January 15, 2008
Morning Roundup: Fire Away Edition
Good morning, Washington. Mayor Adrian Fenty actually fired the six employees he promised he would yesterday on Sunday night, reports the Post, with dismissal notices for the six reaching their homes at about 10 p.m. that night, about twelve hours before the mayor announced that he planned to fire them. None of the two social workers, two managers and two phone operators who worked at the Child and Family Services Agency have been named. Two other employees may yet be fired. Apart from allaying community concerns about the tragedy of the Jacks murders, Fenty appears to be trying to send a message to District employees with these rapid dismissals -- the mayor is looking for a reason to clean house, and when he finds one, he's not afraid to do it.
Police To Charge Ex-Boyfriend In Shaquita Bell Case: Officials will announce this morning that a murder warrant has been issued for the ex-boyfriend of Shaquita Bell, a D.C. woman who has been missing for 11 years. Bell was last seen on June 27, 1996, leaving her grandmother's house in Alexandria with her estranged boyfriend, Michael Dickerson. She was 23 when she disappeared. Police received a tip from Dickerson, who is currently serving 15 years on other charges, last summer, which led K-9 units to find possible clues in a field in Fort Washington, Md.
MPD to Increase Presence in Adams Morgan and Shaw: The Examiner reports that the Metropolitan Police Department has plans to increase their presence in Adams Morgan after a recent rash of robberies, and in Shaw in an attempt to quell recent gang violence. Police will reportedly hold outdoor roll calls in both neighborhoods and deploy foot patrols to visit with residents every day. Officers have also been asked to stop anyone who is acting suspiciously and check their names for existing warrants.
Briefly Noted: Montgomery College enacts three-month hiring freeze ... Cars pile up after accident on the outerloop of the Beltway ... Utilities expected to rise in Montgomery and Prince George's County ... Washington Times names Washington Post investigative reporter John Solomon as its executive editor.
This Day in DCist: In 2007 we thought it was high time to get a proper memorial for Martin Luther King Jr. in the nation's capital, and in 2006 one DCist writer defended wearing an American flag lapel pin.
Photo by allykit16
|
Now its "outdoor roll calls"?!
Why don't they take it a step further and run the entire Police Department out of corner kiosks.
Re: the Shaw gang problems -- what about following the NYC practice of greatly increasing stopping and frisking? The upside is that it will net a decent amount of weapons, warrant violators, and put gang members on notice. The downside is that if you're young, black and male, you're very likely to be repeatedly stopped and frisked.
"what about following the NYC practice of greatly increasing stopping and frisking? "
The new mayor in Philly (w/ former DC chief Ramsey) is planning to institute stop and frisk. The reaction from the community is lukewarm at best, but the situation in Philly is more dire than in DC. I imagine the community reaction in DC would be worse (see school closings).
heh, funny to see the outgoing guy at the times saying he's "surprised" to see his paper going to the post to get a new leader. solomon is such a right-leaning hack, i'm surprised that he didn't go to work for the times in the first place.
I'd love to attend an outdoor roll call. Maybe bring some popcorn and hot dogs, and a giant foam #1 finger. Root root root for the home team.
what about following the NYC practice of greatly increasing stopping and frisking?
Uh, we have this thing here called "The Constitution" and another little thing called "The Bill of Rights" that prohibits this kind of shit.
I hope they do the outdoor roll call by way of Go-Go.
"All my guys form the third district, over there!"
"YEAH!"
"All my guys from the sub station, over there!"
"HELL, YEAH!"
What is this Punching Game Busted Tees shirt all about? Google was little help.
And when are they going to make a "Superman that ho" t-shirt?
DCfist, you win the Internets for today. I spit out my orange juice.
"Uh, we have this thing here called "The Constitution" and another little thing called "The Bill of Rights" that prohibits this kind of shit."
Terry v. Ohio.
"...the mayor is looking for a reason to clean house, and when he finds one, he's not afraid to do it."
Unless of course you are the CFO who oversaw $40 million plus in fraud. In that case, it's all good.
Where are her PANTS???
I live on the Logan/Shaw border on O Street (the block where the guy was bashed near BeBar)...lately there has been increased presence of cops walking around, or just sitting in their patrol car observing....I hope there will be more-there are lots of scary folks out there!
Yeah, they can implement greater Terry stops, but under Terry stop-and-frisk still requires a "reasonable suspicion" - and there are plenty of decisions that say it can't simply be based on anti-loitering.
(Tho I'm sure the Roberts Supreme Court would be happy to find an anti-loitering law constitutional, given half a chance.)
Re: the little girl's pants in the photo. The kids are looking at an ice rink so I'm going to guess (hope) she's wearing some sort of ice skating outfit.
Uh, we have this thing here called "The Constitution" and another little thing called "The Bill of Rights" that prohibits this kind of shit.
Y'know, you'd think that, wouldn't you? Except that last year, about 800,000 New Yorkers were stopped and frisked. And that's up from about half-a-million in 2006.
Guess how many of them were white?
If you're not hiding anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about. If you look like a gangsta, you're going to get frisked. If there're no warrants for your arrest and you possess nothing illegal then you have no problem. How exactly is this a bad thing??
