Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss was arrested for drunk driving on Oct. 1, according to court records.

The arrest took place on the 2000 block of Calvert Street NW, on or near the Duke Ellington Bridge between Woodley Park and Adams Morgan. Records contain few further details regarding the circumstances of the arrest.

Strauss, an attorney by trade, was charged with driving under the influence, driving while intoxicated, and operating while impaired—three offenses with different definitions under District law, yet routinely charged together after drunk-driving arrests. According to the court documents, this is the first time Strauss has been charged with DWI. He is due to be arraigned on Thursday, Nov. 6.

It’s not his first arrest, though. In July 2005, he was detained on a disorderly conduct charge after “confronting officers as they arrested another man,” according to a contemporary account. Regarding that arrest, Strauss told a previous LL, “I was just trying to be helpful,” Strauss says. “I was asking basic questions like ‘Where are you taking him?’”

Strauss, a Democrat, is seeking, and is likely to win, a third six-year term in next Tuesday’s election. LL left a phone message for him last night; Strauss sent a text message in response asking about the nature of the inquiry. LL sent a text message back telling Strauss he was asking about the Oct. 1 arrest. No response came.

Readers may wonder: Why is LL breaking this story a month after the incident in question and days before the election? That’s because LL was informed of the court proceeding by an anonymous tipster on Wednesday. Strauss’ name had been entered into the Superior Court docket system as “STRAVSS,” which would have foiled any earlier attempts at due diligence.

At 8:25 p.m., several police officers, in uniform and plain clothes, surround a woman. They don’t just surround her, they huddle over her. It is impossible to see this woman. All you can do is hear her. She is screaming.

“I’m going in the street!” she bellows. This is her plea. She has a right to it.

Up the street is her brother. He is behind police tape. He lies motionless at 11th and Harvard Streets NW. He is wearing a red jacket and blue jeans and sneakers. He is dead. Someone shot him, according to police.

The sister tries to wriggle free. She is not wearing a shirt. All she has on is a black bra. A cop grabs her and holds her. He hugs her. “I will stay here with you,” he pleads. D.C. Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier stands nearby, close as she can to the mass of officers, and the sister.

After a brief moment of calm, the sister breaks free from the police and runs. It is cold and blustery. Crowds have gathered at two of the intersection’s four points. The sister doesn’t care that she is only wearing a bra. She dashes down Girard. The officers follow and attempt to pull her back in, to pull her close, to calm her down.

A woman takes in the scene just behind the yellow tape. She says the man lying up there–that was her best friend. She says she works at the group home just up Girard. The man’s family lives a few doors down. “He was a good friend,” she says. He was 39. He liked the Redskins. “He’s just a sweet person,” she adds. That’s all she can say at the moment.

It is 8:35 p.m.

A man comes up to Lanier. He is dressed in a track suit. He has a puffy goatee. They talk for a brief moment in the middle of the intersection. He just tells her this: “She is crazy.”

A few moments later, the decedent’s mother arrives and heads straight for her son. She has to be held back by police and bystanders. She pleads her case. She jumps up in the air. She claps. Her shock is uncontrollable and heartbreaking. She is screaming.

Lanier comes over and puts her arms around and escorts her to a police cruiser. The mom takes the passenger seat.

Lanier crouches next to her and talks. She gets a small miracle: laughter.

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Via the Cleveland Park message board, a Porter Street resident warns:

“During the past several years, vehicles belonging to my wife and I were vandalized while parked behind our Porter Street house, on either Quebec Place or Rowland Place. On Halloween Eve in 2006, my wife’s car was egged pretty well…

And in 2007, my motorcycle got more of the same (despite being covered), damaging the paint and cracking the windshield (and resulting in a faint “burned omelet” smell when I rode it, no
matter how hard I cleaned it). Both times, it happened behind our house on Quebec Place — but if memory serves, others reported similar incidents elsewhere as well.

So this year, I’m parking elsewhere — downtown if need be. Just thought I’d remind folks in Cleveland Park that we do have a history of this taking place, and that you may want to take similar precautions on Friday night.”

One of the oldest and most frustrating murder cases in recent District history may finally come to a sad end. In June 1996, Shaquita Bell disappeared two weeks before she was scheduled to testify against her boyfriend, Michael Dickerson, in an assault case. Detectives had spent tons of time and resources attempting to find her body and put away Dickerson.

