In the powerful DC district, Democrats are moving to impeach council members due to the increase in crime

To a standing-room-only crowd in a Southeast Washington office building on a recent evening, Tonya Fulkerson, a veteran Democratic fundraiser, described the gunfight that erupted in broad daylight on her blocks from the U.S. Capitol last year.

“People were ducking behind cars to avoid being hit by bullets,” she said.

These days, Mrs. Fulkerson told the crowd, she walks around her neighborhood with more vigilance and no longer waits in the car when her husband stops at the local corner store for fear of being hijacked or robbed.

And she has moved in a new direction, using skills and connections she developed over decades in national politics to help steer a campaign to unseat her councilman, Charles Allen, a Democrat who has supported progressive criminal justice reform and whom she holds accountable for the crime plaguing her neighborhood and others across the city.

Joining her at the rally, standing next to signs reading “Recall Charles Allen,” were other prominent Democratic political operatives who call Capitol Hill home and have joined the effort, with resumes that include running for multiple congressional and presidential campaigns.

Moses Mercado, the recall’s field organizer, was a superdelegate for Barack Obama, who has lived in the city for 31 years. Rich Masters, a 28-year-old Capitol Hill resident who was an aide to former Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, is handling communications. Ms. Fulkerson’s clients include Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, and the Senate Majority PAC, the party’s main fundraising arm for Senate campaigns.

So far, the recall effort has raised more than $100,000, and volunteers have been rallying around Mr. Allen’s Ward 6 in hopes of collecting the necessary 6,144 signatures — 10 percent of the population — before the mid-August deadline. If achieved, a recall election would take place on October 9.

Most of the organizers of this effort are lifelong Democrats who voted for Mr. Allen in the past, leading him to landslide victories in 2014, 2018 and 2022. Their campaign to depose him is a striking example – in one of the most powerful areas of the world. the country – of how a response to a rise in crime has crossed political and ideological boundaries.

In an interview, Mr. Allen defended his record and said the effort to oust him only played into the hands of Republicans across the country, including former President Donald J. Trump, who have tried to solve Washington’s crime problem as a “political cudgel”. ” to use against liberal cities and Democrats.

He acknowledged that residents had “very legitimate fears and concerns about public safety” that he shared as a husband and father, but said the blame he has received is misplaced.

There has not been a successful recall effort in Washington since the District gained home rule in the 1970s. The action against Mr. Allen and another recall attempt that surfaced last month Councilwoman Brianne K. Nadeau in Ward 1 reflect the depth of residents’ anger over violent crime on their streets.

As a member of the DC Council’s Justice and Public Safety Committee, Mr. Allen was instrumental in cutting $15 million from the 2020 police budget — money that he said would be reinvested in community programs across the District — and wrote a revision to the city’s criminal code, which reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some violent crimes, was ultimately blocked by Congress and rejected by President Biden last year.

“It’s not personal to him at all,” Mr. Masters said. “I think he looked and saw a bumper sticker that said ‘Defund the Police,’ and he decided he was going to turn that into policy.”

The recalls come as residents across the city have expressed fear and frustration over violent crimes increased by 39 percent last yearThe number is down 11 percent so far this year compared to the same period in 2023, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. pointed According to the data, this was 35 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year, while the number of robberies increased by 67 percent. Washington had 958 carjackings or attempted carjackings last year and separately averaged nearly 19 car thefts per day during the same period, an 82 percent increase from the previous year.

In his statement last March explaining his decision not to veto Republican-authored legislation blocking the revised criminal code, Mr. Biden said he declined in part because local law would prohibit mandatory minimum sentences for some violent crimes, such as carjacking, reduced or eliminated. (It also increased penalties for a variety of crimes, including armed robbery, assault, and attempted murder.)

Ward 6, which is relatively affluent and safe compared to much of the city, is an unlikely ground zero for the fight. But it has also experienced its share of crime. Last year, Rep. Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, was attacked in her apartment building while fending off her attacker by throwing her hot coffee at him. Her Democratic colleague, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, was hijacked at gunpoint in October. And an aide to Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was seriously injured last March after being stabbed in broad daylight by a man who had been released from jail the day before.

Residents of Capitol Hill, where one-bedroom apartments often rent for more than $2,000, have witnessed shocking violent crimes, including a shooting captured by a doorbell camera last month.

Mr. Allen was attacked and pistol-whipped a few years ago, he said, by two people who shot a gun right next to his head, and neither was ever caught.

“I have a scar on the back of my head that I carry with me,” he said, adding of the perpetrators: “There was no accountability there.”

None of the acts of violence, Mr. Allen said, were grounds for throwing him out.

The councilman noted that the city was in a recession when he pushed for cuts to the police budget, and that Washington is far from the only city facing officer shortages. He pointed to his work expanding the police cadet pipeline and instituting a $25,000 signing bonus for new recruits.

Mr Allen said reduce crime was the council’s top priority, but argued that merely imposing harsher penalties, as the recall’s proponents have demanded, was shortsighted. He said it was necessary to work with “at-risk communities” to give young people opportunities to pull them away from a life of crime.

“Otherwise you just wait for a crime to happen and respond to it,” he said.

Opponents of the recall are quick to label organizers as carpetbaggers, citing the January campaign finance report that showed a slew of Republican donors living outside Ward 6 contributing.

Ward 6 Democratic President Elizabeth Engel called the effort “a waste of energy, a waste of attention and a waste of taxpayer dollars,” which only served to scapegoat Mr. Allen.

“Crime is a problem in D.C.,” Ms. Engel said. “But the approach to it is complex, and Charles is certainly not personally responsible for this.”

Advocates, however, argue that Mr. Allen has made a bad situation worse by “helping make this argument for Trump” that crime in liberal cities has spiraled out of control, Mr. Masters said.

For April Brown, a real estate agent, third-generation Washingtonian and the treasurer of the recall effort, the bid to remove Mr. Allen is an opportunity for those long ignored to be heard.

Ms. Brown, who is black, said her own experience with crime in Washington — her mother was carjacked by four teenagers, none of whom were ever caught, and she witnessed an attempted carjacking on her street — made her encouraged to speak out.

“Sometimes I feel like we are being silenced,” she said. “Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of politicians do that. They want to speak up the black community, not with the black community.”

Mark Ugoretz, a retired lobby manager who moved to Washington in 1968 during riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and who supports Mr Allen’s recall, said the brutality of crime in the city had resonated with residents across all political and economic sectors. lines.

“This is the first time we’ve had a crime where a kid can stick a Glock in your face and steal your car,” he said.