Last night (Sunday), as I cut through Mt. Pleasant on my way to better things, I noticed huge police flood lights aimed on the corner of 17th and Irving. A lone cop car was parked on the corner. I didn\’t think too much of it, quite frankly, as it\’s Mt. Pleasant and not Glover Park or the Palisades or something like that. Then tonight (Monday), I get the news that the flood lights were there due to a guy getting shot in the face there on the corner on Saturday night. He\’d been out walking his dog.
Aside from stating how I really feel about this (other than pissed at my jadedness toward local violence and my strong desire to return to a country with vastly lower homicide rates), there\’s a few things I think ought to be pointed out:
#1: The Response From Local Hipsterati
Urban Bohemian felt moved enough to rhetorically query his friends about the shooting in two different places. Why shoot a man walking his dog? Such a thoughtless crime! Indeed, I\’m sure many people echo one friend\’s comment of \”Wow, that sucks.\”
Over at my least favorite local blog, DCist, \’staff\’ bloggers gave a morning news roundup for Monday, Sept. 19, by mentioning the murder of a white guy in gentrified Mt. Pleasant (NW), but failed to mention another fatal shooting that took place in DC on Saturday night — that of a man in the decidedly non-gentrified neighborhood of Barnaby Terrace (SE).
#2: The Response From The Washington Post Newspaper
Let\’s just say that if the man killed in Barnaby Terrace this past weekend had been a white man, the story would have received more coverage–more notice, more attention–but a black man killed in SE DC? Shit, honey; haven\’t you heard the Washington Post publishes out of NW themselves? The white man killed in Mt. Pleasant has so far received two full articles in WaPo, as well as received leading local news coverage on televised news. The man killed in SE I have not heard mentioned on the television, but he did receive a full fifty-odd words of coverage in today\’s Washington Post\’s Metro Section — B3 under \’In Brief.\’
#3: Meanwhile, Back In Reality
The always succinct Babylon on the Potomac logged both Sept. 17th DC killings this morning. As any visitor to Babylon\’s site today can see, there are a great deal of grizzly events going on in DC all the time. There was a man beaten to death just two weeks ago. About a week prior to that, another man — this one a lawyer — was beaten, put in the trunk of a car, and then burned to death after the car was set on fire; this was also in SE. On Sept. 3rd, a man was found on a NE street after having been fatally shot multiple times in the head and body; as of three weeks ago there were no known witnesses, suspects, or motives.
Furthermore & In Conclusion
DC is always like this. Most crimes don\’t get the front page or two minutes on the news unless the victims were either white, young, well-paid professionals, or who have vocal advocates who harass the media into carrying the story. This city has had a stupendous influx of more than 60,000 new residents in the past year alone. New residents try to live in the so-called safer neighborhoods, but they often fail to see that their new area is not as squeaky clean as they had previously suspected.
Granted, violent crime rates in DC have improved: we\’re no longer officially the nation\’s leader in homicide numbers, though I doubt those of us who are long-time residents will ever be able to shake the mental imprint of Homicide Capitol of America from our heads. So far in 2005, this little city of sixty-eight square miles has had only 137 homicides. This time last year it was 141. At our most violent peak, we had a whopping 482 homicides in just one 12-month period — ah, the heady days of 1991, when Sharon Pratt Dixon was mayor and the Mt. Pleasant riots shook the city with the fury of hundreds of pissed-off, mostly immigrant youth and 1,000 riot police.
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I had a point to this but then had a hot flash and have not been able to focus since. Eh.
Wise up, yuppies: the city might now have a Crate & Barrel in Tenleytown, a Whole Foods in Logan Circle and a Giant Food in Columbia Heights, but despite it looking more and more like a sprawling suburban strip mall every day, the city is still more dangerous than Crackertown…unless, of course, you look like the people in DC who are usually violent crime victims, in which case you\’d find yourself being forcibly removed from the street by the private neighborhood security faster than Paris Hilton can make a fool of herself in front of a camera. Race and class issues in America? Naw, man, naw. But we\’ll co-opt and fetishize another man\’s culture, then marginalize and subjugate he and his people any day of the week.