The case finally started to take serious shape last year and early this year with Dickerson’s arrest on murder charges. You can read the original charging documents here.

The Washington Post reports today that Dickerson has agreed to help law enforcement find Bell’s remains.

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D.C. is a crap town for public records. Especially police reports. I moved here from Seattle, where I could go down to the station and peruse stacks of reports. The Stranger, where I worked, based a weekly column off the documents, which were all written out with long, descriptive narratives. In D.C., there ain’t no way a reporter could just page through the reports. I asked my first day here and I think the clerk nearly climbed over the counter to slap me. Some reporters listen to the scanner all night and follow cruisers to crime scenes, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll get the good blotter fodder (you need the back story, which you don’t get behind police tape) unless you just get lucky and the police decide to issue a press release. Or unless you’re Jason Cherkis.

So, like many reporters, I’ve turned to the various neighborhood and police district list-serves. They send out brief arrest summaries, which range from vague to vaguely specific. The Fifth District is pretty bad:

Homicide Knife, Cutting Instrument

SHIFT: DAY 10/10/2008 0700 0707

1700 B/O 3RD ST NW, Street/Highway/Road 501 08144117

The Third District is better:

C-1 REPORTS THAT S-1 THRU S-3 APPROACHED HER BY THE LISTED LOCATION. S-1 STATED “THAT’S AN UGLY DOG, I SHOULD BEAT YOUR DOG.” S-1 THEN STATED “GIVE ME ALL THE MONEY IN YOUR POCKET.” C-1 RAN AWAY FROM THE SUSPECTS. SUSPECTS FLED IN AN UNKNOWN DIRECTION.

Pretty good stuff. But still not enough info to go find more info, and of course the police would explain that as protecting the privacy rights of the victims. (Although I bet most of the victims wouldn’t mind talking to a reporter about how the police handled their situation — another reason why the reports should be made available, if not necessarily widely disseminated.)

Anyway, I’ve noticed something interesting in the discussions on these list serves that gives me a little hope. Residents have been lambasting the police for not putting enough info in the online summaries. So when a guy from Cleveland Park sent a message to the list about getting robbed by two men in an SUV while he biked home one night, and mentioned that police had told him there had been a string of similar incidents, someone else emailed asking for more info. That got a response from the district commander–who basically said there had been other robberies–who in turn got criticized by another resident for not alerting the community sooner. This is the same district commander who has never returned my phone calls.

I haven’t noticed much push back from local media to get better access to public documents. Maybe in this case the people will do our job for us.

Factcheck.org has a nice rundown of all the facts the candidates got wrong in the debate last night. McCain’s creative interpretations of his “tax cuts” and health care plans are old hat. But what’s this about eBay? McCain said 1.3 million Americans make their living off the online marketplace. Wrong. The number, according to Factcheck, is more like 724,000, and only “some” of those folks rely on the site for their primary income. What really bugs me though, is the idea that all those people are somehow leading the way for a brighter future. Sure, they’re making a living, but many of them are doing it selling stolen goods.

The New York Times reported on recent testimony before a House subcommittee on a bill that would force eBay to crack down on e-fencers. A loss prevention expert from the National Retail Federation told legislators that eBay was like crack for vulnerable, would-be thieves (not his analogy).

“When they run out of “legitimate merchandise,” they begin to steal intermittently, many times for the first time in their life, so they can continue selling online… At least one major retailer has reported that 80 percent of thieves interviewed in their eBay theft cases admit that selling stolen property on eBay is their sole source of income. In fact, many of the eBay sellers have used those proceeds to obtain mortgages, new cars and even boats.”

Sounds like a great strategy for job creation.

The MPD established a drug free zone for the duration of July in Brightwood Park. A heavy MPD presence followed the red fliers (re: lots of white guys in flak jackets making more trouble for the neighborhood than the dealers they replaced), and now the dealers have gone back to work in front of the corner take-out at 5th and Kennedy.

Evidence that things in the neighborhood are back to normal and that the drug free zone was a waste of (non-recycled?) paper: I walked off the bus yesterday and into a heated public dispute over the price of joints. The seller wanted $15 each, the buyer only wanted to pay $10. There was some yelling, some good dealer/bad dealer, some bravado-fueled hustling, but then they settled on $12 a joint, and everybody walked away with what he wanted. And, I might add, no one gave a shit that I saw it all go down.

