Four minutes after midnight on Jan. 21, D.C. police raced to a deadly shooting inside a residence in Northeast Washington.
The high school student they found inside the gray-bricked rowhouse on Varnum Street was the District’s first homicide victim of 2026, ending a three-week respite from deadly violence.
As of Friday, 18-year-old Malik Delonte Moore was the only person killed in D.C. in January. It capped a remarkable period of calm for a city entering its third year recovering from a generational crime spike that in 2023 thrust the nation’s capital into the top tier of the country’s deadliest urban centers. D.C. hadn’t started a year with more than 10 days without a slaying in three decades. By this time last year, there had been nine homicides in the city. Carjackings have also plummeted, dropping fivefold compared with the first month of last year and tenfold compared to 2024.
“It’s a testament to the work of the members of the Metropolitan Police Department have been doing,” interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll said in an interview. “Those are people’s families that don’t have to deal with a loved one who’s no longer here.” And to Moore’s family, he pledged police are “going to do everything we can to try to solve and bring to justice the person who killed Malik.”
Violent and property crimes in the District have largely fallen to or below pre-pandemic levels, police statistics for January show. Those include homicides, robberies, carjackings, burglaries and vehicular thefts. Assaults with dangerous weapons, which include nonfatal shootings, are the lone crime category up this month, although they are still lower than in the years immediately after covid struck in 2020. Crime spiked in cities across the country during pandemic-induced shutdowns that upended routines and jobs and shattered the social safety net.
Reasons for the crime drop are complex, and just as authorities and politicians spread blame when crime spikes, officials are racing to accept credit.
One criminal justice expert said D.C. appears to be mirroring a national trend in the years after covid. City leaders and a council member credit the drop to a reversal two years ago of progressive laws meant to rein in police tactics in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. A police official has cited increased arrests in homicide cases. Last year marked the city’s highest homicide clearance rate in more than a decade.
President Donald Trump has touted his surge of federal law enforcement officers in the District last summer and fall, after casting D.C. as one of the nation’s dystopian Democrat-led cities incapable or unwilling to safely guard its citizenry. Though violent crime in D.C. was already trending down before Trump declared a crime emergency in August, the number of homicides plummeted afterward. In September, the first full month after the federal law enforcement surge, five people were killed — the lowest September figure since 2011.
At the time, some D.C. police officials credited the surge with helping reduce crime, though they also worried that it cost them credibility and increased tensions in communities distrustful of law enforcement. Homicides and robberies dropped by more than half during the surge, and the extra agents augmented a police force struggling with half-century-low staffing.
Trump declared victory in D.C., saying in October “we’ve got no crime” after a weekend in which three people were fatally shot. The next month, the president falsely proclaimed that no homicides had occurred in the District in six months. Sixty people were killed during that period.
The shooting this January on Varnum Street devastated Moore’s family. The victim’s father runs a support group called the “Spirit of Fatherhood,” which attempts to ease pain for families and young men in some of the city’s most challenging wards.
The killing, said Moore’s sister, Ja’Kila Tate, “was just a dispute over something small. This could have been prevented.” The precise details remain murky. D.C. police would not comment on the ongoing investigation.
Police found five rifle casings on a second floor landing of the rowhouse in the Michigan Park neighborhood. A blood trail led down a set of stairs to Moore, who wrote rap music, played football and aspired to open his own vending machine company.
Moore had been shot multiple times and died 40 minutes later at a hospital.
Tate blamed violence in D.C. largely on youth lacking support and resources from young parents. Her brother’s violent death, Tate said, added to a string of family tragedies. His mother — suffering from kidney failure, diabetes and covid — died in 2020 when Moore was 11, and his great-grandmother died two years later.
Tate said her brother grew up in Columbia Heights, where he lost friends to street violence. He most recently lived with his father in Southeast Washington and was about to become a father himself. She said he aspired to running a vending machine company and “was tying to navigate through life” when he was killed.
The District’s homicide count soared to 274 in 2023, a two-decade high, and dropped to 187 in 2024 and 127 in 2025. A wave of carjackings, often more random, sparked fear across the city in 2023, and dropped in the following years and are now at or below pre-pandemic levels.
David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, attributed the decline in District crime to multiple factors, including the return to normal from the pandemic, and conducting more effective community-based violence intervention efforts.
Muhammad, who is consulting with D.C. and has partnered with police departments and cities across the country, said District leaders are continuing with a program called People of Promise, designed to pour resources at more than 200 people believed most likely to be a future victim or perpetrator of homicide. The program struggled in 2022, but Muhammad said he is encouraged by meetings with D.C. leaders as recently as three months ago.
He described the city’s efforts as “focused better and much more organized and data driven, and better at cooperating with other city agencies.” Still, Muhammad said, police “have to focus better on what is most serious and important, like gun violence.”
D.C. Council Member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), credited the crime drop in part to the passage in 2024 of legislation she sponsored that enhanced laws governing policing and harsher punishments to address the crime 2023 crime surge.
“I am tremendously proud of the progress we have made to keep our city safe,” Pinto said in a statement. The council member, who chairs the public safety committee and is running for the congress as D.C.’s nonvoting representative in the U.S. House, also urged passage of new legislation that she said would assist people with employment, housing and youth development, often seen as root causes of crime.
Carroll said the surge in federal law enforcement resources first ordered by Trump, then later extended in an executive order from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, contributed to the drop in crime. He said partners like the Drug Enforcement Administration have provided technology and databases that helped city police close cases. “That’s the area where we see some of the most benefits,” Carroll said.
But the federal law enforcement surge has been met with criticism by D.C. Council members, local advocacy groups and city residents, many of whom urged Bowser and Carroll to do more to extricate the department from Trump’s immigration agenda. As D.C. police have continued to patrol with immigration authorities, residents have expressed distrust in the department.Carroll said police do not participate in civil immigration enforcement, and that their goal whenever they patrol with federal agents is to drive down crime.
Moore’s father, like his son, lost his mother at an early age.
“He did everything he could to help Malik navigate life, grief, and growth without his mom, the same way he had to learn to do himself,” said Tate, the victim’s sister. “Malik was a part of that story, and his life and loss will forever be woven into this work.”
Lydia Sidhom contributed to this report.
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