Which came first? Washington, DC’s exploding crime or its crumbling economy?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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After more than a quarter-century of playing at the Capitol One Arena in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals will no longer play in the nation’s capital, at all.
In a stunning deal negotiated by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), the neighborhood of Potomac Yard, straddling Arlington County and the city of Alexandria, will house the Beltway’s basketball and hockey teams in a brand-new stadium. It’s set to be funded by a $1.35 billion investment of state and local funds and nearly another $1 billion from Monumental Sports and Entertainment, which owns both teams.
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Across the Potomac River, the announcement stirred a Category 5 conniption among district leadership.
“National Landing Wizards doesn’t quite have the same ring,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser snarked after conceding she was “disappointed.” The city countered the Virginia proposal with a half-billion dollar “best and final” offer, all but ensuring the Potomac Yard deal goes through.
And, of course, who could blame Monumental? Crime has chased business out of D.C., and in turn, departing business will likely only make the problem worse. Just look at the numbers.
In 2023, carjackings in the district — disproportionately committed by the same young people locked out of classrooms and social support for two years of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than doubled from the year prior, while across the Potomac, Fairfax County, Virginia, boasted a 10% reduction in carjackings. Whereas Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Portland, and Minneapolis saw a double-digit percentage decrease in the homicide rate, D.C.’s homicide rate exploded by 36%. All in all, D.C. has presided over the largest increase in violent crime of any other major city, most of which are seeing their post-pandemic crime wave slow down, not speed up.
The reason is obvious. Not only did the City Council defund the district police to the tune of $15 million during the pandemic hysteria of 2020, but the city prosecutors are not enforcing the law even when the wildly understaffed and demoralized police succeed in bringing a perpetrator into custody. The D.C. Office of the Attorney General concedes it barely prosecutes half of all carjacking cases, leaving 43% free to roam the streets for another victim.
Chinatown was an early epicenter of D.C.’s dereliction of duty. Over the nearly five years I lived there, bars and restaurants were replaced with strip clubs and sports gambling clubs, coffee shops and bakeries were usurped by marijuana dispensaries, the Gallery Place Metro stop transformed into an open-air drug market, and the parks were colonized by disturbed, drug-fueled homeless encampments. Now, that crime has rippled far beyond the Capitol One Arena, with an institution as tony as the Navy Yard Lululemon shuttered after being robbed at gunpoint. I have since moved to Old Town Alexandria, one Metro stop south of Potomac Yard.
And like the chicken and the egg, it can be difficult to determine which came first: D.C.’s exploding crime or crumbling economy? The crime problem and the riots that triggered the policies that started it wouldn’t have happened without D.C. shutting down its economy for COVID, and even now, the Chinatown institution of Clyde’s of Gallery Place has threatened to close down after nearly 20 years of business due to crime.
“We feel that we … have been absolutely abandoned by the city,” wrote the president of Clyde’s Restaurant Group in an email to the D.C. government in September, long before the Monumental deal was announced. “The crime and safety issues in that neighborhood are out of control.”
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What does D.C. stand to lose without the Wizards and the Caps? According to city officials, about $25 million in tax revenue and $300 million in sales around the arena. And none of that is to mention crucial jobs, considering that with its 5% unemployment rate, D.C. boasts the highest joblessness of any other state in the union, with the sole exception of Nevada.
Criminal justice reformers may defend hamstringing police and refusing to prosecute violent offenders as good policy by their obscure metrics. But as an economic policy, nothing has been more disastrous for the diverse district than the schemes smuggled into effect under the guise and the lie of “Black Lives Matter.”