Victims of violent crime in Washington shared their stories on Capitol Hill on Oct. 12 in a plea for greater accountability for offenders.
“I implore this subcommittee to understand that policing, prosecuting, and most importantly, incarceration works,” said armed robbery victim Mitchell Sobolevsky during a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance.
Mr. Sobolevsky recalled pleading with the judge presiding over his attacker’s trial for a harsher sentence. Instead, the judge issued a sentence of 24 months and then suspended half of it.
The criminal, after his release, went on to rob other victims at gunpoint.
“Violent crimes should not be dealt with lightly,” Mr. Sobolevsky said. “How many more stories do we have to read about entirely preventable tragedies?”
Other witnesses at the hearing shared similar stories of violent attacks that received lenient sentences.
Gaynor Jablonski, the owner of Valor Brewpub in Washington, was attacked in his veterans-focused bar on June 29 in front of his son. Sharing the surveillance footage of the altercation with the committee, he noted that at one point, the offender pointed a loaded gun at his little boy.
“Not only was it loaded, there was one [bullet] in the chamber,” he added. “When I knocked it out of his hands, luckily, it didn’t go off because it could have killed someone.”
Mr. Jablonski said he spoke with the district attorney’s office about the case and was informed that the charges would be pleaded down to an attempted assault with a dangerous weapon and illegal possession of a firearm.
And although prosecutors sought a sentence of 12 to 18 months for those charges, Mr. Jablonski’s attacker was ultimately sentenced to just eight months in jail.
“He gets eight months and I’m left with explaining to my 5-year-old why I had to fight this man,” he said. “And my 5-year-old tells me—when I drop him off at school every day—to be safe.”
Meanwhile, in the case of Myisha Richards, a firefighter paramedic who was assaulted while responding to a 911 call, her attackers never saw any consequences for the physical and emotional injuries she sustained.
‘De-Carceration’ Agenda
According to Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) data, overall crime in the district has risen 28 percent in the past year, with violent crime seeing the largest increase at 40 percent.Perhaps most concerning is the fact that homicides are up 36 percent and robberies have jumped a whopping 70 percent. However, marginal increases have also been recorded in sexual abuse and assaults with dangerous weapons.
Rattling off the statistics, MPD Detective Greg Pemberton said many of the local communities had begun to look like “war zones.”
Mr. Pemberton added that the DC Police Union, which he chairs, had been sounding the alarm over rising crime for more than three years, but those warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears.
“D.C. residents and business owners are under siege,” he said. “Members of Congress are being assaulted and carjacked. Your congressional staff members are being robbed and stabbed. Tourists and visitors, your constituents, are being targeted and attacked.
“Yet the D.C. council fails to admit that their policies have played a significant role in this outcome.”
Charles Stimson, deputy director of the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, agreed that the city council, district attorney’s office, and local judges had exacerbated the city’s crime problem.
‘Soft On Crime’
While bipartisan members of the committee agreed that local crime was a problem, they diverged on the solution.“Crime is out of control, and everybody knows it,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said.
“More importantly, everybody knows why. When you defund the police and you have prosecutors who go soft on crime, you get more crime. This doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.”
He added that negative attitudes toward police had also led to a shortage of officers, which in turn yields more crime.
“Never forget, bad guys aren’t stupid, they’re just bad,” he said.
“If they know there are less police on the street to stop them, and they’re not going to get prosecuted if they do get caught, they do bad things. That’s what we’ve all got to understand. This is as basic as it gets.”
But Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), the subcommittee’s top Democrat, pushed back on the notion that prosecutors were the problem, noting that she had addressed the crime situation with Matthew Graves, the district attorney for the District of Columbia, the day before.
“I did not hold up on the imposition that I gave of him yesterday in a very lengthy conversation,” she said.
“He assured me that they are at a point where 90 percent of the individuals arrested for the most serious, violent crimes—which are homicide, carjacking, rape, and assault with intent to kill—are being prosecuted.”
She added that the district attorney had also told her he was working to decrease the number of cases his office declines to prosecute.
Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), accused Republicans of using the hearing as a political prop.
“This hearing is yet another attempt to distract and mislead the American people,” he charged. “We won’t fall for it.
“The Republican majority offers no policy solutions that would actually protect residents of Washington, D.C., or other big cities,” he continued.
“Instead, they seek only to flood the cities with more guns while they work against meaningful legislation to invest in our communities and support proven public safety measures.”
But whatever legislative solutions lawmakers might put forward, Mr. Jablonski said they were likely to fall short of resolving what he sees as the root problem.
“You could enact whatever law you want,” he said. “We could have 1000 new gun laws. We could have 1000 new police officers. You could throw millions at this DA’s office. If nobody’s going to do their job and prosecute and hold people accountable, what’s the point?”
