The arrest of two 15-year-olds after a government worker was attacked last week on a Washington, D.C., street was going to attract attention in a city where violent crimes committed by young people have long gripped the public consciousness.
But the man who was assaulted in what he said was an attempted carjacking was not just any government worker — he was a high-profile Trump administration employee. And in the days that followed, the president lashed out, claiming the city was overrun by “roving mobs of wild youth” and renewing his threats to take over the city.
On Monday, President Trump announced he was placing the District of Columbia’s police department under federal control and sending in the National Guard, as he and his top prosecutor for the city declared they were fed up with what they say is rampant lawlessness among young people in the city.
“I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else,” said Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Crime committed by teenagers has for decades been a focus of the city’s leaders — and often a point of political tension. Calls to take a tougher line on juvenile crime run up against efforts to address the extreme poverty and other entrenched socioeconomic problems that many experts say underlie youth crime.
Concerns about youth crime came to a head during the pandemic, when the number of carjackings soared in Washington, D.C., and in cities across the country. Most of those arrested, to the alarm of residents and law enforcement officials, were children. Carjackings appear to have declined considerably in the last year and a half, and the arrest rates for young people in Washington are roughly what they were six years ago.
Young people now make up roughly 7 percent of the annual arrests in the city, a share on par with Boston, a city of similar size. This share is comparable to the national average for juvenile arrests, according to the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice. City-by-city comparisons can be difficult to make because there is wide variation in how law enforcement agencies classify and track juvenile arrests.
But violent encounters involving young people, like the fatal beating of a disabled man by five girls in 2023, tend to provoke a visceral reaction that often seems immune to facts and data. And though such encounters can happen in any community, they take place on a singular stage in Washington, which sits in the shadow — and at the mercy — of the White House and Congress.
As he announced the federal takeover, the president called the city “a nightmare of murder and crime” and declared that “caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day.”
Over the past 15 years, there have been spikes and declines in juvenile crime in Washington, but overall, the number of youth arrests annually has fallen by roughly half. This is in part, some juvenile defense lawyers said, because of an emphasis on prevention, and programs focusing on adolescent behavioral health and city-funded support for new parents.
The most recent spike came during the pandemic and in the months immediately following, with an acute outbreak of carjacking. In 2023, at the peak of this outbreak, the District of Columbia police reported 957 carjackings, an average of more than two a day, a 650 percent increase from six years earlier.
A majority of those carjackings went unsolved, leaving the identities of the criminals unknown. But most of those who have been arrested have been young, in some cases not even teenagers.
“Why would we have a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old carjacking in our city?” Pamela Smith, chief of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, asked at a news conference in April. “They’re not even old enough to drive a car.”
Carjacking became almost a social phenomenon for young people during the years of pandemic isolation. Teenagers often carried out robberies in groups, in some cases streaming carjackings on TikTok or Instagram.
Some carjackings in Washington turned deadly, including one in 2021 that resulted in murder charges for two girls, 13 and 15, who caused an Uber Eats driver to crash his car after assaulting him with a stun gun.
And though there was a surge in carjackings nationwide, nowhere is it more likely than in the nation’s capitol that a victim would be person of significant political influence, even a congressman.
But the number of carjackings in Washington has dropped along with crime overall over the past year and a half, following the surge in violent crime in 2023. In July, 16 carjackings were reported, fewer than in any month since May 2020. The proportion of young people among those arrested in connection with carjackings has fallen as well.
“The pandemic really decimated our social services systems,” said Penelope Spain, a founder of Open City Advocates, which provides legal and other services for children in Washington’s juvenile justice system. It was not surprising that crime surged among young people in poor neighborhoods when critical support services dwindled, she said. And as government agencies and community groups “worked to address those underlying needs,” Ms. Spain said, “it is not surprising that crime has gone down.”
Brooke Pinto, a member of the District of Columbia Council, has pushed some of the toughest juvenile justice bills in the council. She said she was pleased with the efforts the city had made on crime and that the deployment of the National Guard was not going to help.
But she said serious crimes involving young people remained especially troubling, even as the data showed progress.
“Any time I hear a case of a 12-year-old picking up a gun and shooting someone else, something has gone seriously wrong with our city and our country,” she said in an interview.
While Ms. Pirro has accused the city of “coddling” young people accused of serious crime, Mayor Muriel Bowser and some of her allies insist that they have been aggressive in trying to curb juvenile crime. The city has declared curfews in certain neighborhoods to prevent large gatherings of young people that have occasionally included robberies and other problems.
This year, nearly half of young people charged with crimes were detained after their initial hearings, a rate substantially higher than the national average. The office of the District of Columbia attorney general said in a statement that it had pursued charges in so many cases that “the mayor had to issue an emergency order to create more space” at the city’s crowded juvenile detention facilities.
In Washington, serious crimes in which an adult is charged are prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office, in contrast to other jurisdictions, where most such cases would be handled by a local prosector. The city’s attorney general, who is elected, prosecutes most crimes involving people 17 and younger, though the U.S. attorney can directly file charges in local court against a person 16 or older who is charged with certain crimes, including murder, rape or armed robbery.
Ms. Pirro has insisted that consequences are still not tough enough, arguing for the repeal of District of Columbia laws that give judges more leeway in sentencing or reducing prison terms for people who were convicted of adult crimes when they were under 25.
Some who work with children in the district’s juvenile justice system said that research and experience had shown repeatedly that overly punitive methods don’t work, trapping young people in a cycle of lawlessness rather than giving them the tools to build a healthy and productive life.
“I had a client reach out to me a couple of months ago,” said Will Mount, a defense lawyer who represents children in the city. The client “had at least six or seven serious carjacking offenses” in his teens, Mr. Mount said. Now, “he’s 23 years old, he’s married, he has a child, and he’s a plumber. He called me up to say he’s doing really well.”
“We can’t give up on kids,” Mr. Mount said. “That’s really the lesson here.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.