District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier will put all 3,800 uniformed officers on patrol this weekend to kick off her summer anti-crime initiative.

More police will walk the beat, and the department will install five new surveillance cameras, bringing to 24 the number of cameras placed around the District.

The surge comes as the District tries to get a handle on a string of homicides. Four were reported last weekend, including the shooting death of 13-year-old Terry Cutchin in Columbia Heights. For the year, the District has seen 75 murders, compared with 65 at this point last year, an increase of 15 percent.

Lanier has planned for several weeks to put all her police officers on the street this weekend to jump-start her summer policing program, D.C. spokeswoman Traci Hughes said.

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The police chief plans to reveal the rest of her initiative Friday.

“This is definitely not in response to what happened last weekend,” Hughes said. The weekend surge is to make the police force as visible as possible, she said. Officers will be on foot, scooters, Segways, mountain bikes, motorcycles and in police cruisers.

Lanier has vowed to make the force proactive rather than reactive, and her goal has been to reduce crime without resorting to costly crime emergencies used by her predecessor.

Last year, after the District suffered 13 murders in 11 days, then-Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared an emergency that allowed him to force his officers to work six-day weeks over several months.

Crime fell, but the overtime payments cost the city an extra $14.5 million and put a strain on the police force.

Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police Labor Committee, commended Lanier for tailoring her police resources to each neighborhood and letting her district commanders determine when and where the officers should be deployed, but he said sending every officer out this weekend undermines those efforts.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com