D.C. Police Officer Daniel Baez pulls his cruiser out of the 3rd District headquarters and into the hot August night, the 25th night since the District went under a crime emergency.
Fat drops of rain that had interrupted the heat have turned to steam, curling off the still hot city streets. The night was slow.
Baez, like all D.C. police officers, has been working six days a week under the emergency.
He cruises up on 10 men wearing white T-shirts, smoking blunt cigarettes and blocking an apartment entrance. He knows these guys. It’s the same faces that he chases night after night, from neighborhood to neighborhood. He shines a spotlight, tells them to move along. They stare and slowly scatter.
“Look at them,” Baez said. “The residents can’t even get into get into theirhomes. This is all they do, night after night.”
The 3rd District sits in the heart of D.C., roughly from North Capitol Street to Rock Creek Park, from the White House north to Petworth. Traditionally, “3D” has the most officers, most calls to service, most crime and most arrests.
“The most everything,” said Baez’ boss, 16-year veteran Lt. Mike Gottert.
The 3rd District has changed in the five years Baez has been on the job. Money has poured into the neighborhoods and Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant. Expensive new condominiums are being built next to burned-out crack houses.
And a new crime has appeared, Gottert said.
It started in one part of the District about a year and a half ago and has spread — groups of kids ganging up, punching pedestrians in the face and taking their money. They often occur next to Metro stations where the muggers can travel two train stops away before police arrive.
Violent juvenile crime has driven the recent crime spike, police said. The city instituted a 10 p.m. curfew this week for those 16 and younger. Gottert said the teens aren’t any more dangerous than when he started, when the city annually had 500 homicides, but there seems to be more juveniles getting in trouble.
Many come from single-parent homes, where the parent is working two jobs and the only male figure is the criminal standing on the street corner, he said.
Teenagers arrested for hard crimes are often back on the streets the next day.
“Police department’s problems are society’s problems,” he said, “and society’s problems are the police department’s problems.”
