I’m sitting in my office the other day, wasting time, when I hear one of my colleagues exclaim: “Whoa — four people just got shot down the street from my house!”
That would be the foursome hit by hot lead on North Capitol Street the other day.
A resident walked up to Attorney General Peter Nickles after he, the mayor and the police chief held their news conference a week ago about pushing through emergency crime legislation. He said, according to Nickles: “Please get the gang laws going. They control my street; I have had to barricade myself in my house.”
And residents who live east of the Anacostia River, in the 7th Police District, have already endured 21 homicides this year, according to the Metropolitan Police Department Web site. That’s an increase of 62 percent over last year.
I could go on — about muggings in Borderstan, my neighbor’s place getting ransacked, the armed robbery at the corner store up the street.
All of which has encouraged me to double down on my Wednesday column; I said the crime bill wending its way through the council is the most important legislation the D.C. government will handle in a decade. Let’s make it two — an even 20 years.
Beneath what I called a circus act at Monday’s hearing, where Councilman Phil Mendelson got into a snit over the blustering of Nickles, lies a fundamental truth: The nation’s capital city is soft on crime. The scales of justice are weighted toward the bad guys. Too often criminals go unpunished. Our notoriously weak laws are a product of 30 years of lawmakers who favored perps over victims.
As a crime reporter in D.C. since 1986, I have heard one lament for 23 years: Why do police arrest people for dealing drugs or carrying a gun but we see them out the next day?
The Omnibus Crime Bill will give prosecutors and judges more tools to keep suspects behind bars. It will also:
Bring stalking laws up to date and better protect women from aggressive men.
Give rape victims immediate access to HIV status of their attackers.
Toughen laws for car theft.
Make it easier for lawmen to prove possession if a gun is found in a car. As is, it must be on a passenger.
Give prosecutors better tools to prosecute gangs.
“If we pass this gang language on June 2, I will be in court the next day naming names,” Nickles said. “We know of 83 gangs. It’s time to take them down.”
I’m all for democracy, and I know Mendelson has been duly elected, but he had a hearing last month; his people and the mayor’s folks have been working the bill over for a month. It’s time to act.
“If this bill is done right with mandatory minimums and other changes, it could dramatically alter the amount of crime in D.C.,” said police union chief Kris Baumann. “If not, shootings like the four hit on North Capitol will happen all summer.”
Amen.
