My roommate works at a school in this neighborhood that regularly has to go on lock-down, or worse, close early because of threats of violence when the middle school is supposed to let out. Often the administration doesn’t know of a threat until students just get up and start leaving the classrooms, saying “I don’t want to get killed.”

Here, the students who walk home from school have to be escorted by adults most of the way to avoid being jumped or attacked. This, in the middle of a “safety zone” that’s got one gang injunction (of which people were split, partly because of two gangs, only received an injunction). It hasn’t made them feel any safer, because the problems on the streets with animosities and rivalries are also within the schools.

The MPDC are not trying to keep people in, they are legitimately trying to prevent crime. 7-8 people were killed in a one mile radius last weekend, which is absolutely ridiculous for a city in America, much less the nation’s capital.</blockquote.

Why is it much less for the nation’s capitol? I’m not picking on you, it’s just that I think that’s playing a large role behind the rationale of this kind of drastic suppression operation.

It’s like in L.A. when there’s been murders in southern and eastern sections for ages and then someone gets caught in the crossfire of gangfire in West L.A. and the mayor, the police chief and the representing council man or woman are standing before the cameras and saying, about “it can’t happen in our city” meaning West L.A. whereas it’s been going on in the city.

It may or may not quiet things down for a short duration but long-term, it will no impact at all. And as hard as it is to deal with, addressing crime on a long-term level where a neighborhood feels empowered and stake holders in the process and not just plundits that are told how they will be policed, is the only way to effect change. And that’s actually working in some pretty hard hit places in California at least.

Though I may not have lived in neighborhoods with police checkpoints and cordons, I’ve had many African-American and Latino scholarship classmates, especially males who were glad to get out of such neighborhoods precisely because they felt caught in the vise between being victims of violent crime and being constantly profiled and harassed by the police who cared more for throwing their weight around rather than actually helping to stem the violent crimes.

A vice is a good choice of words.

Exactly. That the price of a “safe” neighborhood means getting stopped by the police not just once but often dozens of times. To the point where many parents send their young sons to other relatives to live not just because they might get shot and killed by gang members and drug dealers, but because of all the hassling and what could be worse, by police. Parents don’t mind their kids getting stopped once or twice to be profiled or checked by police, it’s when it is repeatedly or their children are treated with disrespect.

There’s a lot of problems with the D.C. plan especially when it comes to dealing with crime over the long term and not just a five day period here and there.

If you have three or four roads into a neighborhood and have checkpoints for vehicles on one and no checkpoints for pedestrians then this is for show. Yes, for show because if outside criminals want to get in, they’ll go around the checkpoints. If they want to go in and buy drugs from dealers or supply them, they will get in. If they want to go and shoot up someone or someones, they will get in. Criminals are known for doing things like that. Or they can wait out the short stint of the checkpoint, since it’s impossible to keep them going for very long for financial reasons.

And sometimes crime that might happen in a “safety zone” will be pushed to areas around it. I remember there was a lockdown of a neighborhood next to where I live, and the next thing I know there was a massive movement of guns outside of that neighborhood into mine and the homicide rate in my neighborhood went up fairly quickly. Fortunately I was out of town the day some guy got shot and died several feet away from the stairway to my apartment. That’s not uncommon for areas hit with gang injunctions as well.

They might work best when it’s a smaller area that gets hit by mostly outside crime and has one way in and out and pedestrians and motorists were screened. But this program doesn’t sound like that.

Also checkpoints do little to address the majority of most crime which is within neighborhoods. Even in cities like Los Angeles when they had high homicide rates, a lot of those crimes were domestic crimes. If you have gangs or factions of gangs within a neighborhood, then it’s not going to impact them, because again if they have people outside, they’ll get inside around the checkpoints. And if you have a lot of crime in a small area like a square mile, it’s more than likely that the criminals who are causing that are already in the neighborhood.

It’s partly because operations like this one are very costly, and that’s why they’re done for very brief periods of time (the five days listed here for example) not to mention that even people who feel victimized by violent crime and support police efforts get upset at police actions, and about a week or so after a short-term major suppression effort like this is when complaints start coming in.

