According to the experts, murder, gun crime, and gang violence are escalating to unprecedented levels in Washington DC., and the killings are often over petty disputes.
According to the experts, crime and gang violence are so bad in the nation’s capital that murders often take place over something as minor as verbal insults.
“A lot of these just petty arguments – just not being able to process anger – is leading to a lot of the homicides that we’ve been seeing,” said D.C. Witness Editor-in-Chief Trina Antoine.
She said most homicides in Washington were between “people who know each other” getting into a confrontation that they “didn’t think they could get beyond without a gun.”
While rivalries between gangs or crews may drive killings, the underlying disputes frequently stem from petty insults, criminologists and local officials told Fox News. These can often grow from disagreements over drugs or money or women, or sometimes even from a rapper in one crew disparaging another.
“These conflicts … can occur for surprisingly small things,” Thomas Abt, a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice, told Fox News. “An insult on social media, a dispute over a girlfriend, and so on.”
Such murders can be the result of an ongoing dispute or a spontaneous incident, according to Lisa Barao, a criminal justice assistant professor at Westfield State University.
“Maybe you bump into someone at a bar, just an instant of disrespect,” she told Fox News.
These types of incidents “have been around for a long time and have been driving most homicides in the United States,” but they “really took off in 2020 and into” 2021, and in particular in DC, Abt said.
Washington, D.C., saw 198 murders in 2020 – a 19% increase from the year prior, Metropolitan Police Department data shows. In 2021, homicides surged to 226 – the most since 2003.
These kinds of murders over petty insults put the broader public at risk for a variety of reasons. For one, bystanders are endangered since most homicides are shooting victims, leaving open the threat of a stray bullet.
In addition to the 2021 murder surge in D.C., the city also saw shootings in areas that aren’t usually associated with gun violence.
A 6-year-old girl was killed during a July drive-by shooting. The next night, a shootout between two cars outside Nationals Park, which is frequented by political leaders, including Supreme Court Justices, caused a panicked crowd to flee the baseball stadium.
In June, a stray bullet killed a Peace Corps worker on 14th Street NW – a popular area littered with bars and restaurants, like Le Diplomate, where both President Biden and Vice President Harris have been spotted. That stretch experienced another shooting just weeks later.
Meanwhile, murders over personal disputes “are sometimes even harder to solve because, among the young men among whom this is happening, there’s very low levels of trust in police,” Abt told Fox News.
Police trust fell nationwide after an officer killed George Floyd in 2020. In the District, only half of all murders were closed that year, according to D.C. Witness. That fell to 42% the next year – the lowest clearance rate since the nonprofit began tracking the data.
A major reason disputes have devolved to murder is because killers were never taught the social skills needed to resolve conflicts without violence, according to criminologists.
The people at the heart of these disputes were never taught “morals, integrity, and principles,” Tyrone Parker, who founded a violence prevention organization called the Alliance of Concerned Men, told Fox News.
But he ultimately offered a more simplistic motivation behind murder.
“The number one reason is power,” Parker said. “People want to feel empowered. People want to feel strong.”
If two people with that mindset encounter each other, “somebody is going to die. Somebody’s going to jail,” he said. “So obviously, both of you lose in the end.”
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