DC, once violent center of the crack epidemic, is now on pace for fewer than ... - Washington Post

"It strikes me probably daily as I ride around the city, or sometimes when I'm sitting at home at night, and it's 10 o'clock and my phone's not ringing. Or I get up in the morning, and I go, 'Oh my gosh, I've slept five hours," said Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who joined the department amid violent 1991 street riots. "It strikes me quite often how different things are now."

The drop reflects a downward trend in violent crime nationwide and is in line with declining homicides in other big cities. Though killings have risen in Chicago, New York City officials say homicides dropped to 515 last year from more than 2,200 in 1990. Houston reported 198 homicides last year, down from 457 in 1985, while Los Angeles police reported fewer than 300 last year after ending 1992 with about 1,100. Across the country, violent crime reported by police to the FBI fell by 3.8 percent last year from 2010.

Though D.C. is hardly crime-free today, and crime in some categories is even up, the homicide decline is especially notable in a place where grisly acts of violence — sometimes not far from the U.S. Capitol — embodied the worst of the crack scourge.

The number of homicides in this city of about 600,000 residents averaged about 457 between 1989 and 1993, a staggering rate that attracted unwanted attention. "A war zone? No, Washington, D.C.," was the sub-headline of a 1992 People magazine story that described Washington as a "city under siege." The Economist in 1995 called it "the violence capital of America." Tony Patterson, a longtime homicide detective, recalled one eight-hour shift when every detective on his squad landed a homicide investigation. Drive-by shootings with multiple victims were common, as were witnesses who'd see something — but say nothing.

The 1990 arrest of then-Mayor Marion Barry for smoking crack cocaine fed a perception that the city where the nation's laws were made was, itself, lawless.

"If you asked people what would happen first, there'll be a thousand murders in D.C. in a year or there'll be less than a hundred, I think virtually everybody would have said there would be 1,000," said John Roman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute.

Everyone agrees there's no single cause for the trend.