I took the Metro to Macy’s in downtown D.C. yesterday on my way to meet a friend for dinner at my favorite Chinese restaurant. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did have a brief conversation with a young man who was camped out next to the elevator going into Macy’s (the escalator was out of service). He was watching a video on his phone and I said, “oh, so that’s where the noise is coming from.” He immediately turned the volume down. He seemed completely harmless, and as I stepped onto the elevator, I told him to take care. “You too,” he said. I think of that friendly encounter when I read this morning’s news about how Republican lawmakers in Congress are bent on rejecting the District’s long overdue bid to overhaul its criminal code.
As I discussed in my previous blog, the overhaul makes D.C. criminal law more consistent with 21st century legal practices (many other states have already done the same). But because Congress controls laws in D.C. they have carte blanche to exercise control over our crime laws, among many other things. In their fight to reject the overhaul, Republican lawmakers claim that the capitol is awash in violent crime. And yet according to the latest poll taken by the Washington Post and George Mason University, D.C. residents feel safer than they did the year before. And indeed, violent crime in the nation’s capital has fallen by 9 percent from the same time last year, according to this Post article. Yes, homicide rates are up over last year and so are property crimes. And the February shooting at the Potomac Avenue Metro Station (which left one Metro employee dead), rattled a lot of people, including me.
Metro police have since posted an officer on the Potomac Avenue platform (which is the closest stop to my apartment), and I feel quite safe taking the Metro. (There were tons of people getting on the blue line going downtown late yesterday afternoon by the way; it was the most crowded I’d seen in it in a while). Frankly, I am more afraid of my life when a certain friend of mine starts speeding on the highway than I am walking around D.C. or taking the underground. I agree with Charles Irby, a 49-year-old family man, who in an interview with the Post, said he feels far safer in his Columbia Heights neighborhood now than he did in the 1990s. He also said:
“he has seen public safety improve when the city has invested in preventive measures rather than punitive ones. For that reason, he said, he is generally supportive of the revised criminal code’s proposal to lighten maximum sentences — if the local government simultaneously invests in services, such as summer job programs.”
So to the Republican legislators who are trying to run our lives, I say: why don’t you come on down and ride the Metro with Irby or me for awhile? And maybe you won’t be so quick to reject the overhaul of our criminal code.
