City Desk » The Wire

The Blotter: Potomac Gardens Is The New Langston Terrace

Rend Smith — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:37:43 +0000

D.C.'s Barksdale Crew?: A police source offers fresh details about the alleged Potomac Gardens drug ring that suffered a huge blow earlier this month. Police ostensibly busted up the crew–connected to an alleged drug market in the public housing complex–when they made 15 arrests. A police source says cops had been working a case against the heroin-cocaine crew for several years. Police began looking at the alleged dealers some time after busting another crew lead by Rex Pelote, Sr. in Langston Terrace. Two years ago, Langston Terrace was the place for Northeast addicts to go to score. A year after the Langston operation was hobbled, informants told cops local addicts had started shopping at Potomac Gardens. The FBI-led Safe Streets Task Force, which includes MPD and Park Police, used undercover drug buys, surveillance and search warrants to collar the new crew, the source says.

Checks Cashed, Cuffs Clicked: On Thursday, police arrested two men suspected of fatally shooting a store clerk during an armed robbery on June 17. Court documents offer details of what happened: Prabhjot Singh charged one of the gunmen who'd stormed into the check-cashing establishment in the 2500 block of Benning Road around 10 a.m. A security camera picked up the clerk and gunman moving through the front entrance of the store during the fight. They fell. On the ground, clerk and robber struggled over a gun, docments say, and Singh was shot in the head. Singh may have been defending his father, who was also in the store. The elder Singh was pistol-whipped during the robbery. The gunmen escaped with $12,000. Cops later arrested the two alleged robbers, Gregory Trotter, 48, and Ernest Pee, 49.

Beaten and Abandoned: A 19-year-old woman was found dead in a car in Fairfax on Sunday. Though the 2008 two-door Toyota was discovered in a ditch off the south side of Arlington Boulevard at about 3:30 p.m., Fairfax cops don't think the young female died in a collision: "The victim appeared to have trauma to the upper body which was not consistent with the mechanism of the crash." Fairfax cops are investigating the suspicious death.

One Man, Many Burglaries: While cops don't buy the story that a burglar killed Robert Wone, it's obvious that Dupont Circle, scene of the high profile murder, has had its share of break-ins. Serial burglar Willie Carter, for instance, plagued the neighborhood from at least May through November 2009. According to charging documents, Carter was arrested not too far away from Wone's murder site on a fire escape in the 1800 block of S Street NW. Carter allegedly had a packet of "white powder" in his pocket. He admitted on the scene that he had been burglarizing an apartment via the fire escape. After pleading guilty to five other burglaries, he was sentenced to 10 1/2 years in prison this month.

Is Marion Barry Our Clay Davis?

Jason Cherkis — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:02:26 +0000

Simon Says Name The Cops Involved In Shootings. We Agree.

Jason Cherkis — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:23:48 +0000

On Sunday, David Simon published an op-ed in the Post railing against the Baltimore Police Department's recent refusal to release the names of cops involved in shootings. (He also pissed on the press—MSM and "citizen bloggers"—for not challenging the department on its no-names policy.

Simon writes:

"In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman — a refugee from the Bush administration — came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)

Anthony Guglielmi, the department's director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted — in the commissioner's judgment — they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public./blockquote>

I sympathize with Simon on this one. The D.C. police department not only refuses to release the names of officers involved in shootings, its spokesperson doesn't quite understand the need for such openness.

I was able to get the names of the cops in the David Kerstetter shooting only by talking to friendly officers and digging up the officers' phone numbers. [The Post never bothered to even name Kerstetter in its short account of the shooting]. The department still wouldn't confirm the names even after I interviewed the cops. A few months later, an officer shot and killed Osman Abdullahi, and an off-duty cop shot another mentally ill man the next day.

The D.C. police investigation into the DeOnte Rawlings shooting has yet to be made public. The head of the police union, Kristopher Baumann says the Rawlings case should be made public. He blames Mayor Adrian M. Fenty for keeping the investigation under wraps.

"This is a decision the mayor is making," Baumann says. "If they did start making those investigations public, I would be fascinated to see how that would go." He's open to the idea but with one important caveat: make all cases public.

"You can't have one standard for police officers and one for high-ranking officials," he says. "That would be one of the issues....If you do it for the Rawlings case, it has to be done for all cases and all situations. It has to be one standard. That standard has to be across the board.”

But Baumann is against naming names. I will have more posts on this issue later today.

Photo of David Kerstetter provided by the Kerstetter family