Out of all the crime in NYC, what percentage is committed by whites?
What is this Punching Game Busted Tees shirt all about? Google was little help.
The "Punching Game" as I know it is called "Asshole". You have to put your hand like it is on the tshirt somewhere below your waste. If a person looks at you "making the asshole" sign then you get a free punch.
"Out of all the crime in NYC, what percentage is committed by whites?"
"Responding to complaints of profiling, the department noted that while 55.2 percent of those stopped were black, 68.5 percent of reported crimes involved suspects described as black."
Though, the chart says blacks were about 83% of the listed stops (the chart doesn't have other races listed, though, so presumably 83% is higher than the reality.. dunno why NYT ignored everyone else).
The linked chart does have data that shows the hit rate is the same for whites and blacks (at about 11-12%). I'm not sure what conclusion can be drawn from that, though.
If you're not hiding anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about.
Isn't the the standard reason why people shouldn't be worried about government eavesdropping? Who cares if complete strangers are going through your stuff, you're not guilty of anything, so it doesn't matter. And the government never makes a mistake, right? Like mistaking Mr. B. E. Fuckregistering with fugitive felon and convicted kitten strangler Mr. B. F. Fuckregistering.
Please read Kafka's The Trial and write a 250-word essay on why this is happening NOW.
If you look like a gangsta, you're going to get frisked.
See, it's times like these that I wish DC had more thugged-out suburban white kids in poopy pants, do rags, and Tupac/Biggie teeshirts.
"See, it's times like these that I wish DC had more thugged-out suburban white kids in poopy pants, do rags, and Tupac/Biggie teeshirts."
Again, what's the percentage of crimes committed by thugged-out suburban white kids in DC? When the percentage of crime is equally distributed, then I'll have sympathy for the poor people who are getting stopped on the street.
As for the wiretaps, you're exactly right. If you think people are sitting around a bar listening to your conversations about posting on DCist then you're nuts!! If I'm conducting shady business overseas to known terrorists, I'd EXPECT surveillance. Plain and simple: don't do anything wrong and you won't get in trouble.
As for having the wrong initials, don't you think there'd be a little more evidence??
And it's at times like these I wish DC had less folks like "fuckregistering".
It’s also a commonly used gang hand gesture for Bloods....so instead of getting punched you might get shot.
"And it's at times like these I wish [the world] had less folks like "fuckregistering"."
Fixed that for you..
Plain and simple: don't do anything wrong and you won't get in trouble.
And by "do anything wrong" you mean "walk down O Street while being a black male."
Here comes the pedestrian version of the DWB.
just to add to m. erotica's well-said statements, if you look at that graph and do a bit of math, you realize that 88.3% of all whites stopped are not arrested or summoned. This compares to 88.9% of all blacks not arrested or summoned. By following the statistics, the police should be stopping more whites, as they are apparently netting slightly higher results from those stops.
Unless of course you think that any black person who looks like your vision of a "gangsta" should be stopped and search because they are PROBABLY guilty, in which case you are Ron Paul.
I wonder what residents of areas with high gang activity would think about increased stop-and-frisks? If it results in a decrease in crime, I would assume they would support it, even if it meant they and their younger residents would be subject to lots of questioning from the coppers.
I live on the Logan/Shaw border on O Street (the block where the guy was bashed near BeBar)...lately there has been increased presence of cops walking around, or just sitting in their patrol car observing....I hope there will be more-there are lots of scary folks out there!
Loganmo: I live on this very block. Besides the BeBar patron getting his wallet stolen a few months back, what else has happened there in the past couple years? For a pretty much inner-city, urban environment, that's a pretty nice block. Don't know what you think is so scary... your black neighbors who probably make up 10 percent of the block? oooh, come save me mr. officer....
You would be wrong. You are familiar with the whole "Stop Snitchin'" phenomenon, correct? That is part of a greater distrust amongst minorities of the police.
OldPoster: I dunno.. while some of the most ardent supporters of CCTV were residents of the areas where the cameras were installed, a camera is much different from a stop and frisk.
Plain and simple: don't do anything wrong and you won't get in trouble.
[tweeeet] I'm throwing the bullshit flag!!
Spoken like someone who has never been pulled over and snatched out of their car on the way home from work. It's been a while since it happened to me, but not doing anything wrong is no guarantee of not getting harassed by the police.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin
I think Loganmo's referring to activites of the various O Street Crews. They had a truce a few months back. According to some, it didn't take.
Anyway, stop-and-frisk isn't about cops arresting gang members for probable cause. We're not talking about beat cops catching dealers red handed with rock or fencing goods or breaking and entering. This is about cops dealing with "suspicious" activity, whateverthehell that means. We're talking about hillrat and Hillman and me walking through Shaw minding our business and the cops start f***ing with hillrat because he's the "wrong" color or they start harrassing Hillman because he likes men (not wisely, but too well). Because once society says that's okay, sooner or later, they're going to get around to harrassing ME just because I'm a legless monkey in diaper and a Radio Flyer buttwagon.
