Big cities are becoming safer. So why is crime rising in Washington, D.C.?

During the height of the social justice protests in the summer of 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., took to the pages of the New York Times to call for the National Guard to step in and restore order in Washington, D.C.

Three years later, a similar plea came for entirely different reasons, from an elected official who has virtually nothing in common with Cotton — other than a sense of alarm about Washington, which is on course to experience its deadliest year in nearly two decades.

After yet another shooting in his district last week, D.C. City Council member Trayon White, who represents the largely Black and destitute Eighth Ward, where gun violence is spiking, said he wanted federal troops to restore order to the streets of the largely neglected communities he represents.

“The crime is out of control and getting worse by the day,” White said at a press conference with community leaders. “We must declare an emergency regarding the crime and violence in our neighborhoods and act urgently. It may be time to call on the National Guard to protect the children and innocent people that are losing their lives to this senselessness.”

There is little sense that Mayor Muriel Bowser is willing to make such a dramatic move. But the deepening public safety crisis increasingly seems to demand a sweeping solution. There have already been 163 homicides in Washington this year, with more than four months left to go. By comparison, there were 116 homicides in all of 2017.

In almost every other city in the United States, crime is falling. Washington is a rare exception, along with Oakland, Calif., and Chicago.

Read more on Yahoo News: At least 3 killed in shooting on D.C. street, via CBS News

From 'murder capital' to hipster haven

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Washington was widely — if unfairly — regarded as unsafe outside the heavily touristed National Mall area and distant residential neighborhoods near the border with Maryland. The murder of congressional aide Tom Barnes in 1992 seemed to be a low point, and some even called for the district to implement the death penalty.

But that started to change as mayors Including Anthony Williams and Adrian Fenty emphasized public safety, business investment and attracting new residents. And the arrival of the Obamas in 2009 to the increasingly safe city made Washington hip too. By 2018, a Washington Post contributor was complaining that the district had become “too cool,” with new restaurants and bars that seemed to have been airlifted out of Brooklyn.

Then the pandemic hit. Like many cities, Washington emptied — and crime rose. In the years since, crime has fallen elsewhere, but not in the nation’s capital.

Read more on Yahoo News: New data shows COVID crime surge starting to recede. Can Republicans still rely on crime to counter Democrats' advantage on abortion?

A slow and halting recovery

Aside from San Francisco, Washington has arguably been the slowest to recover from the pandemic.

Tumultuous protests followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd, culminating in the violent clearing of Lafayette Park by the Trump administration. Several months later came the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. As the inauguration of Joe Biden approached, Washington took on the feel of a military base.

Since then, security barriers have come down and life has returned to normal in many parts of Washington. Yet the district remains scarred by three years of tumult that most other cities simply did not experience.

Read more on Yahoo News: The unanswered questions about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

Policing, criminal justice reform and public fears

In recent years, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco have all elected progressive prosecutors and have enacted criminal justice reforms intended to rectify decades of discriminatory policing and sentencing.

But now, some critics in Washington and elsewhere say those reforms have gone too far and are making American cities unsafe, often leading to the killings of young men of color who those very reforms were supposed to help. (In Washington, although crimes involving white people and crimes in wealthier, majority-white neighborhoods tend to earn outsize media attention, 9 out of 10 murder victims are Black men.)

In 2016, the district passed a juvenile justice law that prevented the pretrial detention of young offenders. It also eliminated mandatory minimum sentences and, in general, provided broad pathways for young people who had allegedly committed crimes to avoid both arrest and jail.

D.C. had also eliminated cash bail for criminal defendants in the early 1990s, at a time when crime rates began to fall across the country.

But then violent crime started to rise, a trend that began before the pandemic but was accelerated by lockdowns, school closures and other disruptions. Suddenly the reformist policies passed in previous years began to buckle, especially when combined with courtroom closures and a pullback in policing.

In 2014, district voters elected a progressive attorney general, Karl Racine, who focused on challenging the Trump administration and investigating corporate malfeasance. Because of Washington’s lack of autonomy, many crimes are handled by the local federal prosecutor, not the district's AG. The current U.S. attorney, Matthew Graves, has chosen not to pursue charges in 3 out of 4 arrests brought to his office.

Graves has defended his work by seeming to blame the police department, but some have found his reasoning unconvincing. “Some cases are going to be challenging, yes. But that’s your job,” a former federal prosecutor said in response. “Do your job. Don’t just dismiss it just because the evidence is not everything you want it to be or think it should be.”

The appetite for reform appears to have thoroughly ebbed in D.C. Earlier this year, proposed progressive revisions to the district’s criminal code were nullified by an unlikely coalition that included congressional Republicans, Mayor Bowser and, most surprising of all, President Biden himself.

Read more on Yahoo News: Washington's public safety struggles turn D.C. into tantalizing new GOP target

A district in crisis

In July, a 44-year-old District resident named Robert Lavender was shot and killed near Catholic University. Several weeks later, his 42-year-old sister Ebone was also shot and killed. It was the kind of heart-rending tragedy that has become all too common in Washington.

Murder is on the rise in Washington, but so is every other class of crime — even as crime falls in most other major cities across the United States. Especially troubling is the rise in juvenile crime, including gun violence.

To make matters worse, the Metropolitan Police Department is short by nearly 500 officers. As in many other cities, legislators here called for defunding the police, only to see police officers quit or retire in droves on their own. Now D.C. and other cities are trying to spur recruitment of new officers, but the process could take years.

Many residents simply cannot tolerate the violence much longer. Earlier this summer, an Afghan refugee who had escaped the war-torn nation was fatally shot while driving for the ride-sharing service Lyft.

A day later, D.C. lawmakers passed a bill that rolled back some earlier reforms regarding the detention of juveniles and violent offenders.

“We are in a state of emergency right now,” one lawmaker said.

Read more on Yahoo News: Mexican consulate warns citizens in DC about crime surge in US capital, via Fox News