‘That’s B.S.’: D.C. Police Chief Rejects U.S. Attorney Blaming Cops for Lack of Prosecutions Amid Crime Wave

Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA via AP Images

The head of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, Robert J. Contee III, rejected U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves‘ excuse for his failure to prosecute 67% of arrests in the nation’s capital, calling it ‘B.S.’ in an interview with the Washington Post.

According to the Post, Graves had “said prosecutors were declining less serious cases for myriad reasons, including that the city’s crime lab remained unaccredited and police body-camera footage was subjecting arrests to more scrutiny.”

Contee dissented from that view. “I can promise you, it’s not MPD holding the bag on this. That’s B.S.” the police chief told the Post. “We believe every person we arrest should be off the streets.”

Graves also defended the outlier statistic by explaining that “the declinations are mostly coming after arrests in cases such as gun possession, drug possession and burglaries — not in violent crimes,” and citing the fact that his office last year prosecuted 87.9 percent of arrests made in homicides, armed carjackings, assaults with intent to kill and first-degree sexual assault cases.”

But even that number drives home how unusual D.C.’s declination rate is. The capital’s declination rate for the most heinous of crimes resembles that of Chicago’s 14% rate for all crime.

And while Graves, who was appointed to his position by President Joe Biden in 2021, sought to reassure by explaining that gun and drug possession crimes were responsible for the high declination rate, others have argued that enforcement of such crimes is key to bringing down crime rates in more serious categories.

“One of the things that I’m confident is true and has been proven true, that swiftness and certainty of punishment is a better deterrent than inconsistencies, long delays, and soft sentences,” said Jeff Sessions, U.S. attorney general under former president Donald Trump last year.

Congress voted earlier this month to reject a D.C. City Council bill to impose less harsh penalties for various crimes, including carjackings committed with a deadly weapon. The city has seen a precipitous increase in violent crime over the last several years.

In 2022, 485 carjacking incident were reported in the district, up from 148 in 2018. The city is on track to eclipse that number in 2023.