AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Shirley
A citizen-led effort to hold local officials in the nation’s capital responsible for the wave of violence and lawlessness gripping the city is gaining steam.
In February, Diana Alvarez, a local business owner in Washington, D.C., formally launched an effort to unseat Democrat D.C. council member Brianne K. Nadeau, who represents Ward 1 (Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, U Street) and has held office since 2015. Nadeau now becomes the second member of the council to face removal after another group of D.C. residents began collecting signatures to hold a recall election for Democrat Charles Allen of Ward 6 (Capitol Hill, H Street, Navy Yard).
In an interview with Fox and Friends First, Alvarez stated that the final straw was when her business, a smoke shop in Columbia Heights, was broken into and robbed three times in a two-week span. “It’s just been really disheartening what’s happening right now in the city,” Alvarez, a 41-year-old D.C. native, said.
While D.C. has been one of the nation’s most dangerous cities for decades, in recent years the crime problem has become notably worse – in part due to Democrat efforts to gut the police budget and reduce penalties for criminal offenders. Last year was the deadliest in D.C. since 1997, with a total of 274 murders. The number of murders in 2022 and 2021 also topped the 200 mark.
Alvarez specifically cited a spike in carjackings and violent assaults in Ward 1 as reason for starting the recall effort, noting that Nadeau supported policies which only further encourage lawlessness. “[Nadeau] has voted to eliminate amended mandatory minimum sentences on repeat offenders. She also voted to reduce penalties on violent crime, causing a revolving door for these criminals to be able to just do whatever they want. They get caught, they get put in jail, but then they’re back in the streets committing more crime and chaos,” Alvarez said.
Nadeau is currently in her third term on the D.C. council after winning the 2022 Democrat primary with 49 percent of the vote. As Axios has reported, her top opponent in that race “had positioned himself as a former cop who argued the incumbent was soft on crime.” Nadeau was ultimately re-elected with more than 80 percent of the vote in the general election.
Meanwhile, momentum is continuing to build in the recall effort against Ward 6 council member Charles Allen. As AMAC Newsline reported in January, government worker Jennifer Squires, who says she voted for Allen in 2022, launched the campaign to remove him from office late last year.
An X account dedicated to the recall effort, which had 1,400 followers in January, has now grown to nearly 2,400 followers.
Additionally, the Allen recall campaign announced the last week of February that it had already raised more than $100,000 – a sizable sum considering most D.C. council races only raise a few hundred thousand dollars in election years. Meanwhile, the anti-recall effort has only been able to raise about $50,000.
Former Ward 6 Democrat council member Tommy Wells is leading the campaign to defeat the recall and keep Allen in office. Despite the fact that the recall was initiated by Democrats and many of its supporters are self-described Democrats, Wells is attempting to portray them all as radical right-wing insurgents. In an interview with Axios, Wells stated that the recall is led by “MAGA people… lobbyists, and people who do not want to believe in democracy for D.C.”
When the interviewer pointed out that many of the recall supporters are Democrats, Wells stated, “They’ve made a bargain with the devil by bringing in people they either have to apologize for or find a way they need to disassociate themselves from.”
So far, however, it is Nadeau and Allen who have been desperately trying to disassociate themselves from their prior support for the “Defund the Police” movement and a series of extreme left-wing criminal justice “reforms” that led to a surge in crime throughout the city.
In 2020, Nadeau posted on social media that she supports “calls to defund MPD” and “get police out of our schools.” She also voted to cut police funding by $15 million and reduce sentence lengths for violent offenders.
Allen, meanwhile, was the architect of an attempted overhaul to the D.C. criminal code that was so extreme it was vetoed by Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser and then rejected by the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and President Joe Biden. Allen also ushered through a bill which restricted police officers’ right to collective bargaining and outlawed a number of common procedures used to stop and question individuals suspected of committing a crime – policies which led directly to a mass exodus of police officers from the nation’s capital.
The first hurdle for the recall campaigns will be garnering enough signatures to force a recall election later this year. D.C. law requires a recall campaign to collect signatures from “at least 10% of registered voters in their ward in order to force a special election.”
Both Ward 1 and Ward 6 are home to about 80,000 people, meaning the recall campaigns will need roughly 8,000 verified signatures. However, city officials are notorious for tossing out large numbers of signatures as invalid. Therefore, the recall campaigns will likely need to collect at least 10,000 signatures to ensure they have enough to advance to a vote.
If the recall campaigns do collect enough signatures, it would be the first time in D.C.’s history that a city council member faces a recall election. Given the state of crime in the city, it can’t come soon enough.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
