Departing Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier tells the Washington Post she is frustrated by a system that she said allows repeat violent offenders back on the street time after time. The Post says the “chief of nearly 10 years unleashed a blunt rebuke of the myriad local and federal agencies responsible for keeping offenders in check, saying there are too many failures and too little accountability.” She said the fact that the capital’s criminal justice system is “beyond broken” and the lack of outrage over repeat offenders was a key reason for her decision to take a job as head of security for the National Football League.
Lanier cited the arrest of a man last week who she said was on home detention when his GPS tracking device became inoperable. Police allege the man then went on a crime rampage, including a robbery, a shooting, and a car theft that resulted in a crash that left a bystander critically injured. “That person’s GPS went offline Aug. 12,” Lanier said. “We didn’t know it. The agency that supervises that person didn’t tell anybody or do anything with it. . . . That shouldn’t happen. And it’s happening over and over and over again. Where the hell is the outrage? . . . People are being victimized who shouldn’t be. You can’t police the city if the rest of the justice system is not accountable.” She added that people “want more police. They want more arrests, but if we’re arresting the same people over and over again, there’s got to be some questions being asked.”
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