Crime Season Kicks Off in D.C.
Just like the public swimming pools open over Memorial Day, there's usually an unofficial kick-off to the summer crime season in the District. It's never on the same day and it's usually not just one event, but rather a series of incidents that invariably provoke a response from the police and politicians. This year, it looks like it's come a little earlier than usual, and the city is already grappling with ways to respond.
In July 2006, the brutal murder of British citizen Alan Senitt in Georgetown and 13 other homicides in the same number of days during the month provoked a series of extreme crime prevention measures from local politicians. Then Mayor Anthony Williams declared a "crime emergency" and the D.C. Council passed legislation imposing a beefed up curfew for minors and funding the installation of what would become the first of the city's surveillance cameras.
In 2007, a rash of robberies and other crimes saw new D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier introduce the "All Hands on Deck" initiative, flooding the city's streets with all available police officers designed to be a show of force to tamp down on crime -- at least briefly.
In 2008, a spike in killings in Trinidad led to the introduction of the "Neighborhood Safety Zone," a seemingly friendly name for what ended up being driver checkpoints on roads leading into the neighborhood. (The legality of such stops are still being debated in the courts.)
This year, the crime kick-off appears to have already happened. Last week, Ward 1 saw a number of shootings, including a brazen 11 p.m. killing in Columbia Heights on Friday and incidents in Adams Morgan and Mt. Pleasant. And just yesterday, four people were shot during rush hour along North Capitol Street in what police are calling a gang-related incident.
This sudden outbreak of shootings coincides with a crime bill that Mayor Adrian Fenty wants passed by the D.C. Council on an emergency basis by early June. The mayor's legislation would increase penalties for gun crimes and grant police more tools to crack down on gang activity. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who chairs the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, has scheduled a series of hearings to debate a number of the bill's more controversial positions, a move that has not pleased Fenty and Attorney General Peter Nickles. On Monday, Nickles made clear his impatience with Mendelson's hearings, saying, “I don’t want the record to have a lot of namby-pamby about this issue." Mendelson has fired back by saying that it's the mayor's fault that the debates have started this late and that the council has the prerogative to study and question bills submitted by the mayor.
If tradition continues, we're looking at several months of increased summer violence and subsequent reactions by city officials and police. It's not an easy position to be in - Fenty and Lanier are forced by public opinion to propose immediate solutions to criminal problems that have much deeper roots than a police checkpoint or surveillance camera could adequately address. That being said, these solutions — flooding the city with police, beefing up curfews, forcing the council to debate massive crime bills on short notice — are all too often imposed in fits of desperation and without adequate discussion as to their merits. We hope this could change, but recent years don't exactly provide a lot of hope on that score.