‘Existing Laws Are Unenforced’: D.C. in Dire Need of More Cops and Judges, Report Says

With crime in Washington, D.C., persisting at elevated post-pandemic levels, a new report argues that Congress needs to spend millions of dollars to hire more police officers, empower a prosecutor who will enforce the rule of law, and accelerate the approval of judges to clear the growing backlog of criminal cases.

Charles Fain Lehman, a criminal-justice policy researcher with the Manhattan Institute, argues in a new report that leaders in the nation’s capital need to increase the capacity of the city’s criminal-justice system, referring to “the volume of manpower, attention, space, time, and other resources that the system can dedicate to its crime-fighting function.”