The owner of an Adams Morgan bistro has a message posted outside the establishment warning all who pass: “Don’t let this happen to you.”
What Christopher Lynch, co-owner of L’Enfant Cafe, the French eatery known for its savory crepes and Belgian beers, hopes others can avoid the five hours he spent in a 5-by-7-foot D.C. jail cell last week. The same fate befell a close friend, and a pizza delivery driver who works around the block.
Their crimes: riding unregistered scooters.
More scooters can be seen zipping around D.C. streets thanks largely to an influx of young, environmentally conscious professionals moving into the city.
And the city’s police are arresting more who drive the motorbikes, citing public safety concerns as justification for the aggressive policy.
One police officer also noted that drug dealers use the Italian scooters, giving officers another rationale for rigorous enforcement of driving laws.
Lynch refused to talk to The Examiner, but in his window sign at the bistro, he questioned the logic of arresting upstanding citizens while letting neighborhood crimes go unsolved. Lynch said the restaurant has been broken into twice and vandalized once in the last 10 months and two workers have been beaten on the D.C. streets, requiring $12,000 in reconstruction facial surgery.
“I was afraid of the crime in the city,” Lynch wrote. “Now, I’m afraid of crime and police.”
Lynch suggests that the D.C. police are making the arrests to boost their crime-fighting figures, noting that D.C. police recently boasted of a significant increase in the numbers of arrests.
D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said D.C. police enforce the laws evenly across the board.
“If a law’s been broken, we need to act accordingly,” Hughes said. “We can’t discriminate in the way we enforce the law.”
During last week’s All Hands on Deck summer crime-fighting initiative police made 98 arrests for traffic violations, up from 82 arrests during the same time last year. It’s unclear how many of those violators were jailed or how many were given criminal citations but the arrests would count the same. It’s also unclear how many of those traffic arrests were for driving with an unregistered vehicle.
