In March 2022, 16-year-old Kevin Mason stood with his friends in front of the Big Chair in Anacostia, being interviewed about his dreams for young people in the city where he lived.

“What I’m thinking about doing is really changing my community. I really want to buy the whole neighborhood,” he said. “I want [adults] to be involved with us. I want them to hear, try and build things, remodel the community center, basketball courts. Just come together and help the kids out.”

A little more than a year later, Kevin was fatally shot, along with his 15-year-old cousin Demarcos Pinckney, before those dreams could be realized. The two boys were killed after a Father’s Day celebration on Langston Place Southeast in Southeast D.C.’s Woodland neighborhood, where they lived with their families.

Kevin and Demarcos were two of many lives cut short in the deadliest year for D.C. since 1997. The city saw a 36% increase in homicides this year, reaching 271 homicides by December 28. The overwhelming majority of these murders involved guns, according to city data.

Other victims included 10-year-old Arianna Davis, shot and killed in Northeast D.C. on Mother’s Day. And 24-year-old Tyejuan Harkum, who had a young daughter and plans to finish his forensic sciences degree but was fatally shot December 6 on Naylor Road Southeast. Bernard “BJ” Hodges, a community leader who pushed for a rec center in Anacostia, was one of three people killed in a drive-by shooting on Good Hope Road in early August. Less than a month later, the city broke ground on the Anacostia rec center and dedicated the event to him.

“The city took my husband,” his wife told WUSA9. “I don’t know what to say.”

The surge in killings this year came after years of elevated and rising homicide levels in the city. In the District, homicides began rising in 2018 and have climbed every year since, save for a 10% decrease in 2022.

That makes D.C. an outlier.

Across the U.S., experts predict that year-end data for 2023 will show a seven to 10% decrease in homicides. Some cities – like Philadelphia and nearby Baltimore – have seen larger reductions in homicides, by 20% or more, a phenomenon that many experts attribute in part to recovery from the effects of the pandemic. With 2023’s surge in homicides, the District has taken a tragically different path.

“I think many people are rightfully questioning, what’s going on in D.C.?” said David Muhammad, the Executive Director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which works with cities – including D.C. – to research gun violence and devise gun violence reduction strategies.

Experts say it’s nearly impossible to definitively explain in real time why killings rise or fall, and there is no single cause or solution. But gun violence researchers, prosecutors, police, and violence interrupters have put forward a number of potential reasons why homicides have surged in the District this year, including the perception (and, in some cases, reality) that people who commit crimes won’t be held accountable in the court system; the city’s uniquely disjointed criminal justice system; and the lack of a clear and evidence-based strategy from city leadership. They also name other factors they believe have driven or exacerbated D.C.’s problems this year, like high rates of truancy in D.C. schools, the death of one of the city’s key violence reduction leaders, and the failure to properly address the way drill music and social media are fueling violence.

And always in the background, they point out, the city’s structural racism and extreme income inequality remain significant factors.

“Right next door to pockets of poverty are also pockets of tremendous wealth as well. So I think there is this frustration and despair that exists in many members of the community and many young people,” Muhammad said.

Where and why the killings occurred

The year’s trauma was a distinctly unequal burden that was heaviest for Black residents living east of the Anacostia River. Nearly 40% of the year’s homicides occurred in Ward 8, which had experienced 98 homicides as of December 28. Majority-white and wealthy Ward 3, in contrast, had seen two killings this year as of that date.

Experts say that while drug-related killings are slightly up compared to recent years past, the factors behind individual fatal shootings in the District have remained largely constant. Gun violence in the District remains, as previous research has shown, concentrated among a relatively small group of people, many of whom are part of neighborhood crews and have easy access to guns. And personal disputes still drive a significant number of D.C. shootings, experts say.

“Two people in an argument leads to gun violence,” explained Joseph Richardson, a University of Maryland professor and gun violence researcher who co-chairs D.C.’s Violence Fatality Review Committee. “[There’s a] lack of conflict mediation skills, and it escalates.”

Most often, guns are what make that escalation fatal; An MPD spokesperson said the department had seized nearly 3,000 illegal guns as of mid-December.

“I don’t know about nowhere else and what their issues are, but I know in my community, these guys get a gun faster than they can get a cheeseburger,” said Dwayne Falwell, who leads violence interruption work in wards 6 and 7 through his nonprofit Together We Rise. “And that’s a problem.”

Also at play, experts say, is D.C.’s drill music scene. For some D.C. rappers, taunting a high-profile artist or a neighborhood in a music video can get them more views on social media and potential financial success. It also leads to cycles of shootings and retaliation.

“The more disrespectful, the more buzz it gets, the more people want to see it,” said Falwell. “How crazy is that?”

Understanding these social media dynamics, Falwell said, helped his team negotiate a ceasefire between two warring neighborhoods in Ward 7 that has largely held this year. But Richardson said while some violence interruption sites are likely on top of this phenomenon, D.C. in general has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to a broader strategy to intervene with what’s happening on social media.