And if the Holocaust has taught us anything it's that, once they've come for the monkeys in the Radio Flyer Buttwagons, IT WILL BE TOO LATE.
No, it's about being able to take action. Giving the police the ability to do something about situations they know are questionable. Cops know what looks suspicious and what doesn't. They don't go around arbitrarily stopping people because of their color, they stop people who give a few double takes when they see cops coming and double back in the other direction. They stop people who are hanging out in an otherwise empty alley at 4am. They stop people who match the description of a robbery that happened 10 minutes ago a few blocks away. The lack of loitering laws makes enforcement in this city a joke, and anything that opens up the ability to bring criminals to justice is a good thing. Cops that abuse that power should be punished, but the punishment should not be the complete removal of a powerful law enforcement tool that works.
And it's times like these when I wish DC had more people like me. Then maybe the crime rate would go down.
Monkey:
Your scenario of the three of us jauntily skipping through Shaw is intriguing.
Of course the obvious twist in DC is that so many cops are black. So when they mess with a black man for no obvious-to-the-untrained-eye reason, is that racism?
I once had a black cop in DC refer to me sneeringly as 'boy', even though I ain't exactly a spring chicken anymore, calling me out for jaywalking even though he let several large black women jaywalk literally right alongside me. Was that racist profiling?
I don't know that us DC homos get jacked up by cops that much, but I know they often don't take our complaints seriously, especially when it comes to complaints of gay domestic violence, gay bashing, etc.
I'd argue that cops in DC too often treat everybody like shit. But I've also seen enough DC cop behavior to know that in a lot of circumstances it helps if you the resident are black. And it helps not to be a woman. Do I have empricial evidence to back that up? No. Just a decade of living here. And, of course, that delightful little case a few years back where DC cops were nailed using racial (mostly anti-white and anti-Latino) and anti-gay, anti-women slurs on their radios.
I'm of two minds about the anti-loitering laws. First, I hate giving control like that to cops in towns where the cops aren't professional. But, I also think that maybe those insisting on a 'right' to hang out on the streetcorner should perhaps be a little less selfish and agree to hang out at someone's actual house or inside, in the interest of improving the neighborhood.
As for DWB, I'd be very interested to see some legit studies on the subject. For instance, since we now take down race stats on traffic stops, is there anything showing that certain races speed at far higher rates of speed than others? Everybody speeds some, but do some racial groups speed more? Is there enough data now to show that cops do pull over more blacks than others and can the reason (race) be isolated and identified?
As for surveillance, anyone that thinks we aren't at constant risk for invasive surveillance is an idiot. The real question is how we regulate use of all this surveillance.
Plain and simple: don't do anything wrong and you won't get in trouble.
If you stop and frisk 20% of one group, and only 2% of the other, of course you are going to be more likely to find criminals in the 20% group. If that group is only 2% of the population, of course it's going to look wildly disproportionate. Throw in some "thug" imagery, and voila, you've got the perfect recipe for self reinforcing stereotypes.
ya know when you drive out to the 'burbs and you see a bunch of white kids hanging out skateboarding? Well if virtually all the crime in that area is committed by skateboarding white kids, why wouldn't you want to 'stop and frisk' them, or at least keep an eye on them??
This is what I don't get about race issues, especially in an area like DC where the HUGE overwhelming majority of crime is committed by minorities. I'm not saying we should harass ALL minorities, but use common sense. Like when you see a group of five teenaged 'thugs', keep an eye on them! Why? Because TONS of crime is being committed by people who fit that description!!
When certain police abuse their power and pull monkey out of her car for being gay (or whatever she was talking about), then they should be punished and held accountable.
. . . they stop people who give a few double takes when they see cops coming and double back in the other direction.
You mean like someone who may have been harassed previously by the cops and wants to stay away from the police?
I'm not a guy who's afraid of much, but the thing that wakes me up in a cold sweat is the knowledge that cops in this country kill people who fit my description with impunity over nothing and get away with it. The courts have repeatedly said that it is reasonable for a well-trained and armed cop to be so afraid of a Black man that it is essence OK for him to shoot first and ask questions later.
Fuck all that, the less I talk to or deal with the police the better off I am.
"Throw in some "thug" imagery, and voila, you've got the perfect recipe for self reinforcing stereotypes."
Haha so you think crime in DC is committed proportionally equal amongst whites, blacks, and latinos?
Krisa, clearly you've never spent any time with black kids in this city. Kids who make good grades, don't miss school, participate in after school programs and on sports teams, volunteer, etc. but are still stoped by the cops because they might live in the "wrong" building or wear the "wrong" clothes. It happens time and time again to perfectly good kids throughout this city (and I'm sure others) and if you think it doesn't happen than shame on you.
Think about this way (maybe on terms that will help you understand) but if you're driving in your car somewhere and even though you know you are not doing one thing wrong, if a cop comes along beside/behind you, doesn't that make you nervous? Doesn't that make you do a double take?
"but are still stoped by the cops because they might live in the "wrong" building or wear the "wrong" clothes."
You have a valid point about the 'wrong' building.
But I h