Elephant In The Neighborhood

Your Boy in NE – not sure what you are smoking. I grew up in Brooklyn and was just up in NYC this weekend with my girlfriend. We walked through Times Square for her benefit at midnight and made our way down to 34th and 6th… at no point did she feel threatened or uncomfortable as we walked through the masses… We live in Gallery Place and make it a point to visit friends who live in nicer parts of the City where these hoods don’t run free. Someone mentioned its a lot like the early 90’s when Dinkins was mayor in New York… that is dead on. This place is out of control and makes our city look like a bunch of morons are running it… oh wait they are!

I think this article is further evidence that large groups of teenagers hanging around the neighborhood is cause for concern.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/12/AR2008101201870.html?tid=informbox

Your boy in Near NE…

FYI – Platinum/Club Bounce has been reformated post liquor license suspension and now is dry and exclusively caters to the under 21 (or maybe even under 18) crowd. This occurred about two months ago. It is not the sole cause / draw for the teens, but contributes to the crowd.

It’s always entertaining to listen to urban liberals contort their words so as not to sound racist or classist. Different cultures have different ways of expression, so we’re told. What some call incivility, others call normality. For many of these kids, shouting, cursing, and milling about in the way of everyone else is acceptable behavior they have learned from their peers and their parents. It’s unfair for the more reserved PQ liberals to, between sipping their fair trade lattes and pinning on Obama pins, to demand that the cultural mores of privileged white society be forced upon lower-class black kids.

It’s disappointing to hear some people suggest that people are requesting a proactive approach to safety from the MPD because the teens are black, and that a rash of fights and stabbings in a very small area should not be cause for concern. But I usually only hear that side of the coin in anonymous, blog type environments. Having sat through many Shaw neighborhood meetings, where parent types attend, I can attest to hearing the other side of the coin as well, accusing a government agency of NOT acting proactively simply BECAUSE the teens are black. You can’t make everyone happy.

Based on the FOX5 news report I saw on Saturday night from Chinatown (where the reporter mentioned a fight with teens arrested just before she went on air), it sounds like the police ARE stepping it up for now, and I commend them for that.

Of course we could wait until something worse happens. Maybe some teens are “wrestling” and one accidentally gets pushed into the street in front of a moving car, suffering a fatal injury. Even though some might accuse others of using that one freak incident as a prejudiced excuse to tighten down the nieghborhood, I could easily see the parents suing the City and the MPD for turning a blind eye to a crowd control problem that they knew existed, simply because their children were black, and something to the effect that if it were kids in Georgetown, the police would have been out there making a safer environment for those children.

I do know if one of those kids were mine, I’d be pushing for the proactive approach (and I still am even though they aren’t).

It’s amazing what happens when you combine the newly urban with kids, who even at their young age, have lived in DC longer than most adults around here. I find it incredibly selfish to want to run these kids out of the area. Who do you think the movie theaters, bowling alleys and clothing stores cater to? I know they couldn’t sustain themselves without all those kids. So let’s run them out of the area, make them someone else’s problem. Because I’m sure that most of them come from a safe stable 2 parent household.

Or we could do something constructive and give them some guidelines because they are honestly an asset to the neighborhood. They will respect us if we respect them.

Ed. note: Although the names are similar, this comment is not by the corresponding post’s author. This note was added for clarification.

Actually, what they are doing IS a crime under the DC Code:

§ 22-1307. Unlawful assembly; profane and indecent language.

It shall not be lawful for any person or persons within the District of Columbia to congregate and assemble in any street, avenue, alley, road, or highway, or in or around any public building or inclosure, or any park or reservation, or at the entrance of any private building or inclosure, and engage in loud and boisterous talking or other disorderly conduct, or to insult or make rude or obscene gestures or comments or observations on persons passing by, or in their hearing, or to crowd, obstruct, or incommode, the free use of any such street, avenue, alley, road, highway, or any of the foot pavements thereof, or the free entrance into any public or private building or inclosure; it shall not be lawful for any person or persons to curse, swear, or make use of any profane language or indecent or obscene words, or engage in any disorderly conduct in any street, avenue, alley, road, highway, public park or inclosure, public building, church, or assembly room, or in any other public place, or in any place wherefrom the same may be heard in any street, avenue, alley, road, highway, public park or inclosure, or other building, or in any premises other than those where the offense was committed, under a penalty of not more than $250 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, or both for each and every such offense.

