As July 4 approaches, I am sure there are many neighborhoods that have started to celebrate our independence a little early with some imported Mineshell Mayhem or a Phandemonium 205 Shot. I’m sure police are having a grand time chasing down every dispatch to some little back-alley salute and corner tribute in bottle rockets. And I know the listservs go crazy on this issue. I understand all the arguments against: kids need working fingers on July 5, cops need to chase after gunshot noises not the blast off a roman candle, it’s all such a noisy racket well past the time the Mall has emptied out. But still.

I secretly love driving around the city and watching the illegal stuff go off all sparkly in the air. In my experience, Columbia Heights is awesome with unregulated mini-finales (particularly 13th Street is gold).

So where are the best and worst places to catch the illegal action?

From the Brookland neighborhood Listserv: Concerned citizen Andrea on Taussig isn’t getting any love from 311. After finding a discarded handbag in an alley, the poster called the non-emergency number to report the missing item. She writes:

I called 311 to report the found bag and got a very strange response. The lady who answered first told me to call the person, since I have their checkbook & license . . . When I told her I couldn’t find a phone number, she told me that I should “pull a CSI” and try to figure out how to get in touch with the owner. She then told me that if I turned in the handbag to the police, she didn’t know what might happen to it.

Note to Andrea: Please make it a CSI: Miami.

A few months ago, I wrote a story about a man who believed the D.C. handgun ban would be determined unconstitutional once and for all by the Supreme Court.

Well, he was right!

The man, James Wiggins Jr., had long been licensed as a handgun instructor teaching security officers and others. But, he was so confident in his thinking that he was already marketing gun safety classes to D.C. residents. (That’s him up there, by the way, peeking out behind the target.)

Well, today, not surprisingly, Wiggins is in an awfully cheerful mood. He first called me around noon to say hello and discuss the news. Then, we talked again in the early afternoon.

Not only is Wiggins having his 15 minutes of fame after being featured on WUSA9 recently, he’s also ready to unveil new business plans. When Wiggins and I first chatted in late April, he mentioned that he was hoping to open up a gun range when the ban was officially overturned. At that point, he was pretty tight-lipped about the entire thing and unwilling to say too much. But not now!

“I’m going to be at the licensing place [DCRA] in the morning and start posing questions. Then, I’m going to have to hire a lobbyist,” he says.

Wiggins says he’s pulled together $30 million in financial backing, from private investors–”people I’ve trained,” he says, vaguely–for his new project. “I will try to put [this facility] on the MD/DC line. I’m definitely going for it. I’m going to call it the DC safety center. I can also teach you first aid, CPR.”

The Washington Post’s blog coverage of the Supreme Court’s handgun unbanification is generating plenty of comments. Best comment so far:

“I believe guns are unnecessary. I’ve lived in the District for over 5 years and have successfully defended my home from armed intruders with a Samurai sword on two seperate occaissions. Throwing stars and nunchucks are also very effective against guns. If you practice two to three hours a day and are fearless, you will not fail.”

Posted by: razorsedge | June 26, 2008 11:44 AM

As if we didn’t already know….

The Supreme Court of the United States this morning shot down the District’s ban on handgun possession, a ruling that was no surprise given the tenor of oral arguments on the case this past spring.

Here is an abridgment of the opinion, which was written by Justice Antonin Scalia in the District of Columbia v. Heller, as rendered by SCOTUSBLOG:

“Logic demands that there be a link between the stated purpose and the command.”

“We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.”

“the most natural reading of ‘keep Arms’ in the Second Amendment is to “have weapons.”

“The term was applied, then as now, to weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity.”

“Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”

The specific casualties of the ruling are D.C.’s outright ban on gun possession, plus the D.C. requirement that arms in the home “must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place,” according to SCOTUSBLOG.

The District’s powers that be, including Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and many, many others are sure to be outraged by the opinion. Outraged, that is, and completely powerless to do anything about it.

Now that the gun ban’s been overturned, stay tuned for the live news conference on NBC4.com at noon.

File your celebration / complaint in the comments.

Photo by rrafa.

Salim Bhabhrawala is used to the occasional neighborhood crime. There was a homicide around the corner a few weeks ago, and an arson nearby just last week. Lately, cops have swarmed his area of NoMa, where he’s resided for four years. But despite their increased, roaming presence, they could not protect Bhabhrawala from becoming the victim of a crime so unexpected and brazen, he felt the need to share his story with the city.

