In 2020, during the pandemic and after the murder of George Floyd, homicide and violent crime across the US soared. The number of murders that year represented the largest increase since the FBI began formally tracking national statistics in 1960.

But 2023 was different: Across the spectrum, violent crime and homicide dropped significantly from their 2020 peak, and murders fell more than 12 percent in cities, according to the FBI’s latest crime report. Last year saw “one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years,” Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst, writes.

There were exceptions: In Memphis, Tennessee, murders skyrocketed in the 12 months following the killing of Tyre Nichols by city police, and in Shreveport, Louisiana, they jumped by more than 37 percent. But no other city has experienced a crime surge — or the accompanying national scrutiny about its meaning — like the nation’s capital has.

DC saw its deadliest year in more than two decades, with 274 people killed and a homicide rate that makes it among the deadliest cities in the country. Violent crime also spiked nearly 40 percent in the nation’s capital, driven largely by a surge of armed robberies and carjackings, many of them perpetrated by kids. The city reported more than 950 carjackings in 2023, and shocking news coverage about teen carjacking rings rattled residents and people who worked there.

The rise in murder and violent crime has been horrible for the city’s residents, particularly for victims and family members, and those living in the racially segregated eastern neighborhoods of the city where the majority of homicides took place.

Nationally, DC’s struggles with crime have become a partisan flashpoint, a key talking point on Fox News and among Republicans, who use the city’s struggles as an opportunity to criticize its Democratic leaders. The critiques are part of an election-year strategy to portray Democrats as being “soft” on crime, something President Biden and other officials are pushing to contradict.

Locally, officials have played the blame game with one another, with critics going after Mayor Muriel Bowser, the Metropolitan Police Department, US Attorney Matthew Graves, the city council, and pretrial monitoring and detention services for failures they say are responsible for DC’s rising violent crime. The Justice Department recently announced that it would commit more prosecutors and resources to combating violent crime in the city, with a focus on homicides and carjackings.

Assessing why homicides and violent crime might be on the rise in one place but not in another is incredibly difficult to do with certainty. It is not determined by which political party is in power. Still, experts and analysts say there are several possible factors that make the nation’s capital different from other places, and could help explain why violence surged in DC despite falling elsewhere.

DC’s unique status makes law enforcement more complicated

DC’s lack of statehood partly explains why its criminal-legal system is more complicated. Most cities have local government and law enforcement agencies that operate in conjunction with state and federal law enforcement, but the District of Columbia, because of its status as a federal district, has a much more complex, overlapping system of agencies and offices.

Multiple law enforcement agencies operate within city limits — the Metropolitan Police Department, which is DC’s main police department, reports to the mayor, and federal agencies, including the FBI, US Park Police, and Capitol Police, also work within the city.

Unlike other cities,........

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