This month’s Washingtonian includes a feature story about Homicide Watch D.C. You can pick it up on newsstands or read it online. Writes Harry Jaffe:
The murder rate in DC has been on a downward trend since 1991, when it peaked at 479, according to police statistics. By 2001, homicides had dropped to 232. In 2011, homicides fell to 108.
The police take credit for the drop, while many academics attribute the figures to a nationwide decline in violence and to higher incarceration rates. In DC, demographics play a role: The city has razed public-housing projects, poor people have had to pull up stakes, drug markets have moved to the suburbs.Has Homicide Watch had any impact on murder rates?
“I think so,” says US Attorney Ronald Machen. “It used to be out of sight, out of mind. Now when an incident happens, you can see a real person who’s been killed. The more faces you put on the victims, the more people might have the courage to stand up and help law enforcement solve the case.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg writes in Bloomberg about crime in America through the lens of a journalist reporting on homicides in DC. In part one he writes:
The killing took place about 1 a.m. At 2 a.m., Thomas still lay where he fell. Homicide detectives flipped over the body in search of bullet holes. A crowd had gathered behind the yellow police tape. Children made up much of the crowd.
This was before I became a father. Had I been a father at the time, I would have told these children to go home. Instead I wrote down their commentary about the body stretched out before them. “Watch out, man, he’s gonna get up and bite you!” one kid, maybe 14 or 15, yelled at the detectives. His friends broke up with laughter. “I can’t see. Let me look, let me look,” said an 11-year-old, stuck in the second row, behind taller teenagers.
Part two of Goldberg’s column includes an in-depth interview with MPD Chief Cathy Lanier.
The goal, largely achieved, was to convince residents of high-crime neighborhoods that the police weren’t the enemy. This, Lanier said, brought the police closer to their ultimate goal of quickly inserting themselves into the retaliatory cycle that begins after each homicide. As many as 60 percent of last year’s murders, she told me, were committed in retaliation for earlier killings. Homicide detectives are making arrests much faster these days, thanks to better street-level intelligence. In 2007, the average D.C. homicide investigation was closed in 52 days; by 2011 that number had been halved. Many of the arrests grow out of an anonymous tip line Lanier established.
“In 2008, we got 292 tips,” she said. “By 2011 we were at over 1,200, and you would not believe the detailed tips we get. People are trusting us now much more.”
She went on, “As soon as a victim is shot, we want the name, within the hour, to go to the analysts, and then the gang intelligence unit will see if he’s a validated gang member and then we’ll get a work-up on his prior arrests, who his co- defendants were, what arrests happened in the last 30 days, and that will all go to the homicide detectives who are then making arrests before retaliation kicks in.”
The Washington Post reports on a federal drug gang trial “straight out of the HBO series ‘The Wire.’” Read the full story here.
When Crystal Washington checked out of her halfway house and stepped into a gray April morning, the gunman was ready.
He silently slipped behind Washington as she crossed a busy street at rush hour, then he pulled out a semiautomatic pistol and fired six shots at point-blank range, killing the 44-year-old mother of four.
It would not take long for authorities to piece together a motive — Washington, a recovering drug addict, was a key prosecution witness at the looming trial of the gunman’s boss, an alleged Southeast Washington narcotics kingpin.
The slaying in 2009 soon sparked an undercover FBI investigation straight out of the HBO series “The Wire” that would lead to charges against 13 alleged members of a Southeast drug gang. On Feb. 1, the trial of three of those people began in the District’s federal court. Six defendants have pleaded guilty; the dispositions of four others could not be determined from court records.
The investigation provides a rare window into an organization that dominated a vibrant open-air drug market in Southeast, a gang that stopped at nothing to protect its turf. The case also helps explain the city’s stubborn level of violence. Although homicides have plummeted in the District (last year, city police tallied 108 killings, nearly half the number recorded in 2004), authorities say they are still battling an intractable cycle that fuels the city’s murders — territorial disputes and retaliation for snubs and other acts of violence.
The Washington Post this week also published a two-part story about the sentencing of Lawrence Davis, convicted in November of killing his estranged wife, Elizabeth Singleton, almost 13 years ago. In part one, Keith Alexander writes:
Sometimes justice is delayed. In this case, it took more than a decade. In November, a jury found Davis, 47, guilty of first-degree murder in his wife’s death. He is scheduled to be sentenced Friday and could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Christopher, meanwhile, is forging ahead. “I couldn’t let this stop me from living my life,” he says. Physically unharmed during his mother’s killing, he was nevertheless indelibly shaped by it.
In part two, he writes:
Singleton’s sister, Ivy Moorefield, told Jackson that she was pleased that her family was finally receiving some justice. “We waited for 12 years for this day,” Moorefield said. “He not only killed my sister, he robbed my mother of her oldest daughter and robbed my nephews of their mother.”
Jackson could have sentenced Davis to life in prison. He ultimately sentenced him to a prison term 15 years longer than the minimum mandatory under the District’s sentencing guidelines.
After the hearing, Moorefield said she was satisfied with the sentence. “It was basically a life sentence,” she said. “You don’t have to say life for it to be life.”
