Killings in D.C. at 20-Year Low Point

Even as the homicide rate has slowed this year, community activists have kept up the pressure on police, particularly after several high-profile killings.

James Richardson, 17, was fatally shot inside Ballou Senior High School in February. Jahkema "Princess" Hansen, 14, was shot to death in January, five days after authorities said she witnessed another killing in her neighborhood. Police made quick arrests in those cases but have yet to solve the killing of former school board member Terry Hairston, 38. Hairston was found shot to death in his Southeast Washington home in May.

Detectives have arrested suspects in 30 of the District's 91 killings this year. They have closed two cases administratively, they said, because the suspects in the slayings had been killed.

Washington recorded more than 400 killings a year from 1989 through 1993. During the next decade, the numbers gradually declined, largely mirroring national patterns. Last year, the city registered 248 homicides. Although that was a far cry from the carnage a decade go, it still was the highest per capita total of any city with more than 500,000 residents.

The homicide picture in other large cities is mixed. Houston, which many criminologists view as a barometer of crime in the United States, recorded 112 homicides through May, up from 93 during the same period last year.

Boston and Los Angeles also have posted increases. New York's homicide rate is down slightly. Baltimore, which has a crime rate comparable to the District's, is on pace to end the year with about 270 killings, nearly the same as in 2003.

In most Washington suburbs, the number of killings has remained fairly steady compared with last year. However, Prince George's County is on pace to have more killings than any year since 1996. Through the first six months of the year, Prince George's police said that 68 people had been killed, a 13 percent increase over last year.

Criminologists said that homicides and other crimes have fallen steeply across the country since the early 1990s, when drug gangs were gripped in fierce battles over turf.

"We have not seen a drug reappear with the violence associated with its buying and selling on the streets like we saw in the late 1980s and early 1990s with crack cocaine," said Richard Rosenfeld, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rosenfeld and other specialists also attributed the drop in crime to higher incarceration rates -- nearly 2.1 million people are being held in prisons across the country -- and an improving economy during the mid- to late 1990s.

When the economy slumped in recent years, some jurisdictions experienced an increase or stabilization in homicide rates, the criminologists said.

Washington avoided the worst of that economic downturn, which may play a part in the declining homicide rate, the criminologists said.

The District's unemployment rate in May was 7.5 percent, an improvement over May 1998, when the rate was 9.1 percent, according to the Labor Department.

Staff writers Neil Irwin, Tom Jackman, Phuong Ly, Eric Rich and Jamie Stockwell and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.