Crime Doesn't Pay, But Neither Does the Alternative
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
I'll admit, it isn’t easy for me to talk about crime in the District with many of my friends, particularly those who live in the suburbs or outside the metro area entirely. In the minds of those who don’t often visit, Washington is still the murder capital of the United States, still caught in crack wars, still a place into which one ventures at his or her own risk. Hearing such beliefs frustrates me a great deal; Washington, really, is nothing like the perpetual crime scene it once was. Homicides have fallen 65 percent from the dark days of the early nineties. Even with the recent revelation that violent crime went up 9 percent last year, the city is on pace for fewer homicides than experienced in 2005, and several categories of crime appear to have fallen since last year (at least to the extent that we can have confidence in those statistics). Washington is a different place than it used to be.
And yet, I can’t argue that all is well in the District. At some point, one has to stop using the worst days of the city as the appropriate context for comparison and acknowledge that crime remains a serious problem. Forget how far we’ve come; we should not be pleased with the status of public safety in Washington. Increasingly, I find myself having to own up to this fact, to myself and to those inquiring about life in our nation's capital.
Like many aspects of District governance, the lack of change is maddening. When I moved here in 2001, 14th Street from north of Thomas Circle to Park Road and beyond was a long stretch of empty lots, vacant and decaying properties, and rampant crime. Everyone—papers, police, and residents—knew where the hot spots were. There was 14th and Girard, for instance, and there was 13th and Fairmont. Years later, that area has been almost entirely rebuilt, property values have increased three and fourfold, and yet the stories remain the same. Everyone knows that the crime is there, at 14th and Girard and at 13th and Fairmont, and nothing, apparently, can be done about it. How can this be?
Certainly, at some level, this is a failure of policing. Setting aside all other aspects of the problem, the persistent presence of crime in plain site at known locations speaks to deep dysfunction in the way police resources are used. This needs to change, and one hopes that Chief Lanier’s summer crime initiative is a step in the right direction.
And yet, the failures go beyond the distribution and utilization of police manpower. Amid all the changes that this city has experienced in the last decade, certain crime patterns persist. What explains these circumstances, and what can the city possibly do about it?
Picture taken by e.teel.
There is a compelling storyline circulating among economists and criminologists concerning the role of economic inequality in crime. In particular, crime specialists point to the incidence of crime in “transition zones,” noting that locations containing sharp income disparities are prime locations for criminal activity. To a certain extent, Washington’s crime statistics bear this out. Using the crime map feature at dc.gov for any particular month, one is likely to see a thick line standing out among the scattered crimes. This line moves south through Ward 1 to U Street, cuts diagonally from there through Shaw and down Florida Avenue to Trinidad, and then moves south through the Hill East area to Near Southeast. It’s not exactly concurrent with what you might call the gentrification frontier, but it’s not far off either. Many of the older, middle class residents have left those neighborhoods, leaving a hard core of poverty behind to butt up against new inflows of money. It’s certainly probable that this dynamic has contributed to crime in the city.
And yet, that storyline leaves far too much unexplained. On the one hand, much of the violence being done in transition areas takes place among the poor. In many cases, particularly where gangs or drug rings are involved, newer and richer residents are bystanders to ongoing turf wars. Interestingly, development in these neighborhoods has not priced out the old crime, which proceeds apace even as the Starbucks and Target go in.
It’s also important to note that those crime maps show another thick line, far from the main course of gentrification, running diagonally through Wards 7 and 8. Roughly half of the homicides this year have taken place east of the Anacostia River. While some of the city’s Wards have displayed generally positive trends on many categories of crime, Ward 8 has universally backtracked. Homicides are up, violent crime is up, and property crime is up, despite no new massive inmigration of people or dollars.
The factor that connects crime in gentrifying and non-gentrifying areas is the presence of young people, particularly males, with almost no hope for success through participation in the licit economy. Crime across the city is fueled by the attraction of young people to gangs and crews, to involvement in drug sales, and to casual petty crimes, because such individuals have so little to lose. For many juveniles the call is made easier by a general lack of punitive costs for those who are caught, but for all of those involved, the lack of an economic incentive to play it straight is real and serious.
Government has failed these young people across the board. The poor condition of our schools and of many neighborhoods has made it impossible for young people to see what a way out might look like. At the same time, neglect of lower income individuals at a national level has reduced the return to even modest economic success. The city continues to rely on transplanted economic activity to save poor areas when attempts to assist an organic local economy could be far more effective. How, one wonders, is the new Metro headquarters in Anacostia going to bring hope to local residents? It isn’t enough to bring business into downtrodden areas; we have to make sure that residents can participate in that business, and we have to make sure that participation is worth their while.
I support the city’s efforts to improve policing. The city owes it to law abiding citizens to make streets safe, and part of deterring crime is ensuring that there are costs to choosing to break the law. But the city is going to continue fighting a losing battle if it doesn’t devote significantly more resources to changing the equation that faces the young people of Washington. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make such change the city’s top priority.
We need to start from the beginning. Mayor Fenty should move forward on his goal of universal public preschool. Beyond that, fixing the public school system is an absolute must. Part of that effort must include a fight against truancy, which is epidemic in Washington schools. The city should also work to develop programs to keep kids busy when they’re not in school. If the Boys and Girls Clubs of Washington aren’t able to serve District children, then the city should step up. Washington can’t do enough to provide activities to its youth—sports leagues, public projects, and involvement with local business.
The efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to get more Washington kids in college are highly laudable, and the city can do more. The District should partner with local community colleges to get young adults into programs to give them usable skills. The city also needs to adjust its thinking on business development in poorer neighborhoods. Bringing in large office projects is great for the city’s tax base but provides minimal opportunity for local residents who aren’t already a part of the office economy. The city should be focusing on encouraging local business where it can, through tax breaks and training, and by easing access to business credit. We have to find ways to get everyone involved in the local economy; if we cannot create a legal pathway to economic success for all District residents, then crime will not disappear.
It won’t be cheap or easy, but the alternative—large scale police crackdowns while we wait for development to push out crime—is also costly and morally unsatisfying, and it may not prove effective. I wish Mayor Fenty and Chief Lanier the best of luck in their efforts to make the city safer this summer, but I hope our leadership sees that there is much more to be done. In large part, the responsibility for that falls on us. When crime surges, residents demand police action. While similar outcries are heard regarding public schools, there simply isn't great public pressure to make the economy work for poor Washingtonians. It's up to the residents of D.C. to demand accountability on public problems beyond police enforcement and school improvement. We need to make clear that we won't accept widespread economic failure among the city's poor. Hopefully, the city's residents believe that's a goal worth having.