Crime - Greater Greater Washington

Make the MBT safer

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:53:00 EDT

Residents along the Metropolitan Branch Trail (and Tommy Wells and Kenyan McDuffie) walk the trail together to raise awareness of safety issues and encourage people to keep using the trail. (Post)

Comment

Young kids try to assault me while biking

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:44:00 EDT

by Geoff Hatchard

While I was riding Capital Bikeshare home through Capitol Hill last night, a 12-year-old girl and a group of other kids tried to assault me.

Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

I'm totally fine. The police caught the girl, and her mother promised to take action. Will this experience get the girl to shape up before she gets a criminal record that could impair her future?

I was taking the Green Line home from work. We arrived at the Anacostia station, and the train doors were held open for over ten minutes. I decided to leave the station and find another way home.

I hopped on a Capital Bikeshare bike at the station and headed north, across the 11th Street bridge. When I got to the corner of 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE, I had to wait for a red light. Four kids were standing on the corner, next to the fence that has been put up around the charred remains of Frager's Hardware Store. There were three girls and one boy, all around the same age (12 or so).

One of the girls approached me and asked for five dollars. I told her I didn't have any cash on me. She looked at the bike and said, "You need money to pay for that, right?"

I told her, "Yes, I use a credit card."

She said, "Credit cards have money on them, give me some!"

The light turned green at that point, and I said, "Sorry, no, I have to go."

As I started across Pennsylvania Avenue, she lunged at me, pushed on my backpack, and yelled, "Give me money! Give me money!" a couple times, while the other kids laughed. The events of Tuesday on the Metropolitan Branch Trail (MBT) came to mind, and I turned around to make sure the other kids weren't coming after me. I scolded them and asked if they heard about the MBT assault.

The boy in the group started yelling, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Get the fuck out of my neighborhood!" At this point, I realized I could hurry up and bike away, but I wasn't in the mood to let these kids think they could get away with threatening someone on a bicycle, so I yelled out, "These kids are trying to assault me."

I moved my bicycle to the southwest corner of the intersection (in front of the dry cleaners) and called 911.

Kids in the city have it out for cyclists. Just tried to assault me at 11th & Pennsylvania SE. Called 911. No more tolerance. This ends now.

—say 'Eye Em Gōph' (@IMGoph) June 13, 2013

A gentleman came out of the dry cleaners and told me that the kids had been causing problems in the past, throwing rocks at the store's windows.

Two officers arrived after about 3 or 4 minutes. I told them what happened, and in which direction the kids went after our encounter. A quick check on the radio and the first officer was able to confirm that a third officer had some kids a block down the street. The second officer went to bring them back.

While she was gone, I spoke with the first officer. She told me that kids in the area were apt to do things like this, and that the children doing this get younger every year. The second officer returned a couple minutes later with a woman in her cruiser. This turned out to be the mother of the girl who had shoved me. The first officer insisted that the young girl be brought back as well, so a couple more awkward minutes passed while the first officer, the girl's mother, and I stood around waiting for the other officer to bring back the girl.

When they returned, the first officer asked the girl to state what had happened. She basically gave the full story, but claimed that she had just touched the bike, and not pushed me. The officers wanted her to apologize to me, which she did, but clearly not in a sincere manner.

The police told the girl she could be charged with both aggravated panhandling and simple assault. The girl's mother quietly told her not to be stupid and to apologize.

The officers stepped aside for a moment, leaving me with the girl and her mother. We stood there awkwardly as a light rain began to fall. The officers then called me over to where they were discussing things, and asked if I wanted to press charges. They were willing to lock the girl up, and told me that there would be a few hours of paperwork, but it was up to me how to proceed.

I told the officers I wanted the girl to learn a lesson, but I wanted to do what they thought was best. They called her over, and had her stand right in front of me. The officers told the girl that I had the power to ruin her life then and there, to give her a criminal record. They told me to tell her what I thought about the whole situation.

I told the girl that I thought what she did was stupid, and there was no reason for her to have done anything more than say hello to me on the street.

I'm okay. But these kids are going to learn a lesson. MPD is here.
—say 'Eye Em Gōph' (@IMGoph) June 13, 2013

The officers jumped in and told her to look me in the eye, stand up straight, stop mumbling, and pay attention. The girl's mother, standing nearby, implored her daughter to listen. The police asked her if she had goals, wanted to go to college, and wanted to get away from the bad influences around her. They reminded her that her attitude and actions were going to damn her to a life of dead-ends.

