I prefer that MPD focus on *both* petty crimes and serious crimes.

Some of the comments posted here make me wonder if people have lived in cities for very long. This sort of thing is not unique, and the fear-mongering and ‘no go zone’ attitude that some people seem to have is counterproductive at best.

No doubt, crime is a problem in our neighborhood. It requires a multi-tiered approach that has probably been elaborated upon more times than people can count but is still worth listing out:

- Personal responsibility: Don’t listen to music or talk on your cell phone, especially at night, because it cuts down on awareness. Stay alert to your surroundings. Try to walk where it is well lit, if possible. Try to walk with at least one other person, again if possible. Look behind you every now and then. It’s not paranoia, it’s safety.

- Civic responsibility: Inform the people that can make changes about the problems. Saying ‘oh they never listen’ or ‘oh things never change’ its pointless. Step up or shut up. If you think you could do a better job, then run for office rather than complaining on a message board anonymously.

- Neighborly responsibility: Keep your eye out for the safety of others, support local businesses, and be an ambassador for our neighborhood. Telling your friends the area is dangerous or ‘I don’t go north of H street’ is ridiculous and damages the area’s image and improvement, which we all want to be bettered.

Sorry if this seems like a rant, but I find it wild that people won’t walk east of such and such street or north of such and such because of a couple of ancidotal stories that are published with scant details on the situation that led to the crime. I live at 5th and H, so I guess I’m in the red zone according to some, but things are never going to change if we bust out the barbed wire and cordon ourselves into a DC version of the Green Zone.

I agree that the MPD needs to start enforcing more petty crimes to cut down on the perception the criminals have of having a really good chance of getting away with most anything (which appears true). Many people have been asking for that in the last several years in many neighborhoods, but the MPD doesn’t seem supportive, and neither do a lot of Council members, like Schwartz. In her visit to the DNA, she seemed to say that is because we are a “liberal” city. Unfortunately, when the MPD gets pressured to provide a higher level of enforcement, they appear to try to target only the people asking for the enforcement to punish them for asking, and to keep enforcement at the current level, like in this story. That is one example, but it certainly isn’t the first time that kind of thing happened.

I personally think 3 main things could help change this:
1) Making the officers’ paperwork and processing of crimes more like it is in surrounding jurisdictions. Our officers have to fill out much more paperwork and spend a lot more of their own time on processing than officers in other jurisdictions, which causes them to just not take reports in many cases (which causes are crime rates to be under reported in some areas). I think we actually continue to lose good officers to surrounding jurisdictions partially because of this, while we appear to hire officers from other areas that need the job, maybe because they didn’t make the cut somewhere else, which also has us going to places like Puerto Rico to get officers. I know we have good officers, but we have far more than our share of challenged officers as well.

2) Setting expectations with given neighborhoods around what the MPD is willing to enforce (or not enforce), and at what level. This is especially helpful in areas where the laws are not well understood or are not often enforced in many areas (like early morning construction or trash pickup). I think this would allow the residents, MPD and Council/ANCs to identify exactly where there are gaps either in a given law or the expectation of the residents vs. the MPD. Then everyone is in a better position to address the gaps through a variety of methods. Unfortunately, from what i have seen, the MPD’s leaders don’t seem to want to engage in that type of discussion. When they say they want community support, they want you to tell them who shot somebody, not ways to do their job better (which is how they perceive it).

3) I have changed my view over the years, and I am not sure that counting officers per 1000 residents (or whatever the number), and then comparing to NYC makes sense. I mostly believe this because NYC is far more densely populated than DC, and I think that makes a huge difference in how many officers there are to cover a given area. I think if we look at officers per square mile, then we have less coverage than NYC (meaning we need more officers to get the kind of coverage NYC has). If you want to see officers on the street, that comparison would seem to make more sense. Of course many people think more officers won’t make a difference (I believe this applies to Fenty). I am starting to believe that to a point (and I don’t know how many officers that point is), more officers would make a difference because there would be more officer visibility, and they wouldn’t be pulling officers from X neighborhood (Penn Quarter) to cover Y neighborhood (BTW, other neighborhoods, like Shaw, are told the exact same thing about officers having been pulled to cover another area). Of course it only makes a difference if each officer is doing good work as well.

The MPD also continues to resist aligning the PSA boundaries with ANC boundaries, which would allow residents and community groups to work more efficiently and effectively with Police, not to mention the Council members and ANC leaders. I have never heard a good reason why they resist it, except that they don’t want to answer to politicians, so they continue with divide and conquer. The answer I got from an Asst. Chief that last time they changed the PSA boundaries to match the OP’s SNAP boundaries, was that I was underestimating Council members’ abilities to split MPD Districts and PSAs (which I thought was missing the point entirely, which or course didn’t surprise me at all).

The MPD also continues to refuse to release internal investigation reports in many cases, such as the case where over 150 officers were supposedly punished for racist behavior. They said they had to keep it secret, even from Council members who serve in MPD oversight capacities, to protect the officers who were punished. That doesn’t hold water since I hear a lot of other stories where they mention officers names who broke policy, not to mention that when a Judge ordered the Pershing Park report release, it was apparent that Chief Ramsey had lied about why they kept it secret (or someone under him gave him bad info, I’m sure). Not releasing these reports really keeps the public and the Council from evaluating how the MPD is performing and dealing with problems. Nice that they can avoid responsibility, but we end up not seeing improvement.

This is all to say that I think the MPD has plenty of improvements that can be made that could have high impact on residents concerns. I had higher hopes in Chief Lanier making some sizable basic changes by now, but I remain far more impressed by Rhee than Lanier. Lanier does seem to want more Police by using this very expensive “All hands on deck” tactic, but I would like to see us increase the size of the force instead. Of course that’s hard when officers don’t want to work here because of our other issues. I also thought I saw that she was trying to improve the incident reporting paper work/processing for officers, but I don’t think anything is actually changed yet. In the future please email your council member and the at-large council members asking for changes in the MPD however you see fit, because it really does make a difference. The council members focus on the things given neighborhoods complain about.

Sorry for the book, but this issue is near and dear to my heart.

#5 completely misunderstands the issues here. These are not “the poor” who are committing these crimes. They’re criminals and drug addicts. Being poor does not inherently make you a criminal. This kind of logic leads to the opposite conclusion that rich people don’t commit crimes since they have a lot of money.

Anyone who has lived downtown for a while knows that Chief Lanier has pulled officers out of here for other parts of the city. It’s easy to be a victim of a crime here in broad daylight or when many people are around, because the police aren’t here. So nobody should get too comfortable walking around the neighborhood. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, if at all.