I’m for fighting crime in part because I have lived in the middle of it. I’ve had more guns pointed my way even by children than I can count. Shootings nearly nightly. Drug dealing and prostitution everywhere. Lived on top of drug dealers and gun dealers. Had friends or their relatives shot and killed and so forth. But one thing that I’ve learned and studies seem to back it is that suppression tactics like these can perhaps bring a reprieve on crime but the longer they are used, the more neighbors they alienate even those who initially supported these efforts and at best it’s a short term fix to say, okay look we’ve fixed our murder rate problem so you can feel free and safe enough to bring your tourists dollars back to our city. But crime is a much tougher problem to deal with than that and tied into so many other things that suppression doesn’t address or may even worsen.

Thanks for the links. I am actually of the generation that didn’t *get* to study most of the 1960s in school (yeah, I’m a lazy history freak, and my favorite periods are WAAAAY earlier). For whatever reason, those of us in school in the 70s and 80s had our American history stop short with the escalation of the Vietnam War. In fact, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I knew that it had been building for *years* as a nasty.convoluted situation with military advisors and troops placed for “police action” (although I’d heard that term before). We just never got that information any of the three times I studied American History in elementary/high school, and sadly, I’m not sure where to start now. I am aware that the protests of the time were often repressed, sometimes violently. Just not aware of the many instances, apparently.

I was referring more to the principles that this country was *supposed* to have been founded on (yeah — I know that has been mythologized too), and the fact that the kind of control being exerted over those neighborhoods comes very close to some of the excesses that the British troops indulged in back before we WERE a country. Sorry for not being clear! :) Please feel free to e-mail me directly if you have any further comments you’d like to make — I give my permission to have my address handed over to you for that purpose.

The MPDC are not trying to keep people in, they are legitimately trying to prevent crime. 7-8 people were killed in a one mile radius last weekend, which is absolutely ridiculous for a city in America, much less the nation’s capital. My roommate works at a school in this neighborhood that regularly has to go on lock-down, or worse, close early because of threats of violence when the middle school is supposed to let out. Often the administration doesn’t know of a threat until students just get up and start leaving the classrooms, saying “I don’t want to get killed.”

The people of these neighborhoods deserve peace and safety. Who knows if the “safety zones” will work, but at least the MPDC are giving it a shot, as opposed to other cities who shall remain nameless…

However, living in this city and seeing neighborhoods overwhelmingly full of law-abiding, honest people turn into war zones will challenge even a very staunch liberal. I want a safe neighborhood, and I know my neighbors want the same thing. We’re sick of the crime, and horrified at the idea of innocent people getting wrapped up in this crap. I don’t think this will do much good, but I can’t fault the effort.

Though I may not have lived in neighborhoods with police checkpoints and cordons, I’ve had many African-American and Latino scholarship classmates, especially males who were glad to get out of such neighborhoods precisely because they felt caught in the vise between being victims of violent crime and being constantly profiled and harassed by the police who cared more for throwing their weight around rather than actually helping to stem the violent crimes.

Please don’t paint us all as sheltered people who never lived in a high crime area as that’s assuming a lot. I lived in a crime-ridden urban working class neighborhood that was suffering from the effects of the 80′s crime/crack epidemic and some of my childhood friends were killed as a result.

Moreover, I know from some family members’ experiences living under Japanese colonial occupation and under a totalitarian Communist regime that checkpoints and cordons are often more useful in controlling the local population so the state could ensure their conformity to its policies/orthodoxy with minimal effort.

That was precisely the kind of society my family were escaping when they emigrated here and as someone who has taken the lessons from their experiences seriously, I am still sometimes stunned at how clueless many Americans are of the disturbing totalitarian implications of such practices.

And it doesn’t address crimes within a neighborhood, as has been stated.

But on its face, this strategy isn’t effective at least at addressing crime. Certainly, not for anything but short-term. More like people have said, keeping it inside.

Out west, when you hear the term, “neighborhood safety zone” used, you think more along the line of injunctions.

I wonder if these are the officers working in D.C. that will be assigned to the checkpoints.

I’m not sure that MPDC deserves the benefit of the doubt on this, but I do wonder what folks who do live inside those couple neighborhoods. think about it all.

Many of the residents didn’t mind – the neighborhoods had gotten so dangerous that meter readers and mailmen flat out refused to go into them. I lived next to the Techwood projects in those days, and I’ll tell you that there were nightly gunbattles going on. The Red Dogs may have stretched the 4th amendment out of recognition, but the neighborhoods were calmed.

Most of those projects have since been torn down and replaced with mixed-income housing – always fewer units than there were before. The Red Dogs are still around.