Theories about “accountability”

Some argue the rise in violence in D.C. – and its divergence from other major cities in this respect – comes down to a unique lack of accountability within the city’s criminal justice system.

That starts with solving the crimes — which D.C. detectives have been less successful with this year amid staffing struggles. The Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide closure rate (or the rate at which it solves or closes cases) is the lowest it’s been in 15 years, the Associated Press reported in November. It stands at around 45% — which, the outlet reported, is below the national average of 50 to 60%. (In a statement, MPD said it’s been working, amid this year’s surge in homicides, to recruit new talent and better use technology to solve more cases.)

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has also said she believes gaps in the city’s public safety “ecosystem” are allowing people who commit crimes to skirt steep enough consequences. In response, she’s been pushing the D.C. Council to pass legislation that would raise penalties for gun crimes and hold more people in jail ahead of their trials.

“You’ve heard me say repeatedly this year, we must have a policy environment that supports accountability,” Bowser said in October while unveiling one of her legislative proposals. “This perception that people have that you can commit a brazen crime and get away with it has got to stop.”

Some experts also say they feel this perception at play in D.C. neighborhoods.

“There’s a small population of people that’s really committing these crimes,”Falwell said. “When you get [a few of these people] that’s part of this population and then they make an arrest, but then they’re back on the street within 24 hours, it doesn’t help the cause, right? These young guys see this and realize, ‘man, we can do what we want to do — ain’t nothing gonna happen to us.’”

Muhammad also said this idea of a lack of consequences for crime in D.C. came up “over and over again” in interviews with police, violence interrupters, and community members.

“I want to stress that I still need to have more information and have more data, because we sometimes exaggerate that to use as an excuse,” Muhammad said. “But I just have to be true to the interviews that we conducted …and I do think it’s something that needs to be taken seriously.”

U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves, whose office prosecutes most adult crimes in the city, has said his office has been working to build bigger cases against the D.C. crews responsible for driving gun violence. But his office has also been criticized for declining to prosecute many of the gun possession arrests police bring them. Graves has said they’re working to boost those prosecution rates, which he attributes to a combination of factors, including issues with police arrests and the fact that the city’s crime lab lost its accreditation because of concerns about accuracy and attempts to cover up mistakes (the lab recently regained partial accreditation). .

Richardson, however, said he’s worried about what might happen if D.C. pursues a more aggressive police and prosecution-focused approach to illegal guns, especially as MPD’s approach to getting guns off the street has long eroded community trust. Richardson’s fatality review committee is recommending that the city create a diversion program for young adults who are arrested for illegal gun possession with no other associated crime.

“You’re not going to confiscate guns and think that that’s going to cause a dent in what’s happening,” Richardson said. “The vast majority of them aren’t killers. They’re not real shooters. They’re out here because they’re fearful or they feel like, ‘The next person has [a gun], I should have one.’”

The D.C. police union also blames the surge in violence in part on MPD’s 50-year staffing low — which it argues is caused by the slate of police reforms passed by the D.C. Council in recent years.

“People are dying … because we don’t have the right number of police officers,” union chairman Gregg Pemberton told DCist/WAMU in an October interview. “When the police reform bill was introduced in June of 2020, we put out a press release saying look, this is all a bad idea….and now here we are three-and-a-half years later and all those things have come to fruition.”

Bowser has heeded the union’s calls, and is pushing the D.C. Council to roll back some police reforms they passed in recent years – a move that advocates for the reforms argue has no clear nexus to violence prevention.

“Reducing crime and violence is a team sport”

But beyond a perceived lack of “accountability” in the criminal justice system, gun violence researchers say D.C. faces other big problems that might be contributing to rising homicides: A disjointed criminal justice system and the lack of a cohesive violence reduction plan.

“We still have, at the core, a significant challenge with coordination [in D.C.],” said Muhammad, who helped lead a team in Oakland that saw a 50% reduction in shootings and homicides over a five-year period from 2012 to 2017. “D.C. is a city that actually has a tremendous amount of resource that is available – but not rightly focused on the communities, the people, the groups that need it, who are most vulnerable.”

The city is in part hindered by the fact that so much of its criminal justice system is federally controlled, others add. Adults accused of crimes are arrested by D.C. police, but then prosecuted by the office of the federally-appointed U.S. Attorney for D.C. Judges in D.C. Superior Court are nominated by President Biden and then confirmed by Congress, which has been slow to fill judicial vacancies. And federal agencies are often responsible for the supervision of people accused of crimes or on probation.

In recent testimony before Congress, gun violence researcher Thomas Abt said D.C.’s departure from the national trend — where cities saw gun violence rise at the start of the pandemic and then start falling this year – could be because the city’s governing structure is so unique.

“There is no other jurisdiction in the nation that is jointly administered in this way,” Abt testified. “If there’s one thing I know after more than 25 years in this field, it’s this: reducing crime and violence is a team sport. If individual players do not play well together, the team will not succeed.”