I realized after watching yesterday’s exchange that the atmosphere of danger–at least in Brightwood Park–is as much a  product of the MPD’s presence as it is the viral hopelessness that they established generations ago with their crackdowns. In the few months that my girlfriend and I have lived in the neighborhood, we’ve only been scared a handful of times. The first was when red fliers showed up–overnight it seemed–on every light pole in the neighborhood. The second time was when we watched eight cops in five cars bust a teenager for selling pot outside a convenience store.

In other words, we didn’t feel threatened until the cops showed up and told us to feel threatened.

The idea that cops are the problem contradicts theories that a heavy police presence discourages crime, but truth be told, I’ve almost always felt safer in the company of drug dealers than cops. Supra-citizenship lends itself to abuse, but drug dealers–at least the small-timers in our neighborhood–are live-and-let-live capitalists who have a stake in maintaining some sort of neighborhood equilibrium; while cops have every reason to stir shit up.

Just in case you were wondering, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans and police Chief Cathy Lanier are buds. That would be the takeaway from the ad, shown above, that appeared in Wednesday’s Current newspapers.

But does that make also Lanier a scofflaw?

Federal law prohibits District and federal employees from participating in various political activities. According to the Web site of the federal Office of Special Counsel, which investigates violations of the Hatch Act, it’s a violation to “engage in political activity while…in a government office” or “wearing an official uniform.” Evans, as an elected official, is exempt; Lanier is not.

The picture appears to have been taken inside Evans’ office in the John A. Wilson Building, the seat of District government, and Lanier is wearing her uniform. The picture also appears on Evans’ campaign Web site, along with other pictures of Lanier and City Administrator Dan Tangherlini.

According to Evans campaign spokesperson Keith Carbone, Lanier “did not sign off on the picture and was not aware that we were using it.” Traci Hughes, a police spokesperson, says, “We will let the [Evans campaign's] acknowledgment that the Chief was not consulted stand on its own.”

Lanier isn’t mentioned by name in the ad; the only thing remotely public-safety related is a mention that Evans helped bring ShotSpotter to Shaw. “The obvious point of using that [picture] is showing that Jack works closely with the chief of police,” he says. “They maintain a pretty constant stream of communication about things. It’s important to Jack to get frequent updates.”

The picture certainly belongs to the “grip-and-grin” genre common to campaign materials in this town. They usually show up on direct mailings in a collage of various around-town photos. (Check out this blog post from Evans challenger Cary Silverman, for instance.) This one’s a little different: It’s in a paid ad in a community newspaper, it’s huge, it’s the police chief, and there’s no other photos on it.

LL has inquired with the Office of Special Counsel as to whether (a) it is a violation to have your image used unwittingly for political purposes and (b) whether the Evans campaign is breaking the law by doing so. The office is currently reviewing the matter.

Kristopher Baumann, head of the union representing Metropolitan Police officers, isn’t happy seeing Lanier apparently shilling for a political candidate.

Baumann says his group was the subject of a Hatch Act investigation in 2006, after candidates’ campaign materials showed D.C. cops in uniform. Though the cops had never consented to having the pictures taken or their use in campaign ads, the union had to hire a lawyer to fight off the charges, which were eventually dropped.

Baumann says he takes the law very seriously. “What infuriates my guys and me, we bend over backward,” he says. “We follow these rules hardcore….Here you have the executive and legislative branch of government just absolutely disobeying the rules.”

Neither Evans nor Silverman, Baumann points out, asked for the police union’s endorsement.

• FIRST NO. 1: A SPEEDING TICKET

I have been driving for 23 years. I have never gotten a speeding ticket, a minor but not inconsiderable source of pride. I’m not a candyass on the road, but I’m not a maniac, either. What you get from me as a fellow driver is alertness, consideration, and sweet, sweet moderation. I go with traffic.

That last technique has never let me down. Until Friday. I was driving with my family up 16th Street NW. We were on our way to celebrate my train-obsessed oldest child’s fourth birthday with a visit to the railroad heaven of Strasburg, Pa.

I take full responsibility for causing the officer holding a radar gun, standing in the middle of the road, to dodge the Metrobus blowing past me at far greater speed to whistle and motion me into a parking lot, where I was issued a ticket for going 36 miles per hour in a 25 zone.

I do not dispute the facts of this ticket, nor do I blame the police, to whose fraternal order I will continue to donate $25 every year, even if the sticker they send me as a result didn’t work as whispered. I blame myself, but I do think this is a lame way to get my first ever speeding ticket.

