A few months back, I wrote a story about crews in Shaw and the murder of Deon Peoples in January 2007. Two defendants were being held in connection with the crime. Ben Barringer had been arrested last summer; Jeffrey Bright was taken into policy custody in April. As I was wrapping up the piece, I spoke with a lawyer involved in the case, who said that he believed the murder trial would take place late summer. Well, how time flies! Here we are post-Labor Day Weekend.

Time to check in and see if any sentences had been handed down. I called Leah Gurowitz at the D.C. Superior Courthouse. The answer, it turned out, was a straight “no,” though both defendants’ cases had advanced.

On May 30, Barringer pled guilty to conspiracy and carrying a pistol without a license outside a home. He will be sentenced on September 26 at 2 p.m. As for Bright, his jury trial is scheduled for February 2, 2009. It was originally set for August 11, but mid-July his lawyer asked for it to be continued at a later date.

So, any chatter about crew members re-entering the community should be pushed off at least for a while.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

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, we blogged about the boundaries for the new “Shaw ShotSpotter” that actually covers parts of Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, U Street, Bloomingdale, Truxton Circle, and Park View. (Perhaps it graces the borders of lower Crestwood and lower Petworth, as well? D.C. has too many damn neighborhoods.)

Anyway, here’s the graphic version of the rough boundaries of the coverage area, as approved by Captain Michael Eldridge, who is overseeing the technology.

The city plans to spend over $2 million on a vacant lot in Shaw to move forward on rehabbing the historic Howard Theater.

The parcel, behind the theater at 1830 Wiltberger Place NW, is assessed at about $1.25 million. Under the contract submitted for council approval, the city proposes paying $2,012,500 for the lot. That’s a premium of 60 percent.

The land is needed, according to city documents, to construct “back-of-the-house facilities” and loading areas for the theater, to which the city has committed up to $15 million in grants and tax breaks. Now anyone with a modicum of real-estate knowledge knows that assessed valuations are always well underneath market values, but a 60 percent premium is noteworthy—especially in the current real-estate market.

The lot’s owner, Himat A. Gulajan of Centreville, was not available for comment; a person answering his phone said he’s out of town until Monday.

Sean Madigan, a spokesperson for Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Neil Albert, says the price is tied to an appraisal that puts the value of the land at $1.75 million. As for the 14 percent extra the city is paying, Madigan says it “isn’t uncommon to pay a premium in circumstances like this,” where a parcel is needed for a larger project.

Last week, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans sent out a press release about the installment—in Shaw—of new ShotSpotter sensors, which can pinpoint the origin of gunshots by picking up their sound.

I blogged about the news. One disbelieving commenter wrote in, with a very reasonable question: “Is it really here this time?”

Well, Capt. Michael Eldridge, who is overseeing the ShotSpotter technology, insists the sensors are up and running, though he refused to tell me where they are located, for good reason. (Every time I think about this, I see, flashing in my head, the opening credits of HBO’s The Wire—you know, the part where the kids throw the rock at the security camera.)

So, according to Eldridge, the “Shaw ShotSpotter” will cover: north on 10th Street from New York Avenue, west on S Street to 16th Street, north again on 16th Street. The system does cover Kalorama Road, the 17th and Euclid Area, and continuing north on 16th Street, west on Spring Road and Rock Creek Church Road, south on 2nd Street, to New York Avenue.

Check out a map. That’s a big, big area (significant chunks of Liquorridor and Land of the Loft, in CP terminology.)

ShotSpotter’s coverage area is expanding significantly within the next few months, as the Washington Post originally reported.

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That’s the actual subhead in a press release from Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans‘ office. Luckily, the statement redeems itself by presenting some real news (as opposed to the recent “[Kwame] BROWN BAGS IT FOR PROSTATE CANCER AWARENESS“.)

Residents in Shaw have been begging for ShotSpotter since the dawn of the police listervs, or at least it feels that way. Here’s a little sample:

“What bothers me almost as much as the repeated gunfire is that residents (myself included) seem to have gotten so accustomed to hearing it that it may not even get reported. One more reason that we need to get ShotSpotter deployed so that the police aren’t dependent on sometimes not-very-precise reports from residents.”

