E-mails show infighting over police barricades
By: Bill Myers
Examiner Staff Writer
December 7, 2008
DIANE GROOMES, CHIEF CATHY LANIER, BARRICADES — When violent crime spiked in the dangerous 7th Police District this summer, D.C. officials tried to increase police presence.
But authorities quickly discovered that every available officer had been sent to man Chief Cathy Lanier’s neighborhood barricades on the other side of the city, e-mails obtained by The Examiner show.
“I wanted to hold pst over in 7d and now finding out not one pst was deployed???” Assistant Chief Diane Groomes wrote to a district commander on June 12, adding that four people had just been shot.
“PST” stands for “patrol support team.”
District Cmdr. Willie Dandridge replied a few moments later. He said another assistant chief had ordered him “to move veryone [sic] to the Fifth District for continued NSZ operations.”
Lanier called her roadblocks “Neighborhood Safety Zones,” and threw up several of them in the Trinidad neighborhood after a series of killings.
The situation “does not make sense,” Groomes wrote, since “we have major issues in 7D as well.”
Groomes’ e-mails also raised questions about how effective the roadblocks were. She wrote that the extra officers sent to staff the quarantines were ignoring emergency calls from within the neighborhood.
“just grouped at chckpt...???” Groomes wrote.
Lanier and Mayor Adrian Fenty said they put the barricades up after careful deliberations and even more careful officer training, and that they were run with a maximum of efficiency.
Three-hundred-plus pages worth of command e-mails tell a different story.
The e-mails, sent to and from Lanier and her deputies, show department leaders at cross-purposes — with one executive issuing one order, only to be countermanded by a colleague — and bickering over everything from bringing over traffic cones to writing up “Frequently Asked Questions” Web sites for the controversial program.
On June 11, Dandridge told Groomes and others that supervisors had botched the record-keeping on the barricades.
“In other words, if we don’t stay on top of this-the Department will easily lose a law suit,” Dandridge warned, “the managers are killing us.”
Meanwhile, dozens of residents continued to fall prey to violence in other parts of the city. According to police records, at least 27 different reports of assault with a deadly weapon were filed in the 7th District between June 10 and 12 alone.
Groomes and Dandridge declined comment for this story. Lanier didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Examiner filed an open-records request for the e-mails in June, but Lanier’s staff didn’t respond. They were obtained last week after Council Member Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, intervened and demanded their release.
Cheh, a constitutional law professor, said she felt vindicated in her criticism of the quarantines.
“Not only did I doubt the effectiveness of the barricades where they were operating, but it now appears that it reduced effectiveness in other areas,” she said. “It left people in those neighborhoods vulnerable.”