• FIRST NO. 2: ROAD RAGE DIRECTED AT CYCLISTS

A cyclist myself, I am very sensitive to the need to share the road (and yes, I am aware of the cognitive disconnect necessary to blaze through the city at 36 mph despite this philosophical bent). However.

Crossing the street in the railroad heaven of Strasburg, Pa., on Saturday, takes a long time. Walk signals are not lighted until traffic in all directions in the town’s main intersection is halted. As I was crossing the street, my 11-month-old strapped to my chest, a cyclist on a supremely ugly yellow carbon fiber bicycle shouted “Heads up, heads up!” as he tried to blow through the red light that was giving us our walk sign and, by extension, my family. I said “Hey, we have a walk sign,” and he grunted and sailed through the intersection. I shouted “And you have a red light!” at his rapidly disappearing form.

Ever since, I’ve been angry at cyclists. I mean, here I am week in and out, posting about some road outrage or another, and then I nearly get mowed down by a member of my tribe, albeit one clad in yellow spandex that matched his horrendously ugly plastic bicycle. For the rest of the weekend, I fantasized about road rage.

Photo by Flickr user frankh

The non-pot-dealing Mayor’s dead dogs are just the latest victims of misplaced use of deadly force by a local SWAT team.

Remember Sal Culosi? He got gunned down outside his house by a Fairfax County SWAT team member while being arrested for alleged football gambling offenses. He was unarmed. He had no police record. He was an optometrist.

Culosi’s killer said it was an accident. He kept his job.

Why would SWAT teams get involved in pot and gambling busts? My guess is there’s not enough of the work the whole SWAT concept was designed for to justify the teams’ existence, so police chiefs send the gung-ho specialists into situations where gung-ho is wholly inappropriate.

Thanks for nothing, Steve Forrest…

A red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK (I didn’t get the state or even see the driver) went out of control on wet pavement this afternoon and smashed into the car I was sitting in at a stoplight on New Hampshire Avenue just north of the DC border.

The red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK then took off through the stoplight.

Nobody in my car was injured, but my driver’s side door was pried open and the whole left side mangled as a result of the impact with the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK.

My car would still move. So while calling 911, I tried following the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK into DC.

But the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK was in extreme getaway mode and lost me almost immediately.

The 911 system put me on hold. And kept me there.

Before anybody at 911 picked up, I’d found a cop in a Metro Transit Police car stopped at a stop sign on Kansas Avenue. I tried telling him about hit and run with the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK, but he said he was on another call.

I told the Metro Transit cop 911 was keeping me on hold and asked if he could call for another officer. No, he said, he was on another call.

Before 911 picked up, an Officer Maloney of the Fourth District of the Metropolitan Police Department pedaled up on a bike and, seeing the condition of my ride, asked if a red Jaguar did it.

I said yes, and told him about the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK.

Turns out Officer Maloney had almost been killed by the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK a minute earlier while speeding away on Kansas Avenue.

If the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK had just hit and runned me in PG County, I’d bet a lot of money the driver would get away with it.

But Officer Maloney seemed pretty on the ball, and pretty not too happy about what the red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK had almost done to him.

I think anybody driving a banged-up red Jaguar with license plate Z63 CJK around here is in trouble.

And my neck’s hurting.

On July 16, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans sent out a press release pleasantly informing his constituents that the long wait was over: ShotSpotter had arrived in Shaw.

“On one hand I’m glad to see that ShotSpotter is up and running, but on the other, it’s a terrible situation that we need this technology in and around the Shaw neighborhood,” Evans states in his press release.

As many in the neighborhood know, ShotSpotter pinpoints the origin of gunshots by recording their sound. “People have been calling for it for a long time,” says ANC commissioner Kevin Chapple. They don’t see it as a “silver bullet” or a “cure-all”—just one more thing possibly dissuading criminals from pulling the trigger.

Unfortunately, on August 4, Chapple had to break some bad news on his blog: ShotSpotter was not actually totally “up and running,” as previously stated. At a recent community meeting, Inspector Edward Delgado told roughly a dozen Shaw-area citizens that the sensors did not capture the sounds of local resident, Chris Taylor, getting shot near the corner of 7th and N Streets, Northwest on July 27.

