Washington, D.C.’s idea of criminal justice reform has decayed the justice system so much that someone firing off a weapon on the street for fun is not deemed to be a threat to the public.
The suspect in this story is Amonte Moody, who is alleged to have fired 26 shots from an AR-15 at a car on a public street. The act was caught on three different cameras. He was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm with a crime of violence, two felonies. This is a cut-and-dry example of someone who should not be granted pretrial release.
And yet, he was. After casually running into the street and firing off 26 shots for no discernible reason as if it were part of his daily routine, Moody was granted pretrial release with nothing more than a home detention order with GPS tracking and a stay-away order from the people in the car he was shooting at. Evidently, randomly firing a weapon in the middle of the street over what the U.S. Attorney’s Office says was “an argument over clothes” does not make someone a threat to their community or the public.
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No one is blameless in Washington’s crime crisis, though. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declines to prosecute 33% of felony gun possession charges and pleads down half of gun possession convictions from felonies to misdemeanors. Mayor Muriel Bowser and police leadership care more about optics than protecting private property. The D.C. Council, in the midst of the crime surge, passed a bill to lessen sentences for violent criminals, which had to be overruled by Congress. Every “leader” in the city is soft on crime, which is why 2023 was its most violent year since 2003.
This is what criminal justice reform gets you. It is not primarily about leniency for minor drug possession, but about “overpopulation” in prisons, which means even violent criminals get short or no prison sentences and are put back out on the streets no matter how many shots they fire on a public street from an “assault weapon.” Every “leader” in the District of Columbia is failing to keep residents safe because they all prioritize prison population numbers over residents’ safety.