Crime Emergency! Oooo. Can you just hear/feel/see the sirens wailing down the road? Ok, so it’s kind of morbidly useful to count the days since the last murder in the District, as they seem to be happening almost daily.
Why.i.hate.dc has come to the rescue with their murder tracker. As of now, it reads: 0 days since last murder.
But he hits it right on the nail with his second murder tracker: 18 days since last murder in Georgetown. I find this very sadly accurate of how the media and the public differentiates murders based on the person murdered and the location of the crime.
Murders happen more often in the SE or far NE, but you never hear about them. Hell, you wouldn’t even know the street names the 11 o’clock news throws at you — 4400 block of Erie St. SE? But one murder in Georgetown, and the District goes nuts. A cop, Inspector Solberg, gets fired for making a racially insensitive comment about African-Americans in Georgetown (for the record, I disagree with Chief Ramsey’s assessment of what Solberg said). Not soon after this, plus after some more assaults on locals and tourists in the Mall, a crime emergency is declared.
If you’re going to get murdered, do it in an affluent neighborhood and you’ll get plastered in the newspapers. If it’s way out in Congress Heights, it won’t even make page B1 in the Post.
This sucks.
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This is weird, despite hearing all these reports of murders in the DC area, I’ve never felt that living in DC could actually be that dangerous… maybe I should take back what I just said, for fear of karma *knocking on wood*.
I don’t think living in DC is dangerous, but some extra vigilance would be useful at this point, I think. Say, when you’re walking around at night by yourself.
by the way, hope you had a great birthday!
hehe… another Cancer in the blogosphere?
It does suck that the murders in the Southeast and the Northeast aren’t noticed in the news channels, and only exist as a small blurb in the District section of the Washington Post.
However, I do worry for my safety even though I live in Adams Morgan, but I live just a few blocks away from the Northeast, so I do hear about murders happening on streets that I’ve been on.
What I really want for all of D.C. is a noticeable police patrol presence, you know, the kind that actually get out of their cars to patrol the streets on foot. I always felt safe in New York City, even at 4 in the morning. In New York City, you’d see cops on the streets, and I believe it was a great visual deterrence to criminals.
Here, the cop cars just drive on by, and with the flashing lights, criminals know that there’s a cop in the area just by seeing those lights a mile away.
Adams Morgan isn’t ‘a few blocks away from the Northeast.’
No, it’s not. You’re right on that. However, the NW is considered a “safe” area of D.C. but the further you go east past 16th street and U Street, the more dangerous it gets. The further you go west towards 39th street, the safer it is with the exception of the murder in Georgetown.
Noelle is right. I used to live a few blocks from Adams Morgan (that narrow space between Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights - not quite AM but not quite CH). We lived in the NW quadrant but it definitely did not have that “Georgetown” feel. It does feel “a few blocks away from the Northeast” in that area in terms of safety. Now we’re in the NE quadrant close to CUA and it feels safer than the NW area we lived in.
Regardless, increased police presence would be nice. I do want to add here that we’ve observed several times that MPD officers just don’t appear to care. There they are driving around in their cars, lights flashing and on their cell phones.
Anyone remember the Jason Lamberton thing where he caught cops riding on the hood of a police car while it was rolling (what is that called anyway - road surfing…?). It was big news for a while then nothing happened (that I’m aware of anyway). Increase police presence, sure, but please also improve the attitude and vigilance of MPD officers while you’re at it.
Several police officers were disciplined and I think two got demotions in rank, along with being suspended without pay for a month.
NW is considered the safest, but more property crime and theft happens there because that’s where more valuable property is located. Crime gravitates towards where there’s an ample supply of money and victims.
Check out my Google map I built this weekend to plot crimes in DC:
http://www.crimeindc.org
I’d like to see people be more aware of criminal activity in their neighborhoods so they themselves will not become victims.
Not too long ago (I think it was last year), somebody got stabbed at the Silver Spring metro station and I accidentally found myself standing right on the blood. Kind of gives you a new perspective on “Oops, I did it”.
And where do they sell mace sprays, anyway?
I do not think a can of mace spray is fast enough to get inside from your purse. In Florida we are allowed to carry a concealed weapons license. A lot of women carry a handgun for protection. There are pro and con’s of using weapons.
Washington, D.C. does not allow concealed weapons permit for other than law enforcement or people carrying money for business.
If criminals carry a gun and how can you defend yourself? That is the question most people ask.
That’s why I think the D.C. ban on handguns is bullshit because only law-abiding citizens obey that ban while the criminals get away with having a handgun to rob a citizen. Oh, and the criminals barely get a slap on the wrist for violating that ban.
They should get a ten-year or a twenty-year mandatory imprisonment.
If you read the Tipping Point book and the “Broken Window” Theory, you can see how New York City cleaned up their crime.
Basically, they would have a visible police presence everywhere and crack down on the tiniest infractions including graffiti in subways. The theory is that you deter the smalll/minor crimes and it prevents people from coming to these areas and thus the bigger crimes. Some has said that 9/11 increased the presence in DC and recently, that presence has declined a little.
Check the book out.
Yet, the criminals still get their guns regardless.
That’s true - in the 1980s, you would see police vehicles driving through the streets of Manhattan once a while and the crime rate was high. Now after Guiliani became mayor in the 1990s, you can see police vehicles everywhere and several adult entertainment shops were forced to close in the Times Square area. That’s what I call cleaning up!
I’ve read The Tipping Point and the “Broken Windows” theory does sound plausible but Freakomics disputes that theory. In Freakomics, the author asserts that the reason the crime wave went down is because of the legalization of abortion. His theory is that the less unwanted babies there are growing up in bad environments, the less potential criminals there are. According to Freakomics, Rudy G. and his top cop took all the credit for something that was already happening. The crime wave was already going down before they started cleaning up Times Square.
Yep = both theories have credibility but I think it’s a combination of things. The abortion theory is not something we can control. The police presence is.
However, let’s look at the root causes = is the economy doing well enough for the have-nots? There’s a rising divide beween the rich and the poor.
I hope I don’t offend anyone here, but here in Washington, there is a deep segregration between race and class. In an affluent neighborhood that is predominately white, the residents have more political and social connections with the government. So, it’s no surprise that the Georgetown murder forced the D.C. administration to revamp its police department in which the mayor proposed hiring 800+ more police officers to reduce the crime rate. In constrast, poor, black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia have little or no political connections with the police and government and the residents are used to living in fear and tension because “snitching” to the police will likely get you killed. So, that may partially explain the high crime rate.
Read this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01756.html
So, ironically, the murder - while tragic - may be a good thing for this city because if it results in more police visibility, then the black residents might have a rare opportunity to live in peace and harmony.
You’re right about Washington having a deep segregation between race and class. It’s the only city that I’ve noticed such a wide racial disparity in terms of class. It’s astonishing in terms of the divide.
You’re so right, C&D. It had to be said and you put it very nicely.
I blogged twice about similar incidents outside of Gallaudet this year and last about Gally students getting mugged. http://kokonutpundits.blogspot.....-near.html
And yet I get emails or elsewhere in other blogs saying that I was slamming Gallaudet.
*sigh*
Case in point about MPD. Make of it what you will:
http://franksid.spaces.msn.com/blog/cns!E56A21068255A194!190.entry