Poll finds growing public concern over safety in D.C. despite drop in crime

Publish date: 2024-07-26

D.C. residents are more worried about public safety now than they were a year ago despite a significant drop in violent crime in early 2024 and a raft of popular local legislation aimed at curtailing some of the city’s more liberal public safety policies, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

Sixty-five percent of Washingtonians say crime is an “extremely serious” or a “very serious” problem in the District, up from 56 percent in a 2023 Washington Post-Schar School poll. While 70 percent of D.C. residents feel at least “somewhat” safe from crime in their neighborhoods, that is down from 77 percent last year. That includes 23 percent who feel “very safe,” down slightly from 29 percent last year.

The drop in the perception of safety in the nation’s capital is stark compared with attitudes in D.C.’s suburbs, where residents’ levels of concern are largely unchanged from last year. Fewer than 3 in 10 residents in suburban Maryland and 15 percent of those in Northern Virginia say crime is an extremely serious or a very serious problem in their areas, almost identical to a poll last spring. In Maryland, 44 percent of residents reported feeling “very safe” in their neighborhoods; among Northern Virginians, the figure is 64 percent.

The District’s 274 homicides in 2023 marked its deadliest year since 1997. The violence precipitated a political crisis as local leaders came under intense oversight from Republican members of Congress, who portrayed D.C. officials as unequipped to handle public safety.

So far this year, violent crime in D.C. has dropped by 26 percent, which includes a 32 percent decrease in carjackings and a 21 percent decline in homicides, according to police data.

This year’s Post-Schar School poll, which randomly sampled 1,683 Washington-area residents, including 655 in D.C., finds that 42 percent of city residents say that they or a close friend or relative have been a victim of a violent crime in the past five years. Age appears to be the biggest factor, with 59 percent of D.C. residents under 40 saying they or someone they know has been victimized, compared with 36 percent of people ages 40 to 64 and 18 percent of D.C. residents older than that.

One in 10 D.C. residents say they have personally been a victim of crime in D.C. in the past five years, similar to findings from a Post poll conducted in 1993, during the crack epidemic, a period when annual homicide totals in the District topped 400 and the city was known as America’s murder capital.

“I will not walk alone after dark in my neighborhood,” said Grace Moe, 79, who has lived in the Forest Hills neighborhood of upper Northwest Washington for 40 years. “I want to see arrests and convictions of criminals.”

Forest Hills is an affluent enclave of Washington that is mostly insulated from violence, but the area has seen an uptick in crime in recent years, D.C. police data shows.

Moe and other poll respondents interviewed by The Post said their worries about crime were grounded in violent incidents that happened near their residences or to their friends. They also cited viral videos of daylight robberies and CVS products locked behind glass to explain their growing fears in the District.

As the number of killings climbed last year, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), among other officials, pushed for more accountability for adults and juveniles who shot people or stole vehicles at gunpoint, embracing the idea that a lack of consequences contributed to an increase in bloodshed.

This spring, the D.C. Council passed legislation that enhanced punishment or pretrial detention for certain crimes while also loosening some restrictions on police officers. It also allowed police to declare “drug-free zones,” a measure that has drawn scrutiny for its similarity to a 1990s approach to cracking down on open-air drug markets that drew sharp criticism from civil libertarians.

The poll shows D.C. residents to be generally supportive of prison sentences as a crime-fighting tool, with about 8 in 10 saying that people who are charged with violent crimes in the city should be mostly or always held in jail until their trials. This includes 28 percent who say such defendants should “always” be held in jail.

In addition, about 7 in 10 D.C. residents support significantly increasing the number of video cameras in public places in the city so that police can use the footage when investigating crimes, seeking harsher punishments for teens who commit violent crimes and increasing enforcement of fare evasion in the Metrorail system.

Support is narrower for allowing police to create temporary drug-free zones, in which officers can search people suspected of illegal drug activity: 51 percent support this, while 44 percent oppose it.

Phillip Williams, 20, who lives in Southeast Washington, said he feels the “city is being lazy when it comes to crime.” In April last year, he said, he was working as a delivery driver near the Capitol Riverfront area of Southeast when four teenagers attempted to steal his scooter. Williams said he found and confronted the teens in a nearby alley, and one chucked a rock at his head.

Since then, Williams said, he has carried pepper spray and placed tracking devices in all of his vehicles. When he turns 21, he said, he plans to buy a firearm for self-defense.

“I don’t like going out much anymore,” he said.

Theft and carjacking are the biggest concerns for Washington-area residents overall, with 42 percent saying they are at least somewhat worried about being a victim of theft in a public place and 38 percent concerned about carjacking at least “somewhat.” Roughly half of D.C. and Maryland residents say they worry about both types of crime, while in Northern Virginia, 32 percent worry about theft and 26 percent about carjacking.

About 3 in 10 D.C.-area residents worry about home burglary or being physically assaulted, but concern about assault rises to 40 percent in Maryland suburbs and 44 percent in D.C.

Others said they took issue with the District’s increasingly punitive approach to crime and believed the city should instead invest in social services and education.

Jennifer Druliner, 53, who works for an environmental nonprofit, said she feels generally safe in her neighborhood near the Southwest Waterfront. And despite noticing an uptick in the sounds of gunfire in her area, she still enjoys taking public transportation through the District at night.

Druliner said she believes the city should address crime by investing in eradicating the root causes of violence, including “expanding the social safety net, violence prevention programs that are tested and well researched, and addressing the affordable housing crisis.”

Druliner lives in Ward 6, where council member Charles Allen (D) is facing a recall campaign over his handling of crime. Organizers blame him for what they call a “policy of leniency” in the city — referring, in particular, to two pieces of legislation that Allen championed and that were later scrutinized by Congress.

The first was a major rewrite of the city’s century-old criminal code, which Congress blocked. The second was a major police accountability bill that restricted certain policing tactics and created new transparency rules, which Republicans framed as “anti-police” while public concern about crime had been building.

But Druliner said she supports Allen’s approach: “I am very against the recall, in part because the people pushing for it are not offering any solutions to address crime.”

The poll was conducted by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The survey was administered by telephone and online April 19 to April 29 among a random sample of 1,683 residents in the D.C. area overall: 655 adults in D.C., 522 in Northern Virginia and 506 in suburban Maryland. The error margin for regionwide results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points and 5.1 to 5.7 percentage points among the regional subgroups.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

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Poll finds growing public concern over safety in D.C. despite drop in crime