Concern grows over crime in D.C.'s Chinatown neighborhood
One person complained of drug deals at the base of H Street’s signature Friendship Arch in Chinatown. Another asserted commuters at the Gallery Place Metro station sometimes have to push past suspected dealers at the top of the escalators.
Shootings. Thefts. Robberies. Then people police arrest are spotted back on the streets in the area full of bars and businesses “committing these same crimes over and over again,” the chairman of the neighborhood’s advisory commission said.
Residents, shopkeepers and an executive from Monumental Sports & Entertainment — which owns Capital One Arena and its two principal tenants, the Washington Capitals and Wizards — confronted police, prosecutors and other officials at a packed community meeting Thursday to express frustration over what they characterized as the deterioration of the core of the city’s downtown.
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Complaints about safety have been simmering in the neighborhood for months, and the U.S. attorney for D.C. recently launched a pilot initiative to prosecute more misdemeanor cases and get court orders to bar those charged with crimes from returning to the area.
“Our revolving door and lack of prosecution has had a negative effect on the community,” said Crispus Gordon III, director of government relations and community affairs for Monumental Sports & Entertainment.
In June, company representatives met with the chairman of the D.C. Council to discuss the city funding upgrades to the 20,000-seat arena, and they have separately raised the idea of moving the professional basketball and hockey teams to Northern Virginia, officials told The Washington Post at the time.
Gordon did not address those discussions on Thursday, and he stressed that “we love this neighborhood.” But he also described “open-air drug transactions” and said “issues surrounding public safety are concerns of employees and guests.” He asserted an employee was recently assaulted “in broad daylight,” and the person arrested was “released shortly thereafter.”
About 100 people packed the meeting at the downtown Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. It was organized by council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who chairs the public safety committee, and residents were given an opportunity to question D.C.’s new police chief, Pamela A. Smith; the U.S. attorney for D.C., Matthew M. Graves; and other officials.
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Chinatown is not the only neighborhood in D.C. where residents are upset over crime. The city as a whole has seen surges in homicides, robberies and carjackings, and violent crime is up 37 percent this year over the same time period in 2022. Violent crime in the Chinatown area is up 36 percent this year, according to D.C. police.
Those at the meeting said the slow return of workers to D.C. offices after pandemic closures has altered Chinatown’s footprint, leaving businesses with fewer patrons. They said they feared the rise in crime and the presence of people who seemed to be suffering mental health crises on city streets could further fuel economic decline.
“Absent immediate action by the District to address this rise in crime,” Pinto said, “I worry that this issue may get worse, and downtown and Chinatown, the economic engine of our city, will see more and more vacant residential units and more boarded up storefronts, which will allow the vicious cycle of violent crime to perpetuate.”
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Michael D. Shankle, who chairs the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Chinatown, said the neighborhood has experienced an increase in violence over the past two years, “and I think we have seen a lack of repercussions of those committing these crimes.”
“We need solutions now,” he said. “It has been a slippery slope in which issues have not been addressed by our government leaders and has resulted in where we are today.”
An assistant D.C. police chief said that police had made several arrests, most for drug possession, during a recent enforcement operation in Chinatown. Some in the audience shouted in response, “How many were prosecuted?”
Graves, whose office has faced criticism for declining to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested by police officers last year in cases that would have been tried in D.C. Superior Court, said he was implementing changes to bring more cases successfully.
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In May, he said, the mayor helped ink a new contract with a private lab that now allows authorities to test drugs in misdemeanor cases. Such testing had been limited to only the most serious felony drug cases after the city’s crime lab lost its accreditation, and the police had to rely on the already-taxed federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Graves said.
In addition, Graves said he launched a pilot program in June to pursue more low-level, misdemeanor cases stemming from arrests made in and around Chinatown’s Gallery Place Metro station by “turning off any discretion whatsoever” that prosecutors might have exercised previously, as long as there is a viable case.
A spokeswoman for Graves said that the area around the Metro station was chosen because of the number of complaints from residents, and that the cases are largely related to drugs and most of the people arrested don’t live in the community. That makes it easier to get orders to keep them away.
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Graves said that 42 people were arrested in and around that station in June, and that prosecutors moved forward in nearly three-quarters of the 29 misdemeanor cases and 12 of the 13 felony cases. Most defendants are still being released pending trial, but Graves said prosecutors are now seeking stay-away orders prohibiting them from returning to the area around Gallery Place pending the conclusion of their cases.
“It’s a new creative strategy for dealing with the problems we’re seeing in that neighborhood,” Graves said in an interview after Thursday’s hearing, noting the barring notices provide immediate consequences while cases are pending. He said that before, residents would see people arrested right back in the area, “fueling the perception that nothing is being done.”
At the meeting, Graves pointed to a larger issue that has been the subject of much debate in D.C. and elsewhere: whether some recent criminal justice changes — particularly those that mandate alternatives to arrest and prosecution — have gone too far.
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“No one wants to lock people up,” Graves told residents. “But there are consequences when we say, ‘Okay, we’re taking incarceration off the table.’” Supporters of such measures, though, have noted that punishment does not solve some of the root causes of crime.
Pinto recently sponsored emergency legislation, overwhelmingly passed by the council, that makes it easier for judges to detain people charged with violent offenses before trial and broadens the types of crimes for which juveniles would face a presumption of pretrial detention.
On Thursday, Smith, D.C.’s police chief, credited that new law with authorities detaining 21 of 43 juveniles arrested across the city in a recent week on charges of carjacking and robberies. Had it not been for the new law, Smith told residents, “those young people would have been on the street.”
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