WASHINGTON (WUSA9) -- An increase in violence in the Washington D.C. over the last few weeks prompted community leaders to meet Saturday to come up with long-term solutions to break the cycle.
So far in 2015, there have been 73 homicides in Washington, an increase of nearly 18 percent from this time last year.
For these community leaders, the latest concentration of violent crime has a familiar echo, and their meeting in Anacostia was a familiar solution.
"This has been done in the past, where in 2008 everyone came together and we had four straight years of murder rate going down and violence going down," Ron Moten of the Art of Peace initiative said.
But breaking the cycle is not going to be easy, and the synthetic drug problem is drawing comparisons to the crack epidemic 30 years ago.