Reached by phone, Delgado confirmed the account, saying that all the sensors by the crime scene weren’t operational at the time (luckily, actual real live cops were just around the corner at the time of the shooting.) He added that about 93 percent of the new coverage area’s sensors had been installed. The Metropolitan Police Department was still negotiating some MOUs (Memorandum of Understanding) with private building owners to situate sensors on their property. Delgado couldn’t be sure when the entire coverage area—which encompasses parts of Shaw, the U Street Corridor, Columbia Heights, Park View and Adams Morgan—would be “up and running” until all the sensors were installed.

“Mind you, we are working on it. We want to make it operational. It has been very successful east of the river. We’re just trying to bring it to the third district,” he says.

Yesterday, in my quest to meet new people and feel more at home in this new city, I decided to attend a meetup at the Gallery Place cinema. Our group watched the new Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly movie Step Brothers (which, if I were a movie critic, I’d describe as “a rip-roaring good time,” but I’m not, so I’ll just say it was hil.ari.ous and the duo’s best work yet).

On our way out after the movie (at about 6:45 p.m.), the lobby area was packed, and we soon realized the exits were blocked by uniformed officers and the walkway out to the road (by Clive’s) was deserted, though I could see police officers across the street walking around. The officer I spoke with said he had no idea what was going on and pointed me to another exit in a different direction.

A guy on the street told me that Coldplay was headlining at the Verizon Center (in the same complex as the cinema), but I overheard a security guard telling people there was a bomb threat and someone else said there was a “mysterious package” somewhere.

Seventh Street Northwest was closed for at least an hour, though I can’t seem to find any report of what happened. Are these types of things just a usual occurrence here? Does anyone know what happened? This is the second time in a week and a half that I’ve been somewhere in the city and an area was closed off due to a “suspicious bag” or a “mysterious package.”

This might be my final installment into the saga that is the life of Captain Melvin Gresham—a D.C. Police Department official who appears to always be in the center of intrigue and controversy. According to his civil-suit complaint filed in June, Gresham is a hero/whistle blower/all-around standup cop. To cop sources, he’s a supervisor who needs some leadership training asap.

“I had to bang heads with him, very disagreeable is the way he investigated things. He never has any proof. When we go to arbitration against him, he loses most of the arbitrations. We’ve had several arbitration hearings with our members and he’s lost. All the evidence is, ‘What I heard.’ Nothing ever of substance. He never has any real evidence against anybody. When you’re a policeman, you have to have solid facts,” says one veteran officer.

Gresham has his followers. Many of whom have commented on this post and our last installment.

The current Gresham dustup stems from a traffic accident. The allegation: Gresham got into a fender bender and pressured an officer to change the accident report in his favor.

In Gresham’s complaint, he addresses the accident on page 10, bullet-point No. 23. Or rather, he dances around the allegations, focusing mainly on picking apart the testimony and character of Lt. Mike Smith.

The complaint hones in on anonymous letter (was it written by Smith?), Smith’s believing that Gresham is a very rich man, and the allegation that Smith admitted to “tampering” with evidence. “Lt. Smith was off duty and had no actual basis for interjecting himself into the investigation,” the complaint states.

The complaint notes that the police department withdrew the charges against Gresham. “However, Chief Lanier insisted on serving Cpt. Gresham an official reprimand.” The reprimand addresses the very serious allegation of witness intimidation:

According to the complaint, the reprimand reads:

“Internal Affairs Agent Denise Garrett investigated the alleged misconduct. Agent Garrett determined that your demeanor and subsequent confrontation with the reporting officer was intimidating and may have jeopardized the impartiality of the accident investigation.”

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The recent terrifying muggings of a journalist and a punk rocker would normally mean nothing more than a shrug from long-time residents. Oh muggings? Not exactly news. But for some reason, both got me pretty angry. Both took place in high density areas of Adams Morgan. Both were brutal in execution.

At least in the case of Christopher Savage, police haven’t solved his mugging–which may or may not have led to his death. I’m not sure if the journalist’s case has been solved or not.

If you are a mugger, you have a more than 80 percent chance of getting away with your crimes in the District.

The D.C. Police Department’s closure rate for robberies is 15.8 percent through April, according to department spokesperson Traci Hughes. That’s down from the national average. It appears the national average according to 2006 FBI stats is roughly 25 percent. The closure rate is 21 percent for cities with a population over 250,000.

Oh, and muggings appear to be up in Adams Morgan. Stats show a bump in robberies for the area, according to police and a city official. They are possibly up by more than 20 percent.