WASHINGTON (AP) — Though it’s no longer the homicide capital of the United States, the nation’s capital is witnessing a multiyear spike in the number of homicides but solving far fewer of them.

And for families of the victims, the issue of unsolved killings cuts deep.

Asiyah Timimi’s husband, Aqueel, was stabbed in a dispute in January 2021 and died several days later. “You just don’t feel safe until they’re caught,” Timimi said. “I could be walking past the person that killed my husband.”

Natalia Mitchell wants justice for her son Morris, who was fatally shot in March 2022, and closure for herself. A successful arrest of her son’s killer, she said, “doesn’t bring Morris back, but it would help.”

The percentage of homicides that are solved by the Metropolitan Police Department has declined sharply in 2023, leaving the city on track to record its lowest so-called “clearance rate” or “closure rate” in more than 15 years.

As of Nov. 13, only 75 of the 244 homicides committed this year have been solved by police. Factoring in the 33 prior-year homicides cleared thus far in 2023, the overall closure rate stands at around 45%. That would be the lowest rate dating back at least to 2007, according to statistics provided by the MPD.

Nationally, the average clearance rate tends to hover between 50% and 60%, said Rick Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A low closure rate, particularly on homicides, can erode police morale and community trust in the police and lessen the public cooperation between citizens and police that is vital for many investigations, said Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York Police Department.

“That whole process can kind of spiral down, where the community doesn’t trust the police that much anymore or there’s a lack of faith,” he said. “There’s much less cooperation between the community and the police. And once the police see a lack of cooperation from the community, some of them will kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Why should we care when no one in the community wants to help?’”

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lyndsey Appiah acknowledged that closure represents “some sense of justice for victims.”

In addition, she said, “The surety of consequence is a deterrent to crime. So it’s important that we are, as quickly as possible, closing cases and solving cases.”

The drop in homicide closures is just part of a complicated public safety crisis facing the nation’s capital. Appiah, in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee this year, flatly acknowledged the scope of the problem.

“Oxford defines a crisis as a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger,” she testified. “So I would say there is a crisis.”

Homicides in Washington are up 33% this year over last year. Violent crimes involving juveniles also are rising steadily, as are carjackings, with a U.S. congressman and a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates among the recent victims.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Appiah cited police staffing issues and difficulties with crime scene analysis among the potential factors impacting the clearance rate.

It’s at around 3,300 officers this year — down from 3,800 in 2020.

The MPD is at around 3,300 officers this year, down from 3,800 officers since 2020 — a decrease of 500 over three years. Police union officials have publicly blamed the D.C. Council for what they say are anti-police policies that have driven away officers and stifled recruiting efforts. The mayor, however, wants to get the number of officers up to 4,000.

D.C.’s crime lab, the Department of Forensic Science, also lost its accreditation in spring 2021 over allegations of flaws in its analysis. Appiah said the lab hopes to regain its accreditation early next year; in the meantime, the city is outsourcing its crime scene analysis, a process that consumes time and money, she said.

Appiah said that 10 months into the year is too soon to judge the success of homicide investigations that can take months or years. And, in fairness, the MPD just arrested a man in late October for a killing that took place in 2009. In cases like that, the arrest counts as part of this year’s clearance rate.

But with just a few weeks left in the year, it would take a remarkable run of successful arrests to prevent 2023 from having the lowest homicide clearance rate in more than 15 years.

The impact of these unsolved killings can have a corrosive effect in multiple directions.

“It devastates the Black family, and it can devastate the police department,” said Ronald Moten, a community activist who, in his youth, spent time in federal prison on drug charges. “It always gives the family some sense of relief if there’s a closure. It doesn’t help you heal by itself, but it’s part of the healing process.”

Moten’s half-brother was slain in 1991, during the period when homicides in D.C. regularly exceeded 400 per year. The case was never solved.

“It hurts because you feel like somebody’s gotten away with killing your child with no consequences,” Moten said. “That’s painful. You want closure, and you want somebody to be held accountable.”

