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‘Lack of leadership’: DC mayor, attorney general get into finger-pointing war over juvenile violence surge

January 30, 2022 | | Print Article

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Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Attorney General Karl Racine have reportedly been trading blame for the crime wave devastating the nation’s capital. Apparently, in D.C. everybody wants to be a Democrat, but nobody wants to take blame for Democrat policies.

The blame game began Friday courtesy Bowser’s weekly newsletter. In it she took a shot at Racine by complaining about a lack of accountability and consequences from the city’s “public safety and justice ecosystem.”

“If the message that young people in our community get is that when you use a gun in our city, nothing happens, then they will continue to use guns. Whether the guns are being used in a robbery, a carjacking, or mid-day shootout, any person, of any age, who is carrying illegal firearms and using them to terrorize our city must be held accountable,” she wrote.

“When a violent crime happens in our city, we need people paying close attention to what happens along the whole process – from arrest to detention decision for those awaiting trial,” she continued, adding that the public should “[p]ay attention to the prosecution decision by the Office of the Attorney General.”

Racine did not appear to appreciate the criticism. In a Twitter thread posted late Friday evening, he defended his office’s dedication to accountability and then fired back at the mayor, chiding her for “unjustly blaming prosecutors” instead of leading.

“To address the increases in violence, DC needs leadership & a clear, consistent, all-hands-on-deck response.Everyone who has a role in keeping our city safe needs to work together, not point fingers,” he wrote.

“We saw the lack of leadership over the summer when the Mayor inaccurately blamed the courts for crime increases, which the courts—in an unprecedented statement—rightly pushed back on.”

Look:

Who was right and who was wrong? It appears that both were right and wrong at the same time.

Bowser appeared to be right because Racine’s office was, after all, responsible for the two teen girls involved in the murder of 66-year-old Uber Eats driver Mohammad Anwar getting off relatively easy with a plea deal that included no prison time.

But on the other hand, Racine seemed to have a point as well. Bowser threw her full support behind the Black Lives Matter “protests” that erupted in mid-2020, thus helping to pour fuel on a fire that has yet to be extinguished.

As previously reported, the BLM “protests” (many of which were full-blown riots) triggered an across-the-board spike in crime nationwide, but particularly so in decidedly blue districts like D.C.

Another official who’s spoken out in recent days is D.C. Police chief Robert Contee. Interestingly, he’s echoed Bowser’s rhetoric about accountability.

“Where does a 13-year-old get a firearm from? Where does two 15-year-olds get firearms from? But they go further to that to even use them in broad daylight … that’s unacceptable, and we’ve got to make sure there’s a mechanism of accountability in place to ensure that does not happen,” he said, as reported by local station WTTG.

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Vivek Saxena
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