interview.

Others, however, are more skeptical.

Ryane Nickens, the founder and president of the TraRon Center, which works with children and families affected by gun violence, said she wants to see city leadership coalesce around a clear violence reduction plan instead of piecemeal legislation altering penalties and pretrial detention statutes.

“We need to be honest with ourselves,” said Nickens, who also co-leads the Washington Interfaith Network’s public safety-focused committee. “There is no magic bullet to this. There is no immediate, ‘you do this, and then gun violence is over tomorrow or next week.’ This is a four or five decade issue of communal gun violence in this city.”

And Nickens doesn’t think increased police presence, which new acting D.C. police chief Pamela Smith has promised in D.C.’s high crime neighborhoods, will solve the city’s problems.

“The kids who come to the TraRon Center live almost across the street from the Seventh District [police station]. Did that stop anything?” she asked. “Did it stop two young people from being killed this summer? Nope. It did not stop one of our kids from being grazed by a bullet. It has not stopped anything…I am not anti-police, but I am pro solutions and they are not the beginning and the end of solutions around public safety.”

In her work, Nickens said, she’s seen significant gaps in city services for violence prevention. Families sometimes feel like the city only has services to offer after a child has already been shot or arrested — but “there is no help for a parent who sees their child going in the wrong direction and wants help. There is no help in this city for that kind of a parent,” she said.

When she announced her public safety-focused legislation in the spring, Bowser also charged some of her deputy mayors with submitting a plan for a “whole-of-government approach” to crime reduction and violence prevention. They included an order for the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services to submit a plan to the city administrator to establish “a hotline for parents and guardians concerned about an imminent threat to their child from gun violence and a respite program for youth at risk of involvement in the juvenile justice system.”

In the absence of more government support, Nickens said she and other advocates who work with victims of gun violence – or with people imminently at risk of becoming a victim – are getting burnt out as they struggle to find families emergency housing or offer support to residents who fear for their lives.

“It is sleepless nights,” Nickens said. “It is going back and forth to the doctor or the emergency room because my blood pressure has spiked and my nose won’t stop bleeding. It wears on your body to do the work that a damn city should be doing for its people.”

This story has been updated to clarify that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s order for her deputy mayors to submit crime reduction plans specifies those plans should be submitted to the city administrator. This story has also been updated to remove a reference to an incorrectly attributed quote in another news outlet.