The gangs of Washington, D.C., exist in a parallel universe; they live and die in their own place and time.
We read about the tragic case of Deborah Ann Brown, a young woman who was killed Saturday night in a crossfire between gang members in Columbia Heights.
You probably didn’t read or hear about a shootout a few days earlier in Shaw. Two young men were walking up Fifth Street above R Street; two were walking the other way across the street. All four pulled out semiautomatic pistols and started firing. No one was hit. The shooters ran off.
“That’s the kind of stuff that scares people,” Councilman Jack Evans tells me. Shaw is in Evans’ Ward 2. “It’s the randomness of it all – anywhere, anyplace, anytime. It doesn’t matter whether crime statistics are down 100 percent. My constituents are still in terrible danger. ”
The Metropolitan Police Department likes to trumpet the drop in homicides; those statistics, which may even be accurate, are cold digits to Washingtonians who live in places like Shaw and Columbia Heights, where gangs make normal life a harrowing, occasionally deadly, experience.
The alleged drop in crime is cold comfort to the parents of Salim Hylton. He was gunned down at Fifth and N streets last Saturday night. His parents, Patrick and Winnie Hylton, held a vigil for Salim last night. He was to have started a job as an art teacher at a charter school.
The gang violence in Shaw was the subject of a community meeting last week at the Kennedy Recreation Center. Martin Moulton, president of the Convention Center Community Association, called the meeting to hear from council members who had voted against legislation that would have allowed civil injunctions against gang members.
“We have too much violence here,” Moulton tells me. “Gangs cause a lot of it. We wanted some answers.”
Phil Mendelson showed and dodged. It was at-large member Comrade Phil who used his chairmanship of the judiciary committee to lobby against the anti-gang provisions in the recent crime bill. But it was at-large member Michael Brown who almost got hooted out of the rec center. Asked why he voted against the anti-gang bill, Brown said it would have allowed police to sweep his children, who happen to be African American, off the street, just because of the color of their skin.
“That might play in certain areas,” Moulton says, “but a lot of African Americans in the audience rolled their eyes. He lives in upper Chevy Chase, and he’s worried that his kids would be misidentified? He’s not living our weekly nightmare.”
Brown’s demagoguery, repeated by Councilman Harry Thomas Jr., is vile rhetoric, meant to provoke racism and animosity toward the cops. Facts are the anticrime legislation was civil, not criminal, and would not have allowed cops to sweep kids off the streets.
It is council members like Mendelson, Brown, Thomas and others who permit gangs to live – and to kill – in their parallel universe.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