“Over the weekend on Friday/Saturday night between approximately 11:30p and 8:30am, about 3 or 4 gallons of gas were stolen from my vehicle,” he wrote this morning to the Metropolitan Police Department First District listserv.

Around 8:40 a.m. on Saturday, Bhabhrawala left his home, near the corner of 3^rd and M Streets, Northeast. He got into his car, turned the key in the ignition, and noticed that his fuel level was low.

“I knew immediately that something was wrong because I had about a half tank the night before. I got out of the car and noticed that my gas tank was open and my garden hose was gone,” he wrote.

He quickly found “about 90 percent of my garden hose,” a cut section, by an abandoned liquor store around the corner, Bhabhrawala said in an interview this morning. Putting two and two together, he figured out that his own hose had been utilized to siphon out his gas. He didn’t call the police, but he mentioned the incident to his neighbors and decided to post a note on the listserv just “to see if it happened to anyone else.” (So far, no responses.) He also promptly visited a nearby AutoZone to buy a locking fuel cap.

So, is this karmic retribution for his gas-guzzling ways?

For his part, Bhabhrawala wanted to clarify that he doesn’t commute to work, and probably drives no more than 6,000 to 7,000 miles annually.

Later, he adds: “It’s not a huge deal. It’s not like I feel like I’m the victim of some massive crime. I just think it’s funny for $15 bucks of gas for someone to go through all this energy and effort. I can’t imagine if they got caught.”

My scooter was stolen last Thursday afternoon, brazenly purloined from the motorcycle parking area of my Arlington apartment complex.

Sucks, right? Yeah, sure, you don’t care. That’s cool. But here’s a funny thing:

On Thursday night, City Paper held a party downtown to celebrate Dave Jamieson’s receipt of the Livingston Award for his amazing story “Letters From an Arsonist,” which chronicled the career of a prolific serial arsonist in D.C.

I had planned on attending this event, but ended up pulling an all-nighter at the office on Wednesday in order to get the online version of Hoods & Services going. (Check out the Rankinator–it sort of works!) By 2 p.m. Thursday, I was running on fumes. Party or sleep? I chose sleep, scooted home and passed out.

Wrong choice.

Read the rest of this entry »

The scoop award goes to DCWatch for staying till the end of Monday’s hearing on police checkpoints. Turns out Chief Cathy Lanier had a specific crime-fighting reason for firing up the old gantlet — which would diminish the murkiness of the Constitutionality of general crime-fighting reasons for checkpoints. DCWatch summarizes:

There was another, more important, reason, she told the committee, but she could not reveal what that reason was. If the committee members knew what she knew, she was confident that they would agree with her actions, but she couldn’t tell them what she knew. She had, she said, specific information that there were specific individuals who were going to enter that neighborhood to commit a particular crime. Preventing that crime was the real reason for quarantining Trinidad. No lesser measures — tracking those specific individuals, warning the intended victims of the crime, etc. — would have sufficed to prevent the crime. Only a full-scale lock down of the neighborhood and lockout of other citizens was enough. But council members would have to take her word for it, because she couldn’t tell them anything more.

Up till now, the reason for the cordon has been explained as a general need to stem gun crime. In fact, Lanier has suggested that if crime returns to Trinidad, the checkpoints will come back too. Still no word from the ACLU on whether a lawsuit is coming.

The Post published a editorial in favor of the checkpoints today. The author includes a quote from neighborhood activist Kathy Henderson who testified at the hearing that debates about civil liberties were “academic.” She said the crime itself was a violation of her civil rights–which to me seems like a conflation of the freedoms we expect from our government and the natural rights (life, liberty, etc.) we expect from fellow members of humanity.

I think it’s a distinction people don’t think about as much these days. And I can see why the difference is hard to articulate. Here’s one way to look at it: I want my government to protect me from crime, but I can’t hold them responsible if I become a victim. For that I have to blame whichever human jerk does something to me. They’ve violated my natural rights. But if the police decide to arrest me without cause — say, throwing all suspicious-looking women on scooters in jail for a day — I may very well have a reason to complain that my civil rights have been violated. Ok. Sorry for the lesson-time.

