Heather Curtis
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON — (WMAL) Police chiefs from large cities throughout the country are seeing increasing murder rates. In August members of the Major Cities Chiefs Association got together, compared notes and found a common trend – many of the people charged with murders have long rap sheets of charges for violent crimes.

Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger, who also serves as the association’s president, said these people often took plea deals to get shorter sentences than they should have and then got out of prison just to commit more violent crimes.

He said there needs to be sentencing reform. Judges should be required to look at a person’s entire criminal history when deciding sentences so they can see what the original charges were and if the person took a plea deal.

“You need to determine who in our community is committing violent crimes. Who in our community is a danger to the community because of their behavior and the crimes that they’re committing, and let’s focus on keeping those folks off the street,” Manager said.

He said he had a recent case in Montgomery County where a man got out of jail after serving only a few years of a 12-year sentence for drug distribution and then killed his wife. Not only was this man running a major drug distribution chain, Manger said he also had a history of committing violent crimes that a judge would have seen if his entire criminal record had been reviewed at sentencing.

While many cities are seeing repeat violent offenders committing murders, D.C. also found many of those people are using illegal guns.

So far this this year, D.C. Police have confiscated more than 1,100 illegal guns, including 83 between August 28 and Sept. 8 according to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. She didn’t say whether any of these had been used in shootings.

“We do trace all of the firearms that we recover. We can not always trace their origins, so we get that data from the ATF,” D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said at a press conference in August adding most of the illegal guns in D.C. come from neighboring Maryland and Virginia.

Manger, who previously served as the chief of police for Fairfax County, Virginia, said many illegal firearms come from gun shows in the commonwealth. While some vendors do background checks before making sales, others don’t.

“And this is the dirty little secret. How many of these transactions go on in the parking lot out of the trunk of somebody’s car? Believe me. It happens,” Manger said.

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