Finally, I told the girl my name, and offered my hand to shake. She did, and apologized again (personally, it still didn't feel 100% sincere, but I remember how much of a sullen brat I could be at 12 years old myself).

Her mother said she'd be going home and would be on a short leash. I obviously don't know what happened once they got home, but I hope we got some sort of message into the girl's head.

MPD not releasing marijuana data

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:29:00 EDT

by Nick Casey

MPD's data problems are continuing. The crime map came back online last week after a long hiatus but they can't pull data on 2012 or 2013 marijuana arrests. (DCist)

Comment

ART to release unencumbered schedule data (Aug 11, 2009)

Safe at night

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:27:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

A new Gallup poll shows that 72% of area residents feel safe walking by themselves at night, making the area about average when compared to the rest of the country. (DCist)

Comment

Cyclists under attack

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:50:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Armed men attacked 2 cyclists Tuesday night on the Custis Trail, successfully taking one's cell phone and sending him to the hospital. Police have been increasing patrols after similar attacks on pedestrians. (Post)

Comment

Cyclists, officials inspect dangerous Rosslyn intersection (Sep 13, 2011)
Arlington County installs new bike signal on Custis Trail (May 21, 2011)
Redesign could improve dangerous Rosslyn intersection (Oct 4, 2011)
Cold weather, lack of plowing affects bike commuting (Jan 21, 2011)
Lights out on the MBT? You're on your own, DC cyclists (Dec 5, 2012)

WMATA takes action to fight sexual harassment (Mar 12, 2012)
Mendelson: "We're being too easy on drivers" who kill (Mar 22, 2010)
Technology helping MPD set course for fewer homicides (Mar 1, 2012)
Crime remains high, police understaffed east of the river (Feb 3, 2011)
Black homicide rate drops but remains high (Jun 21, 2011)

And...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:22:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

Two different developers are competing to build major shopping centers near Clarksburg. (Post) ... Mary Cheh proposes making mugshots accessible to the public. (DCist) ... New York has picked a winner of its tiny apartment competition. (UrbanTurf)

Comment

Live chat: Mary Cheh, Friday at 1 pm (Apr 29, 2009)
Cheh, Wells try again to fix snow fines (Jan 4, 2011)
Klingle rebuild probably dead (Apr 26, 2008)
Cheh, Brown ask to shelve Tenley library PPP (Oct 29, 2008)

Let's Choose DC posts candidate answers on crime

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:30:00 EDT

by David Alpert

This week, Let's Choose DC—a partnership of Greater Greater Washington, DCist, and PoPville—asked candidates for the April 23 at-large special election about crime.

Photo by fengschwing on Flickr.

We asked the candidates:

Chief Lanier and Mayor Gray have made a lot of the drop in homicides, but other crimes—assaults, robberies—remain stubbornly high. How should DC police deal with those challenges, and do you have an opinion on how many officers MPD needs?

Read and vote on candidate responses here. Let's Choose DC gives you one candidate response at a time, selected randomly. Your vote will count toward the results once you vote on 5 responses.

We posed the question on January 8 to all of the candidates who had taken out petitions by that point. Nine candidates replied: Diallo Brooks, AJ Cooper, Matt Frumin, Jon Gann, Patrick Mara, Pedro Rubio, John Settles, Elissa Silverman, and Paul Zukerberg.

Voting on the first question, about candidates' vision for the future, has ended; we will tally the results and post them later this week.

25 comments

Learn about the at-large race: Announcing Let's Choose DC (Jan 8, 2013)
Crowded at-large Council race could help Orange win (Jan 4, 2012)
GGW, DC4D, DCEN hosting at-large forum Wednesday (Jan 21, 2011)
Will the real education candidate please stand up? (Apr 20, 2011)
Our 2012 DC election coverage will focus on issues (Sep 22, 2011)

Can we get more proportionality in criminal justice?

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:28:00 EDT

by David Alpert

I was heartbroken to read that Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet freedom activist, author of RSS, and Reddit cofounder, killed himself on Friday. I'd met Aaron a few times; on April 6, 2009, he emailed me to ask about books he should read on city policy issues.

Photo by okfn on Flickr.

