Residents and experts who didn’t have their say about a hastily enacted crime emergency bill last month can get a chance to speak tonight.
A Citizens’ Crime Summit, featuring presentations by two D.C. Superior Court judges, comes a month before the District’s 90-day crime emergency expires. Democratic mayoral candidate Adrian Fenty — the only council member to vote against the crime emergency bill last month — reserved Room 418 in the District Building for the summit.
“We don’t think the bill provides any emergency relief,” said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the National Capitol Area ACLU, and the host of the summit. The D.C. Council passed the crime emergency bill after meeting behind closed doors and without calling witnesses or holding any hearings, Barnes said.
Fenty said at the time that the 90-day measure was a “knee-jerk” bill and would do little to make the city safer.
The crime emergency bill allowed the mayor to impose a 10 p.m. youth curfew, gave police immediate access to some confidential juvenile records and installed surveillance cameras in neighborhoods. The D.C. Council also approved $8 million to pay for police overtime to put more officers on the streets.
Since July 12, when the D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a crime emergency after 13 people were killed in 11 days, violent crime has decreased 12 percent.
The summit will open with presentations by D.C. Circuit judges Lynn Leibovitz and Anita Josey-Herring. Leibovitz, appointed to the bench by President George Bush, was a prosecutor for the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. Josey-Herring is the presiding judge of the Family Court of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Before that, she was deputy director of the D.C. Public Defender Service.
Other presenters are from the National Black Police Association, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute, Efforts for Ex-Cons, D.C. Action for Children and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The findings will be sent to the D.C. Council and mayor.
