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.