1:02 AM – I hope you’re not referring to my comment as suggesting we “run these kids out of the area”, because I simply didn’t suggest that. And I think posting more officers out there to ensure the crowd stays under control, and who would hopefully let teens (among others) know when they are doing something inappropriate is a form of giving constructive guidelines.

However if you are referring to curfews, DC has had a city wide juvenile curfew in place since 1995 – before the majority of the “newly urban” came to the PQ. And it wasn’t directed at keeping kids out of a certain neighborhood, but rather from hanging out on their own streets in the early AM getting into trouble, and hopefully to suggest they go to sleep on school nights so they can get up and go to school. I have often heard parents say they wish the MPD would enforce those curfew better.

MPD Chief Ramsey (who also was not newly urban) had Mayor Williams tighten the city wide curfew temporarily to 10PM in 2006 to get a handle on a rash of teen violence. I doubt anyone wants to get back to that state before we act, but there have been a rash of group teen beatings and robberies lately, and a rash of teen fights, some stabbings, and lesser crimes in the PQ itself at predictable times and days of the week. In 2006, Councilman Fenty was the major voice against the curfew (maybe the only) if I recall correctly, which may be why he doesn’t mention it today. Marion Barry, the man of the people, was all for it.

Finally, the suggestion that “they will respect us if we respect them” certainly works in some environments. But are you saying that the residents of PQ are walking around at night being disrespectful and not minding their manners, and if us older folks just learned how to improve our manners out of the street, everything would change? This doesn’t even make sense to me, unless you actually saying that implementing crowd control and/or enforcing at least the existing curfew would be constructive and for the good of the teens. I guess your solution needs to be more concrete for me.

It is also disturbing that those who advocate the ‘just get used to it’ solution premise their arguments on a belief that it is illegitimate for people to want their neighborhoods to be safer and more civil.

I hope a few of these folks like 1:02 a.m. and 7:49 p.m. go to the DNA meeting tonight to voice their minority viewpoints to the neighborhood. I’d simply like to see them justify handing this neighborhood’s quality of life, economics and safety over to the region’s unsupervised teens. But if they have a real viewpoint and stake in this matter, they need to stand up before the others that are impacted by this issue every weekend.

I doubt you will see any of those folks at the DNA meeting, they don’t live in the neighborhood.

3:00 — Don’t worry — plenty of people with similar opinions to 1:02 and 7:49 will be there at the meeting. I am working on getting out whole Board and many residents of our building there.

If anyone has doubts about teen violence rising, maybe you should remind yourself of the last bad economic recession in the US, back in the early ’90s. As a result, the movie KIDS was produced in NYC to show what happens to teenagers in urban areas. When the economy slows down, as its doing now, jobs that kids would usually get at convenient stores are slimmed down, putting them out of work and bored as hell.

From my personal experience, I am guessing that many of the people posting about this area not being a big deal have not been to 7th btw H and G on a Saturday night. This is not just groups of teens – it is a phenomenon. The block takes a good 10 minutes to walk down if you make that mistake because there is absolutely no where to walk. It’s a gauntlet of screaming, groping, punching, pushing…it’s mindboggling to see. It’s sad that I never want to go out in my own neighborhood at night during the weekend anymore, it’s just not worth the effort.

To be honest, I don’t know what the fix is. I’m not condemning the kids themselves. If I was a teen and I heard the hot spot to hang out was 7th and H, I would probably be there too. I remember that much of my teen weekends were spent looking for something “not boring” to do. It’s a tough age.

