Fear and loathing on DC's streets as summer crimewave reaches the elite; Widening gap between rich and poor blamed for rise in violence, with 14 murders in two weeks
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Thursday July 20, 2006 Guardian
The call comes over the radio just a few minutes after Officer Kristina Cappello's patrol car has crested the National Mall, the white dome of the Capitol gleaming in the darkness as she turns the wheel towards the less touristy streets of Washington DC. A fellow officer needs backup at the scene of an assault.
For Officer Cappello, this is the kind of call that has become pretty much routine during a summer in which there has been a sudden spike in violent street crime after several years of decline. This reached international attention this month when a young Jewish activist from London [Alan Senitt] was murdered as he walked a female friend home.
In an eight-hour shift, Officer Cappello has had calls about an assault, a man shot in the leg on a housing estate, a car slamming into the side of a city bus, a domestic disturbance and a couple of suspected break-ins. "It's the heat," she says.
Last week, Washington's police chief, Charles Ramsey, declared a "crime emergency" after the city registered its 14th murder since July 1, and a spate of violent robberies around Washington's most famous monuments on the Mall. As well as the steep rise in homicides, robberies are up 14% and armed assaults 18%. ...
William Chambliss, a sociology professor at George Washington University, notes that crime rates, in Washington as in other American cities, are cyclical. A few years of declining incidents will be followed by a few years of increased crime. But he believes Senitt's murder is a product of other forces. Over the past 25 years, as the gulf between rich and poor has widened, the divisions between rich and poor, black and white, in Washington have grown more acute.
A property boom has turned the city into the third most expensive in America - good news for homeowners, but a blow to the 19% of Washingtonians living below the poverty line. (The national rate is 13%.)
In a city that is 60% black, African-American students have the lowest performance levels in the country; overall 37% of Washingtonians cannot read well enough to fill out a job application. Four percent carry the HIV virus - a higher rate of infection than any other American city. Mr Chambliss argues that such divisions find an outlet in violent crime. "It creates an anger and a callousness towards those people who benefit from society," he says. "There is a parallel with terrorism where the upper-class white people become the enemy just as the western infidels become the enemy of Islam. I see this as a pattern that could be the beginning of a very serious change in crime, and where it is committed, and how it is committed." ...
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1824587,00.html>
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