A new D.C. Council bill would merge the District’s two violence prevention programs and house them under one consolidated agency. The legislation, which At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie will introduce, seeks to address a longstanding challenge for violence prevention efforts within the D.C. government: a lack of coordination.

The bill, dubbed the “Safe Neighborhoods Amendment Act,” would also get rid of the requirement that applicants to the Metropolitan Police Department have 60 college credits, instead permitting people with a high school degree or GED to apply to become D.C. police officers. And it would expand a housing assistance program for police officers and firefighters.

McDuffie’s bill is the latest in a slew of public safety-focused bills being considered by the D.C. Council. In the coming weeks, the body is also expected to pass a large omnibus package of public safety measures called “Secure DC,” which includes about 100 provisions and would enact an array of changes to D.C.’s criminal justice system, including upping penalties for certain gun possession offenses, allowing police to create “drug free zones,” and amending or loosening some police reforms the council passed in recent years. While homicides and assaults with a deadly weapon are down so far in 2024, they surged in 2023, which saw more homicides than any year since 1997.

Consolidating violence prevention programs

D.C. has multiple programs that employ violence interrupters and credible messengers to engage with members of the neighborhood crews driving much of D.C.’s gun violence. The two most prominent of these programs are housed separately: One falls under D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE), and a separate program called “Cure the Streets” is housed under the Office of the Attorney General. Both of these programs give out contracts to community-based nonprofits, who in turn set up teams in some of the D.C. neighborhoods with the highest rates of gun violence.

The programs are undergoing a formal evaluation by academics, but preliminary data from 2023 showed that gun violence in Cure the Streets target areas dropped overall between 2022 and 2023, while gun violence in the ONSE target areas held about steady. A previous analysis by the D.C. Auditor found that Cure the Streets sites tended to be more robustly staffed than ONSE sites.

While some sites have shown promise successfully negotiating ceasefires between warring neighborhood crews, the two programs have frequently struggled to collaborate, according to McDuffie. For example, he says, he has heard from violence intervention workers that often, workers for the Attorney General’s Cure the Streets program struggle to connect participants with resources housed under ONSE.

“I think there is the potential that looms over the work of the Attorney General that the people who are in the trenches performing this work put their credibility at risk by connecting with these individuals and not having adequate resources to hand them off to after,” McDuffie told DCist/WAMU.

A spokesperson for Bowser declined to comment on the bill and on McDuffie’s claims that ONSE resources are not always available to Cure the Streets participants.

More broadly, experts who have analyzed D.C.’s violence intervention landscape say that D.C.’s government has struggled to coordinate violence prevention resources and execute a clear, identifiable strategy.

“We still have, at the core, a significant challenge with coordination [in D.C.],” David 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, told DCist/WAMU last year. “D.C. is a city that actually has a tremendous amount of resource[s] … but [they’re] not rightly focused on the communities, the people, the groups that need it, who are most vulnerable.”

In response to these critiques about coordination, discussions about merging ONSE and Cure the Streets have accelerated in recent months. After she held a roundtable on violence intervention programs in the fall, Ward 2 Councilmember and Judiciary committee chair Brooke Pinto said one of her takeaways was that the city “need[s] to merge the violence interruption programs housed in the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and the Office of the Attorney General.”

McDuffie’s bill would do just that, by creating a new, independent government agency and placing the violence interruption programs under it. The new agency, called the “Office of Neighborhood Engagement and Safety Agency,” would be an umbrella agency that would house two different offices and also administer the “Cure the Streets” program.

The first office would be called the Office of Violence Prevention and Health Equity. McDuffie championed a law called the NEAR Act that created this office, but he says the Bowser administration didn’t open it as intended. The second office under the umbrella agency would be called the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (this office already exists).

Under McDuffie’s bill, both the umbrella agency and the two offices under it would be led by one director, appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the D.C. Council. The umbrella agency would also have its own special fund attached to it, which could contain money allocated from the city’s budget, as well as grants and donations from private entities (McDuffie believes the city hasn’t utilized philanthropy enough to fund violence prevention).

Police recruitment

McDuffie’s bill would require the Deputy Mayor for Public and Safety Justice to prepare a report on best practices for police recruitment.

Notably, it would also relax the education requirements for applicants to MPD. Currently, police officers in D.C. are required to have completed at least 60 hours of post-secondary education, served in the Armed Forces for at least two years on active duty, or served at least three years in full-duty status in another police department. McDuffie’s bill would strike the post-secondary education requirement and replace it with a requirement to have completed high school or obtained a GED.

It would also add a provision to D.C. law to stipulate that applicants can’t be deemed ineligible for MPD based on their credit scores.

A study of MPD’s culture by the Police Executive Research Forum said employees of MPD have voiced concern that the college credit requirement is unnecessarily limiting recruiting options and forcing the department to turn away potentially good officers. But the policing experts at PERF ultimately recommended against doing away with the requirement.

“While it is true that some departments nationwide have relaxed their higher education requirements amidst severe staffing shortages, PERF is reluctant to endorse this action. Research has shown that college-educated police officers are less likely to use force and they generate fewer complaints than officers without college degrees,” the PERF report said. “College-educated police officers are also believed to possess greater problem solving and creative thinking skills, have better community relations skills, and are more prepared to assume formal leadership roles.”

PERF instead suggested that if MPD wants to get rid of the secondary education requirement, it should require employees to complete the college credits during their first four years on the job.

McDuffie, however, argues that relaxing the education requirement “would allow the force to get back up to the numbers that the chief has said is more adequate to perform the quality community policing that I know MPD wants to engage in, that residents deserve.”

Home loan assistance 

McDuffie’s bill also boosts D.C.’s hiring incentives for first responders by expanding a home loan assistance program. Under his bill, D.C. would provide assistance in the form of a deferred interest-free loan for up to 20% of a down payment or up to $202,000 for first responders who purchase homes in the city, provided they serve D.C. for at least 15 years. For the first responder’s first ten years of service, the loan would be forgiven at a rate of 5% for each year; after that, it would be forgiven at a rate of 10% a year for the final five years of their service obligation to the city.

“I frequently talk to firefighters and other first responders who say it’s too darn expensive to live in Washington D.C.,” says McDuffie. “We want to change that.”