Now, apparently, the wait is over.

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A year or so ago, my boyfriend bought a 1979 Chevy LUV truck from upstate New York. It was old. It was rusty. It had some holes. But it was a good little truck. It’d been through a lot. Who knows how much hay it hauled or how many bumpy back roads it traversed. That good little truck survived the drive from New York to D.C. And it survived little trips around the city. (Except for that one time it broke down in the Whole Foods parking lot, which I think it did on purpose out of protest.)

But this good little truck couldn’t survive Shaw.

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Maybe it’s because I’m new to the D.C. area, but I can’t seem to figure out the purpose of attending ANC meetings.

I thought ANC meetings were created to form active communication between political bigwigs—they are bigwigs, right?—with everyday D.C. residents. But after attending my fifth (and maybe last) meeting last night, all I’ve noticed are older community members complaining about loud music and speeding cars.

Last night I attended the Petworth community’s ANC 4D meeting at MPD’s 4th District. In a rather small corner room, about 20 community members gathered for more than an hour discussing ways to improve their neighborhood dog park.

The meeting sparked up when one resident asked the commission board if her petition for new speed bumps was reviewed since the last meeting. When she realized no one had a clue what she was talking about, another 15 minutes were spent with the crowd discussing the inefficiency of the ANC and why nothing ever gets done.

I heard several soft mumbles from a few residents—“this meeting is pointless”—and from others slight snoring sounds.

At another meeting I attended last month, I noticed a mass of empty chairs as community members discussed corner store closings and trash on the sidewalks.

I asked 4D-03 Commissioner Robert Whiddon what he thought the overall problem with ANC meetings is:

“The D.C. government preys on empathy,” he says. “Nothing is going to change because the people in the community are OK with being docile citizens. The mayor comes to the meetings and gives out his personal cell phone number telling people to call with concerns, but he is not going to call these people back. There are simply too many people with small issues that matter to them.”

“But 20 people coming to a neighborhood meeting is sad. In an area of over 1,000 residents, our meetings should be packed. It’s just pathetic. We need to get people out to these meetings by buying food, giving away prizes, or awarding raffles.”

Another problem he says is the overwhelming number of ANCs in the district. There are currently 37 ANC commissions and more than 250 representatives in all eight wards. Whiddon says that with 37 geographic clusters complaining about traffic lights, reckless teenagers, or the need for speed bumps, there is no way that the D.C. government is going to take anyone seriously.
People give up, he says, when it takes almost two years to get a rotting tree taken out or stop sign put in.

But guess what? It’s still true that you can’t fix something if you don’t do anything about it. ANC elections are coming up in November; petitions to be a political bigwig can be picked up in early August.

Much has been reported on the renewed crew violence in Shaw. On Feb. 18, four youths were shot standing near the Washington Convention Center on 7th Street. In the midst of constant reports of shootings, one 5th Street resident came home to find a bullet through her window. Her response, according to an e-mail posted on a local listserv: “My husband thinks that it was someone shooting at the political sign that I had in the window, but who knows.”

I don’t think this was a joke. Perhaps this bit of info from the Washington Post will bring her up to speed.

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Last week, I wrote a blog post about the removal of pairs of shoes from trees and street lights in Shaw, and the various ideas flying around about the symbolism of the shoes. One theory is that the shoes mark gang territory; Another is that they are used as memorials to lost friends; One more is that they identify drug houses. These conflicting ideas were often recorded with deep conviction (read: self-righteous dogmatism) on the Police Third District listserv. Example: after one poster wrote in support of the gang territory theory, another posted, “It’s very obvious that you are not an expert on this topic, sir.” Then, with great wisdom and compassion, the writer enlightened the listserv: “The kids I have tried to discourage from doing this were hanging shoes on telephone lines to honor the memory of a deceased friend who they held in high regard. Not every little neighborhood kid is in a gang or a crew.”

In the end, no one idea emerged as the absolute truth. But, I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I made some calls to the Ward 2 representatives in the Mayor’s Office of Community Relations and Services (MOCRS). They were working on the shoe removal. Unfortunately, the MOCRS guys didn’t call me back too quickly. But, somehow through the grapevine, two other men heard what I was doing and called me to set me straight.

