Petworth Shootouts – Possibly Gang Related – Spark More Recriminations Over Defunct Crime Bill
Good morning readers. And, while I have your attention, let me take a minute to join the long list of public officials and say: I’m very saddened by the Metro crash. Condolences all around. But, jeesh, it’s not the only thing to go down Monday night.
Petworth residents are perturbed by a possible new round of gang warfare that broke out in their hood hours after the Red Line crash. Just before midnight Jun. 22, police say, there was a double shooting on the 600 block of Quebec Place, N.W. A woman suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and a man – who police believe was shot at the scene and fled in a car that crashed – later died of his injuries, Ward 4 Councilwoman Muriel Bowser told her constituents yesterday.
About three hours later, police responded to an apparent shootout on the 500 block of Shepherd Street, N.W. They reported finding cars riddled with bullet holes but no victims.
Bowser says police are investigating a link between the two incidents as a “suspected gang beef.”
Monday night’s wee-hour gunplay was just the latest street violence in Petworth and prompted a new round of recriminations over the D.C. Council’s failure to pass legislation aimed at cracking down on the city’s allegedly growing gang problem.
“Having lived in petworth my entire life and having seen Petworth at its worst, all I am simply saying is lets come up with solutions period! Whether a neighborhood beef or a gang or just someone randomly in the neighborhood shooting. It all needs to stop. We already know the problems in the area lets do something about it,” Roneal Josephs posted to the MPD-4D Listserv. His was one of several comments on the shootings.
Elsewhere in the city, debate also continues over the crime bill torpedoed earlier this month over concerns that the proposed measures could lead to racial profiling. The Washington Post had a story Monday quoting “youths” who say they need more and better extracurricular activities to lure them away from the streets.
But how to create successful programs is an ongoing challenge in D.C. and around the country. Anyone who works with teenagers knows getting them to consistently show up for structured and constructive afterschool time is an uphill battle. It’s a well-known fact that nonprofit organizations often end up vying for the same pool of kids willing to give these activities a try. Sadly, the ones who choose to participate rather than hang unsupervised on the streets are not necessarily the ones most “at risk” for gangster life.
When I was a reporter covering gangs in the Boston area a few years ago, a high school principal made an observation that gets to the heart of the matter: He said combating the spread of gangs is like fighting against the tide. Every year, a new generation rolls in.
11:42 am
I don't understand why we need new measures. Police these neighborhoods, bring out the massive lights they do near busboy and poets that make the yuppies like myself feel safe. Have police parked in trouble stops, while others ride around on constant patrols, use the cameras that were authorized and shot spotter.
11:45 am
A light tower and police cruiser have done nothing to quell nonstop violence at 13th and Girard. The last shooting over there was about 30 yards from where a cop was sitting.
11:53 am
Here's a simple thing to do. Kick criminals out of public and Section 8 housing. Apparently Clark Realty doesn't care who is in Columbia Village so long as they receive their voucher $ on time, from what I hear. The lawabiding residents are powerless because the "landlord" just doesn't give a hoot. Criminals do not have a right to free housing and terrorizing other residents. Yes, they will pop up somewhere else (I mean, they're going to live SOMEWHERE, right?) but it'll likely be a crack den or jail cell, which is fine by me.
1:32 pm
The shooting on the 600 block of Quebec Place, N.W. took place in Park View, not Petworth. Does that matter? I'd prefer my neighborhood not attributed to crimes that didn't happen there and would appreciate this story being corrected.
Meanwhile, on the Washington Post, I looked for information about this shooting and saw there haven't been any new stories posted under "Crime Coverage" in the metro section since June 19. Swell - somehow I think crime of this magnitude deserves coverage, regardless of the Metro crash story.
1:41 pm
Also, what's the deal with the "Petworth Violence" tag at the end of the story? Petworth covers a huge area of the city compared to other areas, yet the crime rates are much lower than many other areas. I clicked on this tag and get a whole list of shootings across a several mile area. Yet, when I looked for the Columbia Heights shooting there is no "Columbia Heights Violence" tag, or "U Street Violence" tag.
According to this article in the Washington Post, "Sense of Safety: Don't Base Crime Perceptions on Hearsay -- Study the Statistics," "in 2007 Dupont logged as much violent crime as Petworth and four times as much property crime, per capita." The Washington City Paper is just perpetuating myths here. Report on crimes, yes, but please refrain from labeling neighborhoods as violent.
2:05 pm
RT, who's to say that all "criminals" come from Section 8 housing or from Columbia Village? Yep, it's the evil money grubbing landlords who don't screen the potential tenants. Yep, if landlords and mortgage holders stood up and did their jobs, criminals would not live in "nice" city areas. Yes, in an utopian world, we would live in crime-free communities and all the bad people will be exiled on some island somewhere. But reality being what it is, crime visits the "just" and "unjust", the "law abiding" and the "criminal". Folk with ill and criminal intention can and do live everywhere...even at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Here's what I don't understand, statistically speaking, there are more "law abiding citizens" than criminals correct? If so, wouldn't it be far more effective if law enforcement and the citizens of the community stood up and all sat on their front porches/balconies for a day or two. That would do more to curb violence than sanctions and eviction. We can no more choose our neighbors than we can choose our relatives.
Yes Georgia Ave, you are correct -- it does matter that neighborhoods are accurately identified in media.
2:15 pm
Hey Georgia Avenue,
I used to live on the 700 block of Quebec and it was definitely considered Petworth though some people had taken to referring to it as the northern reaches of Colombia Heights. Who draws up the definitive neighborhood lines and could you cite your source? I'm not challenging you so much as I'm interested in the info.