Preventing that negative cycle from becoming entrenched is one of the city’s top priorities. To close cases, police need residents to help uproot violent criminals from their communities, said Appiah, the deputy mayor.

“We need their help. And they need to trust that if they come forward with information and help us, that it will move towards accountability,” she said. “If they provide us tips on someone engaged in a shooting and then that person is just back in the community, they will not trust MPD in the same way. … We need the community to help us close cases, and then we need the rest of the system to work to help keep them safe.”

Timimi, whose son Khalil was shot outside of Washington in neighboring Prince Georges County in Maryland about six weeks after her husband was stabbed, now cares for her paralyzed son and runs a charitable organization teaching modern life skills to urban youths.

She said she fears a return to the days when Washington routinely led the nation in per-capita killings. Two of her former neighbors have lost children to gun violence in recent years, and in 2021 her godson was caught in a crossfire and killed while he was home from college because of the national COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, I remember going to a funeral every week,” she said. “And when it’s unsolved, you just feel like they’ve forgotten you.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — The homicide rate for older U.S. teenagers rose to its highest point in nearly 25 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the suicide rate for adults in their early 20s was the worst in more than 50 years, government researchers said Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report examined the homicide and suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds from 2001 to 2021.

The increase is alarming and “reflects a mental health crisis among young people and a need for a number of policy changes,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher who studies U.S. death trends and wasn’t involved in the CDC report.

Experts cited several possible reasons for the increases, including higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services and the number of guns in U.S. homes.

Guns were used in 54% of suicides and 93% of homicides among the age group in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

“Picture a teenager sitting in their bedroom feeling desperate and making a decision, impulsively, to take their own life,” Woolf said. If they have access to a gun, “it’s game over.”

Suicide and homicide were the second and third leading causes of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, after a category of accidental deaths that includes motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings and overdoses. Other researchers have grouped the data by the method of death, and concluded that guns are now the biggest killer of U.S. children.

Earlier this year, Woolf and other researchers looking at CDC data noted dramatic increases in child and adolescent death rates overall at the beginning of the pandemic, and found suicide and homicide were important factors.

The report also found:

—Suicide and homicide death rates remained far higher for older teenagers and young adults than they were for 10- to 14-year-olds.

—In 2021, there were about 2,900 suicides in youths ages 10 to 19, and 4,200 in 20- to 24-year-olds. About 3,000 homicide deaths were reported in the younger group, and nearly 3,900 in the adults in their early 20s.

—The homicide death rate jumped from 8.9 deaths per 100,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2019 to 12.3 in 2020. It rose to 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021, the highest since 1997, according to CDC data.

—Homicide deaths became more common than suicide deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, while suicide was more common in the younger and older age groups.

—While large increases were seen in homicide rates for young Black and Hispanic people in the U.S., there were not significant increases for their white counterparts, other CDC data shows.

—Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the homicide death rate jumped 34% from 2019 to 2020 — from 13.4 per 100,000 population to 18 per 100,000. It held stable in 2021, but the suicide rate rose enough in 2021 — to 19.4 per 100,000 — to surpass the homicide rate.

Suicide death rates in children and teens were rising before COVID-19, but they jumped up at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said the reasons may be hard to pinpoint, but that isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns could be a factor.

“There is a misperception that if you talk to young people about depression, they’ll get depressed. A don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy for depression is not effective,” Trivedi said. “The earlier we can identify the ones who need help, the better chance we’ll have at saving lives.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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DETROIT (AP) — When Andre Avery drives his commercial truck through Detroit, he keeps his pistol close.

Avery, 57, grew up in the Motor City and is aware that homicides and shootings are surging, even though before the pandemic they were dropping in Detroit and elsewhere. His gun is legal, and he carries it with him for protection.

“I remain extremely alert,” said Avery, who now lives in nearby Belleville. “I’m not in crowds. If something looks a little suspicious, I’m out of there.”

In Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and even smaller Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Milwaukee, 2020 has been deadly not only because of the pandemic, but because gun violence is spiking.