I wondered why I couldn’t find Washington on the list preliminary 2007 crime stats for big cities. The Examiner made the smart call to find out why: DC police are still finishing the implementation of a new computerized data system, a tool they purchased after a big snafu over the 2006 data dump to the FBI.

Actually, the Examiner is really all over it this a.m., which another scoop on DC police manning checkpoints without training.

On Saturday night, D.C. police converged on a small, one-way street in Trinidad to man the first of their newly-approved Neighborhood Safety Zone checkpoints. Officers stopped cars driving south down Montello Avenue NE, which is hardly a major entrance point to the area, with Florida Avenue and its tributaries just to the south. (In fact, I tried for a while to enter via the checkpoint but kept ending up on the other side of it without passing through the gauntlet.) Officers stood in the middle of the intersection and asked drivers for I.D. and an explanation of their business in the neighborhood. Sometimes, an officer would use a flashlight to peer into the vehicles (does that constitute plain view if they find something?) If drivers didn’t have a good enough reason to be in the hood, the officers waved them to the left. According to legal observers from the ACLU, about 90 percent of the cars were rejected, often because the drivers didn’t live in that immediate block. Most people parked around the corner and walked back.

The whole scene felt a bit surreal. Everyone was sort of slow and sleepy after a day of 96-degere heat. Storm clouds darkened the sky but held their rain, just sparking up with intermittent lightening. Despite the impending storm, this normally sleepy intersection attracted a crowd of many dozens. There were people from the neighborhood, police officers and white-shirted brass, and lots of white people in t-shirts with clip boards (representatives of various do-good organizations). I watched assistant chief Diane Groomes field questions, or rather, commentary, from a group of frustrated young people, some of whom kept calling her Cathy. There were lots of comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan. One young man asked Groomes why the city hadn’t held a neighborhood meeting to discuss the checkpoint. She said it was a fast, strategic decision in response to the murders, and that she was here now, ready to listen. The guy said back, “You want to listen to us now, after you’ve made your decision.” She said, “People make decisions all the time.” In addition to questioning the legality and civil rights implications of the action, many people wondered aloud about the effectiveness. One little boy remarked, “people do killings when they’re walking, too.”

While the city has repeatedly stressed the legality of the plan, the courts have not whole-heartedly endorsed checkpoints. In Indianapolis v. Edmunds, the Supreme Court ruled that checkpoints that serve general law enforcement purposes (rather than narrow dragnets for specific violations) contravene the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. It seems plausible that Lanier’s checkpoints are pretty damn broad and general, even if they target just one neighborhood. If I were the ACLU (and knew more than one CrimPro class worth of law), it might seem like a reasonable gamble on which to wage a potentially precedent-setting lawsuit. Which makes me wonder what kind of payoff Lanier sees in this plan. The crime-fighting benefits are vague at best, and she hasn’t exactly won over the community. Is all that worth a potentially costly legal battle?

Instead of empathizing with her critics, Chief Cathy Lanier has cast them as jaded curmudgeons who don’t really care about public safety. In an open letter to 5th District residents, she wrote, “It is unfortunate that some want to criticize the use of this tool when we are simply trying to reduce the opportunity for violent offenders to enter a neighborhood for the sole purpose of taking someone’s life… I want to thank the officers, residents and other supporters of this district for what residents agree was a successful weekend. No matter what the critics say, this collaboration was a way of working together to confront potential violent crime at the door to say, “the crime and the killings are not welcomed in the Fifth District or any part of our city.”

On the list serve, one resident responded: “It is unfortunate that if someone expresses concern about this tool, you see it as negative… It is easy to set up a road block and soothe your mind that you are fighting crime in our neighborhood, but many of us feel that you have not done enough of the good old fashioned policing to justify setting up road blocks and it makes us all feel as though we are criminals.”

Can we get Mike Davis in here? Cathy Lanier’s latest plan to stop the wave of violence (still bellow 90s levels) in D.C. is a nice, friendly quarantine of the most troublesome pockets of the city. From an exclusive report in the Examiner:

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Aside from the obvious historical comparisons in New York and Russia, it strains the mind to imagine how this will do anything other than displace crime, and send a very clear message to kids growing up in D.C. that the police already think they’re criminals.

