Mayor Muriel Bowser slammed the D.C. Council during a news conference Wednesday, saying “they made the District less safe” after approving a police budget cut in a preliminary vote.
“It appears to me to be a shell game, them moving dollars around from this to that, and we’re going to have to dig into it,” Bowser said. “What also appears is that the … amount of the cuts will mean that our force strength will go down in the upcoming year to levels that it was at in the 1990s. And that to me is very unfortunate and I think … if that’s what happened yesterday with the budget, they made the District less safe.”
Bowser also knocked the idea of moving management of D.C. Public Schools’ security contract to the school system as opposed to D.C. police.
“All it is is a shell game,” she said. “And I have no idea why the council would … again go back to a 1990 strategy. Keep in mind that D.C. Public Schools at one time managed the security contract. The D.C. Council, by law, moved it to MPD.”
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She said the schools chancellor should be focused on education, not security.
“And now they also have to manage a security contract is just not the best way, in my view, to run schools, and the council also, in my view, has provided no justification for doing that,” Bowser said.
She added that said she hasn’t had a chance to review the D.C. Council’s proposed legislation.
The council’s proposed $15 million cut to police, part of an emergency policing and justice reform bill that repeals and replaces a similar bill passed last month, come as the council voted to raise the gas tax — which Bowser said she doesn’t think will have “much impact” on D.C. residents.
Bowser renewed her arguments against cutting the D.C. police budget in a July 4 letter to the council.
“This reduction would result in a level of sworn officers that has not been seen in D.C. since the 1990s, with seemingly no analysis on the impact this cut would have on the deployment of officers, officer response times to calls for service, and on community and neighborhood safety,” she wrote.
“Fewer officers would protect a District population that has increased by more than 17%, and where calls for police service have increased by 21% in the last decade alone. These reductions will be felt across all eight wards.”
A second vote is expected in late July.
Community spread clock reset
The District saw a setback on its road to a potential Phase Three reopening and reported the largest jump in cases in about a month on Wednesday.
D.C.’s clock for the decrease in community spread has been reset to three days out of the 14 needed following a rise in numbers in late June, according to data posted online.
The city also reported 73 new coronavirus cases — the highest jump since June 9, when D.C. reported 85 new cases. Those numbers, however, are significantly smaller than infection rates seen in April and May.
District officials cautioned during a news conference that meeting the 14-day community spread decline threshold does not automatically mean the city will move into Phase Three.
“The counting of the 14 days is for us to look at the quantity of what is happening, but we also have to assess the quality of what is going on,” D.C. Health Director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt said.
“Which is why we add additional metrics, and why we say there’s more than one metric that helps us make the decisions to advise when it is appropriate to move into Phase Three.”
Nesbitt added that’s something they want residents to understand.
“In terms of the resetting … as we get new data, more people are getting tested, there’s going to be periods of time where you have to reset,” she said.
The number of confirmed cases in the U.S. hit 3 million on Wednesday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Health officials have said that because of inadequate testing and the many mild cases that have gone unreported or unrecognized, the real number of infections is about 10 times higher. That would amount to almost 10% of the U.S. population.
DC coronavirus numbers
The District reported 73 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, bringing the total to 10,642.
Three D.C. residents lost their lives to the virus, for a total of 564.
Track the District’s coronavirus data online.
Below are maps of coronavirus cases by ward, neighborhood and community spread (click to enlarge).
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