Aaron clearly suffered from depression, but his family, law professor Lawrence Lessig, and many others are also criticizing prosecutors in the Boston US Attorney's office who hounded Aaron with multiple felony charges after he downloaded large numbers of academic articles at MIT, but never distributed them.

Aaron, and many others, find a major injustice in the the way academic journals pay authors nothing for articles but then charge large amounts of money for online access to the journals. That doesn't justify lawbreaking, but his also wasn't a transgression that merits multiple felony counts and jail time.

In a post entitled "Prosecutor as bully," Lessig wrote:

If what the government alleged was true ... then what [Aaron] did was wrong. ... But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? ... Our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed. ...
From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. ... I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House—and where even those brought to "justice" never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled "felons."

Our local criminal justice system also has plenty of examples of proportionality failures.

Drivers who behave recklessly and kill pedestrians and cyclists usually face little punishment unless they are drunk or flee. When a driver was caught on tape assaulting a cyclist, authorities didn't press charges. After police worked hard to investigate a driver who was allegedly on his cell phone when he hit and killed a senior crossing the street, prosecutors brought charges, but a grand jury refused to indict.

Meanwhile, our punishments for some transgressions often go far beyond what's appropriate or what is necessary to stop crime, like suspending students for taking their prescription medication without proper paperwork or a 6-year-old for making a gun shape with a hand.

Even for violent crimes, which we absolutely must vehemently combat, prison terms often far exceed what's necessary or effective. In his most recent column, David Brooks wrote:

If you want to deter crime, it seems that you'd want to lengthen prison sentences so that criminals would face steeper costs for breaking the law. In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. Criminals, like the rest of us, aren't much influenced by things they might have to experience far in the future.

Instead, it's more effective to fight lawbreaking by adding actual enforcement, so that more perpetrators get caught and punished. In the lingo of the field, you want to increase certainty rather than severity.

Based on this logic, our local government just passed a bill to relieve punitive burdens on drivers who speed. It made sense not to charge punitively high fees on speeders, since the primary objective must be safety rather than revenue. (Unfortunately, Phil Mendelson, who never participated in the task force that pored over research and debated options, then rewrote or deleted most of the key provisions in the bill that would increase certainty, and added new sections that will reduce safety in other ways.)

Now we've applied the certainty-over-severity analysis, or at least the less-severity half, to an area of crime that has a politically powerful constituency—drivers—behind it. Will the council now do the same for other areas of our criminal justice?

Unlike speeding, injustices in the way we prosecute drug laws or the "school to prison pipeline" disproportionately affect poorer and minority communities that have less political clout. The families who suffer from over-incarceration are less likely to be the ones having lunch with a councilmember than the business leader who might complain about some speeding tickets.

Will Wells try to fix laws that over-punish some people to little end, and under-punish others who today don't face any consequences for serious transgressions? Will the rest of the council agree to such measures?

It's not possible to devise a perfectly fair criminal justice system. Some people will get away with serious malfeasance while others suffer excessively. What we can do, both nationally by recalibrating our response to journal article downloading versus financial fraud, or locally in our response to speeding versus shooting transgendered people, is push for more proportionality where possible. There's a lot of work to do.

40 comments

Lower camera fines? Sure, once we have more cameras (Feb 22, 2012)
What is the right level for speed camera fines? (Aug 2, 2012)
Gray slightly tweaks camera fines to stave off larger change (Nov 2, 2012)
DC Council bill would lower traffic camera fines (Oct 16, 2012)
Petula Dvorak puts a few minutes' convenience over Montgomery residents' lives (Nov 5, 2010)

Thank lead for crime wave

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 09:03:00 EDT

by David Alpert

More evidence suggests drops in crime since 1970 come mostly from less lead in paint, car emissions, and more. Lead removal coincided with crime's decrease, other theories don't seem to fit the facts, and lead indeed makes people more aggressive. (Mother Jones via Gothamist)

Comment

Condos rise on corner once mostly known for its crime

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:07:00 EDT

by John Muller

At the intersection of 17th and Euclid Streets in Adams Morgan, adolescents making hand-to-hand drug sales and running up to cars with out-of-state license plates are long gone, as is a corner market. In its place will be 19 new condominiums, scheduled for delivery this spring.

Corner of 17th & Euclid St. NW, December 2012.

Euclid Market, March 2012.

