A safer capital
By: Harry Jaffe
Examiner Columnist
May 29, 2009
I was midway through penning a column about how the D.C. Council was sitting on a crime bill that would have made D.C. safer for you and me this summer. Based on my reporting, I was writing that the local legislature would not take up Mayor Adrian Fenty’s Omnibus Crime Bill of 2009 on Tuesday, despite a pair of hearings and general agreement among cops and many community activists that tougher laws could make the city safer. Tuesday being one of the council’s last legislative session of the season, the crime bill could have languished.
Thugs across town would have rejoiced.
Then my phone rang a few times. Sources started to check in. The bill had life. I checked their tips. I had to scrap my negative column and can now report much more positive news: Thanks to Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, the essential elements of the crime bill will come before the council at a special meeting on June 16, and the bill should pass. Evans crafted his own bill; it is circulating among council members this weekend. To recap, Fenty introduced his bill in February. It suggested many changes in the way cops and prosecutors and judges deal with violent crimes. Fenty’s bill would:
Make gangs vulnerable to prosecutors who could bring civil injunctions.
Allow prosecutors to charge passengers with gun possession if cops find a firearm in their car.
Give judges more power to detain defendants charged with gun possession.
Toughen penalties for using a stolen car in a crime. Evans’ bill adopts all of these points.
At-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, who takes pointers from the American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders, held two hearings but showed no intention of moving the bill. Fenty, aware that summers bring a spike in crime, vowed to move it as emergency legislation. The council seemed frozen, between Mendelson’s inaction and members’ antipathy for Fenty.
Evans stepped in the breach. His ward, spanning Georgetown to Shaw, suffers from petty and violent crime. He had chaired the judiciary committee. He wrote his own bill: Summer of 2009 Crime Prevention Emergency. He worked with Council Chairman Vince Gray to take it up on June 16. He tried to collaborate with Mendelson, who declined to play ball.
Freed of relying on Mendelson, Evans moved forward. “I am giving the bill to all council members,” he says. “It’s gathering support. My view is it will pass.” If it does, Mendelson will be the big loser, Fenty will have to realize a bill with his name would not pass, and residents and visitors to Washington, D.C., will have a better chance of living through the summer without some thug sticking a pistol in their face. Perhaps D.C. will start losing its reputation as a breeding ground for criminals.
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