As for the story tag about Petworth violence, I can't help you there since I didn't add those.
2:32 pm
Christine, the neighborhood lines don't seem definite as they used to be. There isn't an authoratative source, as even Wikipedia's page undoes age old understanding for the locals. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_of_the_District_of_Columbia_by_ward
2:53 pm
Christine, here's a map of Petworth on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_petworth.jpg
Certainly people call the area around the metro stop Petworth, but according to these maps, the Petworth metro stop isn't even in Petworth, it's in Park View. And people who live north of Columbia Heights and West of Georgia Avenue are endlessly debating on Prince of Petworth what their neighborhood is called.
A map of Park View's boundaries can be found on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_park_view.jpg
2:54 pm
For what it's worth (very little) I'd say Quebec was Northern Park View, just south of Petworth. It's two blocks from the Parkview Playground and 4 from the Petworth Playground. Forget about the metro station, as that's a modern thing.
2:57 pm
My main point was that there are a lot of myths about crime in DC, such as the further east you go, the more crime there is; also that less affluent neighborhoods have more crime, that neighborhoods that are majority black have more crime. This stuff, like seeing the "Petworth Violence" tag on a story about a crime that didn't really happen in Petworth drives me a little crazy.
3:02 pm
Oh, Dupont definately has crime stats that meet- even exceed- Petworth/Parkview/Pleasant Plains. Especially when it comes to non-fatal violent and property crime.
But shootings and stabbings are sexy, so they get all the attention. And Dupont has fewer of those.
4:16 pm
If you covered crime in Boston my response is (1) http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/01/straight-outta-boston, (2) as well as this article from last week's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/22/090622fa_fact_seabrook
The kinds of proposals from the Fenty Administration don't seem to employ the kinds of successful approaches that have derived from Boston and similar efforts.
4:22 pm
Mr. Layman great points. The New Yorker piece pointed towards an in-depth approach. Fenty and Co. seemed to be looking for quick fixes, press conferences and gimmicks.
6:08 pm
I just finished reading the Boston piece. It is compelling and goes to show that you can't achieve peace in the short term. You have to constantly work at it and maintain it.
We can't solve it hear on WCP, although that would make a tremendous headline, 'Miracle in DC -- "Gang" Violence Remedy solved by Washington City Paper Readers'. Still, there is work to be done, if the right people talking to one another and follow-up action behind it, I believe a remedy is within our reach.
Honestly though, many of the citizens have become too fearful, apathetic, selfish, unconcerned, and oblivious to make the stands that are needed. There's no Jim Brown or David Kennedy (we got Ron Moton of Peaceoholics). There's no bloods or crips either, just a loose bunch of crews fighting over respect culminating it with violence. For those selling drugs, it is about money. For those who rob people for goods, it is about money. In earnest, talking to some youth "caught up", even the ones from not so great home environments don't really desire to do these things long term. There's no reward in bravado, getting locked up, etc.
However, our piecemeal response (DC Govt, Law Enforcement, and Citizens) wants simply to lock people up into oblivion thinking that will change the psyche of these individuals. Locking them up giving them no alternative to correct their lives only leads to repeat offenses, more prison time and/or death. It is time for DC to become a community again and not a selfish bunch of haters, filled with presumptious status, too scared of their own shadow.
The following quotes from the Boston article say it all...
"The first of these misconceptions, Kennedy says, echoing Sherrills, is that gang members are murderous superpredators. "That's not true," he says. "One of the interesting things about these guys is that if you can pull one aside and talk to him away from his boys, they start talking about how shit-scared they are, and how they don't like this stuff, but if they don't act in certain ways their friends and their enemies all turn on them. You get the occasional psychopath, but most of these guys do not have the same commitment to violence that they might to making money on the street."
"Another story is that it's all about drugs," Kennedy says, "and that's not true either." While most gang members do participate in the drug trade, the popular image of Crips and Bloods battling for crack-dealing turf is as outdated as the movie Colors. Nor, in Kennedy's view, is gang violence a sickness somehow endemic to ghetto culture—"because almost everybody in these neighborhoods doesn't participate. Hardly anybody goes this way." In Boston, Kennedy found that even within the most gang-dominated neighborhoods, fewer than 5 percent of young men were gang members. A 2004 outburst of gang killings in San Francisco produced a similar finding: Only about 100 young men in the entire city were thought to be truly dangerous, and a couple dozen were thought to have done most of the killing. "But because almost everybody deals with one or another of those fictions," Kennedy says, "it's very hard to engage with what's really going on."
Graham proved this point when he put His intern in His car and talked to him before turning him over to the Police.
7:41 am
Well, I am no Kennedy... my biggest "problem" is a breadth of interests--but at least I work to push for better practice by incorporating and implementing theory and experience-based best practices.
E.g., on the concerned4dcps list months ago, someone forwarded an email from a Cardozo neighborhood elist, calling on a massive police response to problems derived from the students. I was infuriated. I countered about how after a shooting by/at a school in Baltimore, Superintendent Alonso called upon Baltimoreans to volunteer, to assist the schools/students as tutors, and more than 1,000 people responded.
Hey, I am a hard on crime person myself (my first marriage broke up as a result of crime, back in my H Street days in the late 1980s)... but at the same time, I don't believe in police-military-like responses to situations where such a response makes no sense. And has no long term positive impact.
8:11 am
Ah, and here's an article worth reading from today's Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009381231_experts25m0.html