The Washington Post: Emily Davies takes on new assignment on the Local desk

In this role, Emily will look to break scoops and write high-elevation accounts of how the re-shaped federal government changes life for those who reside in the nation’s capital — and how city and regional leaders adapt. While the role is based on the Local desk, Emily will work closely with the teams chronicling the new administration on National, Business and elsewhere across the newsroom.

In her years on the D.C. crime beat, Emily has demonstrated that she is a high-metabolism reporter who knows how to set the agenda on the biggest stories of the day. She is equally comfortable popping scoops in an hour as she is anchoring deep narratives that seek to hold powerful people to account.

In Emily’s hands, there is no such thing as a dutiful story. When a wayward plane provoked a fighter jet scramble and sonic boom in the D.C. area, Emily landed a heartbreaking interview with a family member of those on board the adrift aircraft and put together a compelling re-telling of the day’s events in a matter of hours. Her true-crime thriller about the arrest of a suspect in a cold-case murder in Chevy Chase still periodically generates a flurry of reader interest. When she was deployed to run after a bear on the loose in Brookland, she came back with a narrative reconstruction that took readers inside rescuers’ harrowing efforts to capture “Franklin” unharmed.

Emily got the key, on-background confirmation that helped us scoop that Council member Trayon White had been arrested by the FBI — a full day before the bureau announced it. She rapidly raised her hand to go to Pennsylvania after former president Donald Trump was shot at a rally there, delivering compelling, on-the-ground-reporting that shined a light on the shooter’s background.

Perhaps most memorably, in 2022, Emily got her hands on a close-hold list of about 230 people D.C. had designated as “People of Promise,” a diplomatic way of referring to a list of those considered most at risk of committing violence — or becoming a victim of violence themselves. The initiative, a key pillar of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s effort to combat crime, was designed to bring intense government services to those on the list. But Emily found that about five months after the city formally launched the program, officials had yet to even contact about half of the people on the list. Meanwhile, many were getting shot, killed or arrested.

Please join us in congratulating Emily on this new assignment, which she starts immediately.