Authorities and some experts say there is no one clear-cut reason for the spike. They instead point to social and economic upheaval caused by the COVID-19 virus, public sentiment toward police following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody and a historic shortage of jobs and resources in poorer communities as contributing factors. It’s happening in cities large and small, Democrat and Republican-led.

Two years ago, Detroit had 261 homicides — the fewest in decades. That year there were about 750 nonfatal shootings in the city of more than 672,000.

But with only a few days left in 2020, homicides already have topped 300, while non-fatal shootings are up more than 50% at more than 1,124 through the middle of December.

“I think the pandemic — COVID — has had a significant emotional impact on people across the country,” Detroit Police Chief James Craig said. “Individuals are not processing how they manage disputes. Whether domestics, arguments, disputes over drugs, there’s this quickness to use an illegally carried firearm.”

About 7,000 guns had been seized through mid-December in Detroit, with more than 5,500 arrests for illegal guns. There were 2,797 similar arrests last year.

“I’ve not seen a spike like this. But when it’s happening in other cities — some smaller — what do we all have in common?” Craig said of the slayings and shootings. “That’s when you start thinking about COVID.”

Washington, D.C., a city of about 700,000, has seen more than 187 homicides this year, eclipsing last year’s total by more than 20. Among the most horrible: A 15-month-old baby boy was shot to death during a drive-by shooting.

“We’re all sick of the heinous crimes in our city,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Crime in parts of the U.S. dropped during the early weeks of the pandemic when stay-at-home orders closed businesses and forced many people to remain indoors.

University of Pennsylvania economics professor David Abrams said crime began to spike in May and June when initial orders in some states were lifted.

Some people “may have been a little stir crazy,” Abrams said. “At the end of May, George Floyd’s killing led to protests and looting. That led to police reform movements. Any of that could have potentially affected individual behavior and also the police response to that.”

Calls for some cities to reduce funding for police departments may have led some officers to take a less aggressive approach to policing, he added.

What the COVID-19 virus did was exacerbate all of the frustration and anger that some in Black and brown communities already were dealing with, according to retired Michigan State University sociology professor Carl Taylor. The virus has killed more than 300,000 people across the country, with minority communities hardest hit.

“The COVID has been absolutely the trigger of an everlasting bomb that’s exploding in many parts of our community,” he added.

Nowhere is that more true than inside people’s homes. “The COVID crisis and the economic shutdown is forcing people into their homes, creating conditions where people are more volatile,” said Kim Foxx, the top prosecutor in Cook County, which includes Chicago. And the most jarring statistic that illustrates that volatility is this: The number of domestic-related homicides in the nation’s third-largest city are up more than 60% compared with last year.

President Donald Trump claimed spiking crime was somehow related to massive protests over police brutality that swept the nation this year, but the majority of those protests were peaceful. Trump also claimed the crime was concentrated in Democratic-run cities, but there have been spikes in Republican-run cities as well. Federal agents and resources were poured into Detroit and a number of other cities this summer to help local authorities collar the rising crime rates.

By early October, more homicides — 363 — were recorded in Philadelphia than the 356 committed in 2019. There were 354 killings in New York through Oct. 11 — 90 more than at the same time last year.

Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 5, 165 homicides were recorded in Milwaukee, the most since 1991. And in Chicago, after three years of falling homicide numbers, the totals skyrocketed to 739 in mid-December compared with 475 at the same point last year.

Even smaller cities like Grand Rapids are suffering. By mid-December there were 35 homicides compared with 16 through all of 2019 and nine the year before. From this January to October, non-fatal shootings topped 200 in the city, which is home to about 200,000 people. Over the same period last year there were 131 non-fatal shootings.

“This year, is it because of COVID? The political polarization we have seen?” asked Sgt. Dan Adams, spokesman for the Grand Rapids Police Department. “This year has been a year like no other. I don’t think you can point to any one ‘why.’”

It is the same for other mid-sized cities. Last year, there were 18 homicides in Rockford, a city of about 170,000 people in northern Illinois. More than 30 have been killed so far this year, including three Saturday at a bowling alley.

“As we come to the end of this most difficult year and we look ahead at this New Year upon us, we know that this type of violence needs to stop,” Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara said.

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