In just over a month D.C. voters will head to the polls for the city’s critical primary election, where they will choose their party nominees for mayor, attorney general, various seats on the D.C. Council, and more.
The marquee race is on the mayoral side, where seven Democrats are vying to succeed Mayor Muriel Bowser. (There’s still a general election in November, but the Democratic primary is often seen as the decisive contest.) As June 16 approaches, candidates have sharpened their attacks, and nowhere has that been more obvious than with apparent frontrunners Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George.
But as with politics generally, some of those accusations have a complicated relationship with the truth. Below we’re looking at two attacks that came up in recent debates: One claiming that Janeese Lewis George supports divesting from police, and another arguing that Kenyan McDuffie was responsible for D.C.’s disastrous rollout of a sports betting app. Tomorrow we’ll delve into a few other attacks, including ones on alleged tax increases and Trump donor dollars.
Defund the police
Public safety isn’t as prevalent an issue as it was in 2023 — when D.C. experienced a significant spike in homicides, carjackings, and other violent crime — but it still finds a way into every election cycle.
Currently, there’s persistent talk of so-called teen takeovers (and debates over teen curfew zones in response), controversy over possible crime data manipulation within MPD (which last week led to 13 senior officials being put on leave and possibly fired), and concerns around the significant amount of overtime D.C. is paying annually for police (roughly $100 million) and whether that means the city should hire more officers.
But at a debate late last month on WUSA9 Kenyan McDuffie went after Janeese Lewis George with a significant accusation: She supports defunding the police. "I'm not going to divest from the police like my opponent, I’m going to invest to make sure it’s community oriented," he said. He repeated the claim at another debate a few days later: “She’s the one who has pushed divesting from the police.”
Is it true?
McDuffie was referencing a tweet from Lewis George dating back to 2019 (before she was first elected to the D.C. Council) where she said, “I will absolutely divest from MPD and put the money into violence interruption programs.” So, in a narrow technical sense, Lewis George has “pushed” to divest from MPD. (That same year she also tweeted that "more policing doesn't work... we can't enforce our way to safer communities.")
But, using the same logic, one could argue that McDuffie did actually divest from police — or at least was part of a push to do so. If there was ever an actual “defunding” of MPD, it happened in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, kicking off a wave of protests across the country. The council — which Lewis George hadn’t yet joined, but McDuffie was on — voted to pull $15 million from MPD’s budget, which at the time was more than $550 million. (Because of the complexity of how MPD is funded, though, it isn't even clear there was much of a cut that year at all.)
Also, later that year, McDuffie himself said pretty much exactly what he’s now accusing Lewis George of. “We need to redirect funding away from the police department to other government agencies in other priorities and invest in those communities where people have been over-policed for years,” he said in response to a report that said certain MPD units only used violence against Black residents.
“This is just a fear-mongering tactic,” Lewis George told me last week about McDuffie’s attacks. “This has been brought up in every campaign I have ever run. It’s usually a Republican tactic. I think the facts are clear: the last six years I have been on the council I have voted to fund the police budget.”
This could be a case of guilt by association: The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Lewis George, said in a questionnaire for candidates that it supports “reducing the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) budget by 50% over a three-year period.” (In her answers to the group’s questions, though, Lewis George did not directly endorse that view.)
Despite their past statements, both Lewis George and McDuffie now say they want to hire more officers for MPD — which currently has around 3,100, down from roughly 3,800 five years ago. In fact, McDuffie made news during those same debates by putting a number to his goal: He says he wants to hire 1,000 new officers. When I asked him how he would accomplish that, given that increased $25,000 hiring bonuses in recent years have only done so much, he said he would look to double them.
Generally speaking, Lewis George and McDuffie probably coincide more on criminal justice reform than they differ. McDuffie authored the NEAR Act, the 2016 bill that pushed D.C. to treat violence as a public health problem and kicked off the city’s investment in violence interruption programs — which Lewis George has long supported. (In the same 2019 tweet where she said more policing wouldn't work, Lewis George added, "We need to take a public health approach to violence and treat is like the disease it is.") More recently, they were both on the same side of a push to limit a bill that would have increased the use of pre-trial detention for people accused of crimes. And when the council passed the Secure D.C. omnibus public safety legislation in 2024, both Lewis George and McDuffie raised concerns with specific provisions — but both ultimately voted for the bill.
They have, though, been on opposing sides of the debate on whether D.C. should be able to declare 8 p.m. teen curfew zones as a means to prevent so-called teen takeovers, with Lewis George repeatedly opposing their use (especially since Trump surged federal agents and the National Guard into the city). McDuffie supports the zones as part of a broader plan that would include more alternative programming, jobs programs, and access to mental health services.
Since both McDuffie and Lewis George served on the council, their records provide rich fodder for campaign attacks. And recently, Lewis George unveiled a new one.
“We’re also not going to be putting forth bad deals like the sports betting deal that cost us millions of dollars that my colleague Mr. McDuffie oversaw,” she said. That, of course, is in reference to what many now admit was one heck of an albatross in the world of D.C. deals: the bill that legalized sports betting in D.C., and the contract that ultimately brought it to the city.
After the Supreme Court tossed out a federal law outlawing sports betting in 2018, states — and D.C. — rushed to legalize it. In order to get the jump on Maryland and Virginia, the city’s chief financial officer at the time proposed that the council give a sports betting contract directly to Intralot, the company that had for years run the city’s lottery program, instead of opening it up to a competitive bid or allowing multiple players into the market. The council ultimately agreed, and the results were generally disastrous: Intralot’s app was so buggy that few people even used it, costing D.C. significant amounts of potential tax revenue. In 2024, the council reversed course, opening the city to multiple sports betting apps.
McDuffie’s role in all of this is nuanced. As he responded during the debate, the move to sole-source the sports betting contract was spearheaded by former Ward 2 councilmember Jack Evans. McDuffie voted against skipping the competitive bidding process, though he ultimately supported giving the contract to Intralot after the council went with sole-sourcing. (Like other councilmembers, he was enticed by the promise that revenue from sports betting would pay for childcare programs and violence interruption.) He did author an amendment, though, requiring that a certain percentage of the contract go to local businesses. (His cousin was reportedly linked to one of those companies, but McDuffie said he had no advance knowledge of the apparent connection and the company said it was a clerical error.)
As chair of the council’s business and economic development committee, it later fell to McDuffie to do oversight of the sports betting app. He generally pressed the D.C. Lottery hard on why Intralot’s app didn’t often work and why the expected revenue wasn’t rolling in, but it wasn’t until early 2024 that he introduced a bill that ultimately opened up the city to private sports betting alternatives like DraftKings and FanDuel. (Interestingly, former staffers in McDuffie's council office worked on both sides of the debate; one worked alongside Intralot, another with private sports betting companies that wanted to break into D.C.'s market.)
Though the sports betting mess is largely in the rearview mirror, the shadow it cast is long. Emmanuel Bailey, a local businessman who partnered with Intralot to manage sports betting in D.C., has spent $45,000 through his Regional Alliance for Small Business Executives independent expenditure committee to support McDuffie’s mayoral bid.
Martin is a longtime reporter and editor in D.C. He formerly worked for WAMU 88.5 and DCist.com, and has contributed to the Washington City Paper and other publications. He's been in D.C. for 25 years, and tries to ride his bike everywhere he can.
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