I don’t work with youth, nor am I claiming to be some urban-problem solving guru but I do know that something does have to be done in this area. It has escalated in the three years I’ve lived in the neighborhood from a hangout for teens waiting for a movie to something much bigger than that. If teens are consistently getting into fights and now there has been a stabbing, we can’t (or at least I can’t) just look the other way and shrug it off as another thing to just accept as “urban living.”

3:47 — Good work, let’s tell the police to stay out of Gallery Place so the kids can do as these please. Anarchy for all!!!!

Kolkhoznik, ’nuff said; concise and precise.

The bottom line is this: We need to find a BALANCE. Club Bounce’s Promoter is a concerned Mom who wants to give kids something fun to do. Fine. So our neighborhood is WORKING for this Promoter and the kids but NOT for the residents and some business owners. How can we resolve this in a balanced way? What about this: If the kids want to hang out until midnight, why not have some concerned parents and grandparents as “orange caps” trolling the streets? They’ll put ’em in their place! OR if the kids insist on hanging out unsupervised, it’s a 10pm curfew; send ’em home to their mamas where they belong. My lovely neighbor had this great idea: Have the clubs let out at 11:30pm, then it’s straight to the metro or be picked-up by the curfew cops at midnight. BALANCE!

I think a lot of the critics labeling us PQ residents as racist liberals who hate teens not only are baselessly responding to legitimate community concerns with culture/race war boilerplate that is not relevant in this local issue, they also do not realize that what we are experiencing is not just a “teen” issue. Had most of them actually experienced the station on a regular basis, we wouldn’t have the anonymous slandering of PQ residents.

While teens make up the bulk of the crowd late at night, the Chinatown exit on H Street has been plagued by rowdy, abusive, mob behavior of people of all ages. To call this an issue about “kids just growing up” really misses the point that the Chinatown station is a phenomenon all to itself. And I know I’ll be attacked for it–another “elephant” issue–but the bulk of the problems I have experienced are from people congregating near the bus stop for the X2 and P6 buses heading east down H Street. I’ve seen fights break out on the street and then continue as both parties get onto the X2 and continue to rumble as it heads east down H.

There are a range of issues. One of every two times I come out of that station I am aggressively panhandled. There are people who congregate at the top of the Metro escalator, forcing people exiting the station to forcefully wedge a way out, almost asking for a violent confrontation. There are people who loiter around the station in large numbers, smoking, cursing, and creating a ruckus. Now critics are going to say this is just what happens when you live in a city, but in my 6 years in DC this is unique to the Chinatown station exit on H street. This doesn’t even take into account the violence and threat of violence that is very real at the station. If this was a ubiquitous city problem, then I’d experience the same problem at the south exit of the station, which is not the case. The south exit is also not a major Metrobus stop.

I appreciated the MPD presence there this past weekend. Their calming presence restored the station to a peaceful state where people flowed naturally down sidewalks and in and out of the station without harassment. That’s the neighborhood I moved to, the community I’m a part of–not one of loitering, abusive behavior, and violence.

Only one block further down the street where the major Chinatown buses pick up and drop off, I have seen no major issues. People waiting for the buses are orderly, courteous, and don’t regularly engage in fighting. When I walk home from the station, by the time I’m past Chinatown market, I feel safe. This is a very distinct crowd we deal with at the H Street station–the Chinatown bus crowds prove this isn’t a ubiquitous “urban” phenomenon.

An aside–thank you to PQLiving for hosting this discussion of this important community issue. I think the number of comments speaks for itself how much the neighborhood cares about this issue. I’d be interested to see the number of page views for this article versus other typical PQliving articles.

I just wish there was a better solution to the problem than kick all the kids out. Keep the movie theater with it’s late night shows, and the bowling alley that doesn’t cater to kids at night anyway, but the kids, they have to go. Apparently, I smoke too much to come up with anything better, so I look to internet trolls for the answer.

-Your boy.