After 15 slayings in D.C. in as many days, Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared the city’s fourth “crime emergency” of his eight-year tenure. The City Council’s hastily endorsed $8 million package of crime-fighting measures — including the hiring of 450 additional officers — was a transparent reaction to a few headline-grabbing crimes in affluent parts of town, hardly a panacea.
As residents of less prominent neighborhoods know all too well, crime in D.C. is not an emergency, it’s a chronic condition. However, those who argue that the city must first tackle its longstanding social problems have it backward: Without safe streets, it’s impossible to create the stability necessary for long-term prosperity. The last exodus — driven almost entirely by crime — left the District 100,000 taxpayers short. It certainly could happen again.
In January, shortly after New York Times man David Rosenbaum was beaten to death, Congressman Frank Wolf, R-Va., gathered city and federal officials to discuss rising crime in the nation’s capital. A local activist group held a news conference, describing the situation as a public health emergency. But nothing happened until a grisly murder in Georgetown and five armed robberies on the National Mall galvanized the public’s attention.
But installing surveillance cameras, enforcing teen curfews and adding hundreds more names to the roster won’t correct the department’s underlying problems. As The Examiner’s Bill Myers reported earlier this month, a growing number of rank-and-file officers, community activists and elected officials are questioning the way Ramsey deploys the 3,800 officers he already has — more per capita than any other major American city. “We’re like an army of occupation,” one veteran officer told The Examiner. “We don’t have the community’s trust. We talk community policing, but we don’t do it.”
Part of the problem is the department’s current redeployment program, which requires detectives and desk-bound administrators to don a uniform and patrol the latest hotspots once every seven weeks. These drop-in cops don’t become part of the communities they intermittently patrol; they’re props in a PR program designed more to reassure the public than actually catch the bad guys.
When suspects are arrested, too often investigators don’t finish the job and the charges they file don’t hold up in court. The crooks wind up back on the street, emboldened by the experience, while public confidence in law enforcement is further eroded. The demand for more uniformed patrol officers is really evidence of a larger failure to lock up violent thugs. Instead of keeping tabs on teenagers’s bedtimes, Ramsey should reinstate the department’s once-successful Repeat Offender Program, which aggressively identified and targeted recidivists during the late ’80s and early ’90s, but was eventually disbanded.
And instead of trying to catch crooks committing crimes on camera, the chief should base future promotions on his officers’ conviction rate — the one vital statistic that measures how well they’re doing at putting criminals behind bars. Not coincidentally, it’s also one statistic Police Department bigwigs still don’t bother to track.
