http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009381231_experts25m0.html

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes Georgia Ave, you are correct -- it does matter that neighborhoods are accurately identified in media.

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.

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.