Police: 1 Dead, 5 Injured in Washington DC Shooting

Gunfire erupted on the streets of Washington, D.C., on the night of Sept. 19, leaving several injured and one dead, according to local news reports.

ABC affiliate WJLA-TV posted images on Twitter of ambulances with victims.

Metropolitan Police Department officials confirmed the shooting took place near 14th St. and Columbia Road, which is about 2 miles from the White House.

Officials said one person is dead while the injuries range from non-critical to critical.

The station’s Jay Korff reported that it was a “possible drive-by” shooting, adding the police response was “massive.”

It was not immediately clear if a suspect had been taken into custody in the incident, but a law enforcement source told Reuters it was not considered an “active shooter” situation. The source said the five wounded victims of the shooting were expected to survive their injuries.

According to Fox5, five men and one woman were shot.

The incident took place along the 1300 block of Columbia Road NW at around 10:06 p.m. local time in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.

Police blocked sidewalks in the area as they investigate the case, reported the Washington Post.

A Google Street View photo shows the intersection near the shooting (Google Street View)

The names of the victims were not released. Police have not revealed a motive.

Other details about the incident are not clear.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

Stock photo of a police car. (Shutterstock)

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Reuters contributed to this report.