Criminals are increasingly fanning out to affluent neighborhoods to commit crimes, D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey said Wednesday.
A day after he declared a citywide “crime emergency,” Ramsey said crime patterns have shifted as the District’s neighborhoods have changed and its economy has boomed. Criminals are stealing cars or taking the Metro to travel into affluent areas to collect their booty from unsuspecting tourists and residents.
On Sunday, British political activist Alan Senitt, 27, was brutally knifed to death near a Georgetown mansion during a robbery by two men, a woman and a 15-year-old boy. Police tracked the four to the southeast part of the city based on evidence from similar robberies in Georgetown. Senitt’s slaying was reminiscent of the robbery and beating death of a former New York Times journalist, David Rosenbaum, in another affluent residential community in the northwest section of the city.
“Criminals go where they think they can commit their crimes,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey called for a crime emergency after the District witnessed 14 homicides in 11 days, including Senitt’s slaying and the shooting of a political activist near the convention center.
Of the 14 homicides, many occurred in areas that aren’t normally considered hot spots, Ramsey said. He said crime is up in the thirddistrict, the heart of downtown, and 40 percent of those arrested have been from outside the district, Ramsey said.
In the past, criminals mostly worked within a one-mile radius of their neighborhoods, Ramsey said.
By calling a 30-day crime emergency, Ramsey can adjust most of the department’s 3,800 officers’ schedules immediately, instead of giving 14 days notice. That allows him to quickly assign them to high-crime areas during peak times for crime, he said.
This was the fourth time that Ramsey has called for an emergency. D.C. police union chairman Officer Kristopher Baumann called the emergency declaration a “failure of the police department to realize what is going to happen.” Bauman said the police know crime spikes in the summer and the declaration simply allows the chief to stop paying police for overtime.