Violence reduction experts say there is a collaboration problem within D.C. government, as well. For example, Richardson argues, the city has hundreds of violence interrupters and outreach workers in hospital-based violence intervention programs, the Office of the Attorney General’s Cure the Streets program, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, and elsewhere – but the programs aren’t united by one coordinated strategy. A separate violence prevention initiative, Building Blocks DC, changed form after its initial launch.

“There hasn’t been a strategic plan that the city government has committed themselves to see through until the end,” Richardson said. “I think the mayor likes all of these really shiny new things and it attracts the attention of the media and the public like, ‘We’re really doing something’ … but we’re not coordinated at all.”

Instead, he and others note, the Bowser administration has let violence reduction initiatives fall apart without seeing them through.

The city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council actually commissioned Muhammad to develop a citywide gun violence reduction strategy, and Muhammad said he’s heard “a lot of buy-in and support” within government for his plan. But, he added, he hasn’t seen quality implementation. In particular, Muhammad said, D.C. is still failing to reach many of the people at high risk of being a shooter or a victim with enough intensity and frequency — a key tenet of the plan.

One example of this lack of follow-through is the “People of Promise” program – an initiative Bowser announced in 2022 to much fanfare. The program was tasked with pairing 200 residents whom Muhammad’s team identified as “high risk” with job training, subsidized employment, and behavioral health care. But Richardson said “it never really took flight,” and Muhammad said that as of his last update, the program wasn’t focused on the people it said it would help.

“I’m not entirely sure what the current effort is,” Muhammad said. “I know when I had an opportunity to meet with that team several months ago, they had not yet been structured to focus specifically on folks at highest risk. They were taking general community referrals, with people who need support, don’t get me wrong. But what we need is a team in D.C. whose sole focus is on this group of folks that are the highest risk.”

During a D.C. Council roundtable in October, Bowser administration officials testified that the People of Promise program is still operating, but were not able to immediately answer councilmembers’ questions about exactly how many people it had reached.

Spokespeople for Bowser and her Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah did not directly answer questions about the “People of Promise” program for this story, and did not directly respond to criticisms about coordination and strategy. Appiah said in an emailed statement that the administration had been responsive to calls from school leaders, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, and residents for “solutions to fill the gaps in our public safety and justice ecosystem” and had introduced legislation to address their concerns.

“This year, Mayor Bowser proposed the Safer Stronger Amendment Act and Addressing Crime Trends Now Act to rebalance our public safety and justice ecosystem,” Appiah told DCist/WAMU. “In 2024, we are focused on additional policies, policing strategies, and strategic partnerships needed to reduce crime and increase safety in all eight Wards.”

Efforts to coordinate violence reduction efforts across D.C. government also took a hit in the spring when Linda Harllee Harper, the director of both the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, died after an illness. Multiple violence interrupters, researchers, and advocates noted that the tragedy left a vacuum in leadership; Bowser has not nominated a permanent replacement for Harllee Harper, who was deeply respected both inside D.C. government and among violence intervention leaders outside government.

Meanwhile, researchers argue that as D.C. has failed to take a truly unified approach, nearby Baltimore has provided a counterexample; city leadership there has championed a clear violence reduction strategy. (D.C. Council chairman Phil Mendelson recently introduced legislation that would push Bowser to implement such a strategy). One piece of the strategy — commonly referred to as “focused deterrence” — involves offering the people at highest risk of committing violence a slate of services, and then focusing law enforcement on those who don’t cooperate and continue with serious criminal activity. Reporting in the Baltimore Banner found the focused deterrence strategy has helped bring about  reductions in homicides, though it has also faced some hurdles as it has expanded. Prosecutors also say they believe their approach to gun possession cases has also helped reduce violence in Baltimore, and recent research indicates that non-police violence intervention programs in Baltimore have been effective, too (Richardson and research partner Daniel Webster also recently launched an evaluation of their effectiveness in D.C.).

Richardson said it’s worth noting that Baltimore remained committed to its strategy even when it wasn’t showing immediate success.

“Whatever people choose to say about the state of Baltimore … they’ve managed to stick with a model and try to see the model [through] until it’s actually produced some results,” Richardson said.

Meanwhile, in D.C., elected officials are trying to offer reassurance to residents who question whether they’re meeting the moment with enough urgency.

“I don’t think we’ve seen such a flurry of public safety focused bills … in the seven years that I’ve been on the Council,” said At-Large Councilmember Robert White. “There’s been so much loss in the city. Both human loss … but also the loss of security. People look over their shoulders when they’re at the gas station. They think twice about going out at night. Doors close early so employees don’t have to leave in the dark. That is a magnificent shift from where we were not too long ago.”

And the killings have continued through the holiday season. Days before Christmas, a mass shooting killed two people and injured two others outside a corner store in Southwest. Police identified the people who died as 35-year-old Patricia Harris and 24-year-old Tyrone Jacobs, both Southwest D.C. residents.