ANC 2C01 Commissioner Alexander Padro rang first: “I grew up in the Bronx. I knew that shoes hanging from lampposts and trees [identified] where a drug house was, and that’s where you go for the action.” Padro says he’s called the Department of Public Works several times over the years to report hanging shoes. He’s noticed a lot of shoes on the 400 block of Q Street. “I’ve talked to people who walk on the block or live on the block, they think there’s a message: this place belongs to us.”

Then, Steven Cox from local anti-violence group Root Inc. called. “So, what do you think the shoes represent?” I asked. “Well, let’s get past the “think” part,” he responded, “I know exactly what’s going on here.” Or something to that effect. “You know how people say ‘he got smoked out of his shoes,’” continued Cox, well apparently, the shoes often belong to murdered victims of gang violence. The perp lobs the shoes up to show his gang is unafraid and willing to kill. Grim stuff–and utterly different from Padro’s claim.

So, who’s not down with the DC streets? “As far as theories, there’s not one specific theory [driving the removal],” says mayoral spokesperson Dena Iverson. Her office heard various complaints at community meetings and via e-mail, and decided the best thing to do was just take down the shoes. So, I guess there’s my answer, if I were to consider the Mayor’s Office of Communications the ultimate authority on gang activities. I still think the full truth has yet to emerge.

On the morning of Jan. 17, teachers and staff at Garnet-Patterson Middle School in Shaw thought their school remained safe from the dreaded D.C. public schools closure list. Hours later, their outlook changed.

Around 3 p.m., Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham placed a call to Garnet’s principal, Veda Usilton, letting her now that the plan to close Shaw Junior High School and ship its students and a gifted program over to Garnet could be in jeopardy. Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, he said, was considering a swap: Shut down Garnet, keep Shaw open.

With a few hours to go before Rhee’s 23 simultaneous school-closure hearings—the public’s last chance to testify on the proposal—Graham wanted Garnet to stand up and show some muscle.

“I had advised her that I believed it was important that some support be established in the record,” he says.

That night, after Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans and a variety of other community figures testified on behalf of Shaw, a group of Garnet supporters spoke about how they were blindsided by their school’s potential closure.

“The good people of Shaw have had upwards of three months to gather support from the community. We had three hours. Here at Garnet-Patterson, we need the same time to gather our community members,” said one Garnet teacher.

Toward the end of the meeting, Rhee showed up and confirmed she was considering moving Garnet to the closure list. If the switch were to take place, she added, the Garnet community would get an opportunity for its own hearing.

Shaw’s Queen of Sheba restaurant has been attempting to secure a liquor license since April 2005. Yesterday, the license was finally granted. The resolution comes after over two years of feuding between Queen of Sheba and its chief opponent, Shiloh Baptist Church.

The Church, located opposite the Ethiopian joint on 9th St., resisted the restaurant’s license, citing the fact that the restaurant was within 400 feet from a school (Seaton Elementary) and right next door to the church’s own Child Development Center. Read up on the history of Shiloh and Sheba’s feud here.

ANC 2C01 Commissioner Alex Padro, a vocal supporter of Queen of Sheba in the battle for the license, had this to say:

“The church will say they opposed the license in the interest of community safety. But a lot of people think it’s just the church’s attempt to stay relevant in the neighborhood.”

According to Padro, Shiloh Baptist poses more of a threat to Shaw than does Queen of Sheba’s ability to serve up a few drinks. “They’ve been a bad neighbor,” he says of the church. “They have over a dozen vacant and abandoned properties that have been boarded up for a very long time. They haven’t maintained them properly. They haven’t properly boarded them up to make sure vagrants and children don’t get in. They promised they would renovate the properties and never did a thing. It’s a decade-long pattern of broken promises.”

Shiloh Baptist Church declined to comment.

We recently reported on Shaw’s Asbury Dwelling’s dilemma of what to do about the homeless people who camp out in the building’s spacious window ledges. It seems they have found a decorative yet uncomfortable solution.