The Washington City Paper has chronicled many incidents over the years at this rather infamous corner, tucked behind Adams Morgan's main commercial strip. A Maryland teen was recently killed at the Woodley Park Metro station after a fight ensued from an earlier robbery that took place in this immediate area.

Corner of 17th & Euclid St. NW, December 2011.

More than 5 years ago, the Metropolitan Police Department installed a closed-circuit TV camera here. Whether that is responsible for scattering activity elsewhere, or just changes in the neighborhood, the corner is now quiet. The Euclid market has been demolished, and the shell of the coming condos is yet another subtle sign of change and transition in the neighborhood.

10 comments

Look at those streetcars (Jun 11, 2008)
Balancing 17th Street's retail: a moratorium, parking policy, or something else? (Feb 3, 2009)
Where to put the noise? (Mar 27, 2008)
Then and Now: The O Street Market (Jun 24, 2009)
Hill East changes tune on commercial strip (Dec 26, 2012)

2012's many bar closures

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:37:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

MPD police chief Cathy Lanier closed bars at a rate of more than 1 per month throughout 2012. Last month's closure of Bohemian Caverns was the first for a reason other than a shooting, stabbing, or drug trafficking. (Post)

Comment

Technology helping MPD set course for fewer homicides (Mar 1, 2012)
Crime remains high, police understaffed east of the river (Feb 3, 2011)
Uniontown drug charges stymie Anacostia's hope for renewal (Nov 14, 2011)
The police broke my house by mistake, wouldn't pay to fix (Aug 17, 2011)
DC Home Rule almost had... the FBI picking the police chief (Nov 19, 2012)

Still not great for young black men

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 09:09:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

While the murder rate overall in DC was down, black men in their 20s had a 1 in 734 chance of being murdered this year. While that may be a record low, they are still not good odds. (R.U. Seriousing Me?)

Comment

Not your typical day on Metro

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 09:09:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

Metro had an eventful Thursday evening and Friday morning with a woman going into labor, a train striking a deer, and a driver in a stolen car crashing into a Metrobus. All of this was in addition to the foiled bank robbery getaway. (Post)

Comment

Transit fights crime (Dec 28, 2012)
To address bicycle crime, Metro PD should take it seriously (Oct 3, 2011)
Labor Day work to close 5 Metro stations (Aug 27, 2010)
Watch the patterns of Metro ridership (Nov 27, 2012)
Ask Metro: Broken PIDs, bus fareboxes, and bikes (Sep 28, 2010)

Transit fights crime

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 14:35:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A lot of suburban areas around the nation once (and, in some places, still) opposed building transit lines because they feared it would bring crime. We know that's bogus, but got another piece of evidence today.

Photo by alesacm on Twitter.

DCist reports that a man robbed a Wells Fargo bank on K Street this morning, then tried to get away by Red Line train. MPD asked Metro to hold the trains, and the agency promptly robbed the man of his choice of getaway vehicle.

This is an example of what was already obvious to most thinking people: transit is a less appealing mode of transit for robberies, not an invitation to commit them. Generally, the people who used (or still use) this argument against transit were (or are) white suburbs afraid of they darker-skinned people they associated (or still associate) with transit.

They warned that a rail line to a wealthy town would lead people from the scary inner city to take the train up, rob people, then speed away by train. This ignores the obvious fact that any criminal who tries to escape by transit is putting himself in a perfect container for police to close off and capture him.

26 comments

I thought criminals took transit? (Nov 18, 2008)
Robinson's wedge politics destructive for DC (Sep 8, 2010)
Breakfast links: Big steps (Dec 4, 2008)
I'm an environmentalist but... (May 9, 2008)
Weekend Metro closure may bring unintended improvement (Oct 6, 2011)

Barry's ex-con law fails

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:47:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

Amid contentious debate, the Council voted down Marion Barry's proposal to ban firms from asking job applicants about their criminal records. (WAMU)

Comment

Barry holding up streetcar that was his idea 15 years ago (Jun 19, 2012)
Barry surprised at streetcar plan from Barry mayoralty (Jul 1, 2010)
Gray transition: bold innovators or a return to Barry? (Nov 4, 2010)
Rally questions Barry's leadership in Ward 8 (Dec 30, 2011)
For Ward 8 Council: Jacque Patterson (Mar 22, 2012)