News items published on list-serves aren’t always very reliable. They’re often second or third hand, and details like date and time get lost in the author’s outrage over no-good kids down the block or the injustice of such and such an agency. A recent posting on several DC scooter websites smelled typically dubious: a group of delinquents had attempted to jack a scooter, and the rider ended up getting cited for breaking the law. Turns out police reports aren’t always very reliable, either.

Jonathan Lieber bought his scooter, an orange Buddy 125, just a week before he nearly lost it. Here’s his version of the events: Around 9 p.m. on Friday May 16, he was riding north on 13th Street NW and came to a stop at the light at Euclid. A group of teenagers started crossing the street toward him, but that didn’t seem odd, it being DC, on a Friday night. Then one of the young men marched over and told Lieber to give up his scooter. Not comprehending his assailant’s determination, Lieber refused. To help him understand, a second teen lifted up his shirt, grabbed the pistol stuffed in his waistband, and used it to slapped Lieber in the face. That sort of backfired. Instead of dismounting, the panicking Lieber yanked his throttle and zoomed into the intersection, where he collided with a car and toppled over the hood and onto the ground. The kids ran off, someone called 911 and John sat bleeding from his split lip. (Another driver ran out of his car after the hoodlums. In return for this daring deed, his car rolled down the hill and crashed into another vehicle.) Lieber, after giving a statement to police, took an ambulance to Howard University Hospital, where he got eight stitches. (And yes, Mrs. Lieber, Jon was wearing a helmet.)

Then he got another surprise: an officer showed up with a $50 ticket charging Lieber with causing the collision on Euclid. Lieber says the officer explained that he had to blame someone, for insurance purposes, but promised not to show up in court if Lieber contested the ticket. Still, it seems highly odd that you can get charged with a crime for attempting to flee from an assault. To further sweeten the pot, the incident report from the attempted armed scooter jacking blamed Lieber for causing the injury to his lip. According to the report, Lieber “attempted to flee northbound on 13th Street, striking [the assailant's] handgun causing the listed injury.” backwards. In addition to blaming Lieber for injuries he says he sustained after getting pistol-whipped, the report jumbles the sequence of events. Lieber says he fled into the intersection after getting slapped in the face with a gun, not the other way around.

Lieber is waiting to pass judgment on police until everything is over. He says his injury is healing and his insurance is covering the damage to his scooter. “We’ll see how they handle I guess,” he says. A detective contacted him this weekend with news of possible suspects.

As for the mixed up police report, a district supervisor said he needed to get in touch with Lieber before commenting on the incident.

I just stopped by Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest, hoping to talk to kids about the breaking news that at least one of their own is suspected in connection with a mostly-suburban drug ring with “plans” to sell marijuana to high school students. After finding more than $6,000 in cash and more than three pounds of marijuana in one student’s home (which leads me to believe the “plans” had already been realized), Montgomery County police arrested two students, from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and two adults. More arrests were promised–potentially at Wilson. Police said they were proud they caught the little buggers before they had a chance to sell any drugs. Um, right.

Anyway, I figured this news would be the talk of the town at Wilson. Even though the campus was relatively busy this afternoon, I found only one student who’d heard anything. The gossip, she said, was something about “a white, 17-year-old girl” involved with selling drugs with kids from Maryland. The rest of the students I talked to were more concerned about another police action on campus today: the closure of Fort Reno park due to high arsenic levels in the soil. According to a group of students sitting on some steps at a business across from the school, at about 1:30 p.m., the park was their favorite place to ditch class. Now where will they go???

I understand their frustration. When I was in high school, we would sneak away to a place called Hamburger Mary’s in Portland. We would order home fries, douse them with Tabasco, nurse coffees and smoke Marlboro Reds. I was really not that much of a rebel, so we only skipped during assemblies or when we’d done something to make showing up in class riskier than getting caught skipping. When Hamburger Mary’s closed, we were distraught. We tried going to the fancier brew pub down the street, but the waiters quickly caught onto our game and gave us a time limit. The next year, our school started locking the doors during assemblies. That meant we actually had to go. And they were really, really bad. Wilson students, I feel your pain.

…you’re havin’ a bad week:

NY congressman admits affair, out-of-wedlock child
USA Today - 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON (AP) - Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.