Tag: crime

Incompetents with guns

This is not about the second amendment.

This is not about gun control laws.

This is about drug dealers on the corner.

The problem, and it comes with every wave of new neighbors, particularly white neighbors, is the idea that the guys on the corner are harmless and have some imagined right to hang about. They are not harmless.

Where there is the business of drug dealing, there is a gun somewhere nearby. A loaded gun, ready to shoot. More than likely an illegal gun where those in possession never bothered to go through the gun safety training class or registration.

Incompetents with guns have have bad aim hitting cars, houses, bystanders, and sometimes their intended target. I remember a daytime shooting many years ago on my street, in front of my house, so this is not theoretical. The shooters shot at a bunch of guys hanging out on the corner (suspected drug dealers) in a drive by from an SUV- Suburban Ussault Vehicle. The shooters managed to hit one guy in the butt and as they traveled down my street they felt the need to shoot several rounds of bullets towards the ground. They managed to damage some cars. I didn’t have a car so, I didn’t care that much. But I do care about an errant bullet wandering into the insides of one of my neighbors or myself (and now as a mom, my family members).

The bad old days of the drug dealers are slowly creeping back into Shaw. The only difference is there are fewer baby mommas’, girlfriends’ and grandmas’ houses to hang out in front of, the plus side of gentrification. So yes, some of the guys may have lived in the neighborhood at one time (as a kid, as a boyfriend, etc) but they don’t live here now. They do not respect the neighborhood, and never did. Don’t feel obligated to make excuses for them.

The bad old days of Shaw is why I don’t believe in ghosts – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

Over a decade ago when I was looking for a place to buy a home that was affordable and close to enough stuff to maintain my car-less lifestyle, I was doing some serious research on Shaw. In December of 2000 the Washington Post had a series called “Fatal Flaws: The District’s Homicide Crisis” and along with it was a map showing a big gigantic splotch of unsolved murders along Rhode Island and Florida Avenues. And when I moved to the neighborhood, I would hear gunfire almost nightly. Sad, and eventually ugly, memorials of rain sodden stuffed animals and empty liquor bottles littering the sidewalk were a common sight. The crack years were winding down and people were still getting killed over turf battles.

So with all these people dying violent deaths in the streets and parks of Shaw & nearby Sursum Corda, the area should be littered with spirits of the dead if you go by ghost rules. The Help and I, enjoy a good ghost story of the mild horror genre. The usual story is such and such a place is haunted because X number of years ago so-in-so died a tragic and violent death. By this logic 7th and O should be paved with the poltergeists.

We have friends who had to shoo people away from the Seminary up in Forest Glen when it was vacant and before it went condo. It was said to be haunted. People love haunted large buildings. People also like “interesting” haunting by interesting, middle class or wealthy persons or people associated with the wealthy. Haunted castles, yes. Haunted public housing, not so much.

 

I do relate to the supernatural, but in the regular practice of my religion. I am a skeptic regarding ghosts. That scratching in the walls? Rats. Maybe, squirrels. Lights flickering? Possibly crappy wiring by a crappy contractor or blame Pepco. Ghostly figures walking across the room? Obviously, your eyes are engaging in time travel.

I’m all about time travel.

Five Reasons to Keep My Security Bars

NOTE: This was an unpublished draft that for one reason or another I did not publish on the date given. In order to clear out my draft folder on 12-16-2013 I chose to publish it. However, I won’t vouch for the completeness or accuracy of it, and it most likely does not reflect my opinion anymore.
1. Zombie Attack.. unless they get up to the 2nd floor then I’m screwed.
2. Gardening. I hang window boxes and trellis from them.
3. Flier holders. An alternative to placing them in my mailbox or fence.
4. Target for the Newspaper Guy. Aim for the door, not the plants.
5. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. incident. You can’t arrest me if you can’t get in…. without a warrant of course.

Just Call the Cops

This weekend I was awoken at 3 in the morning by loud obnoxious drunks who were on the alley side of whichever house they were partying at. Now I went into my back yard to try to tell where exactly the noise was coming from so I could call 911 and tell them which house they need to go to. I like to be accurate and since it is a small alley and a tree blocks my line of sight, so I couldn’t tell if it was from the house with the tiny deck or the roof deck house.

On other blogs in comments people suggest going to the neighbor causing the noise and respectfully asking them to turn it down. Reflecting on my actions that night, calling 911 and not engaging with the noisemakers would have been the least risky (to my health and safety) option. Mainly because the phrase, ‘I walked alone down a dark alley at 3am, in a bathrobe armed with only an umbrella to talk to an unknown number of drunks yelling profanities and ethnic slurs’, seems to be a really bad idea. I would have been armed with a pick-ax if the one I had was near the umbrellas. It was 3am, I don’t think straight at that hour. And to give most of that crowd credit they acknowledged that they were loud and needed to be quiet and one guy apologized. However, another guy screamed he was going to “kill your neighbor.” Twice. And this boys and girls is the reason why you just call the cops. Even if it was in jest, it was still a death threat.

There are situations where I do talk to (or text or call) some of my neighbors when any of their gatherings get a little loud and interferes with my desire to go to sleep. It’s when I know the neighbors already, desire to maintain good relations and know that they are reasonable people. There are neighbors who have exhibited bad behavior in the past and confronting them is just asking to make a bad situation worse. Another thing is if I’m already dressed for bed and don’t feel like putting on a robe, shoes, and depending on the weather, a coat I’m more likely to use the phone to resolve my problem. If I have the neighbor’s number, I call or text them. If I don’t, I’ll call the cops.

One aspect of “better” and ‘changing for the better’

I’ve only been here in the Shaw neighborhood for 10 years, so here are a few observations that I think the changes in the neighborhood has brought that is an improvement due to the demographic changes sometimes known as gentrification.

For one, the drug dealers are not a regular presence at the corner I turn at to come home from work. Almost every friggin day, there they would be, leaning on a fence, littering up the treebox, hanging around. You know how depressing and anxiety producing that is to have to walk by that every single day? The only good thing about it was if you left them alone, they’d leave you alone. And the block up from me was ugly, unfriendly and just had a bad feeling about it. I wouldn’t even walk down that block in the daytime. It also had dealers. Older residents had been fighting the good fight but had figured to pick their battles, what was needed was new blood that wasn’t burned out.

Second, gunfire is no longer a nightly sound. Okay, maybe where you are, but in my section it is no longer every single night. A couple of years ago a guy was shot in the butt in a drive by that then continued to shoot my street (thankfully shooting the asphalt) as they speeded off. Fewer (though none would be nice) incidences and gun shots is an improvement for the better.

A reduction in crime and gun shots may relate to the area being more politically active. One of the reasons why I dislike Vincent Orange so much is that I remember him not really caring that much for our area. When he was running for Mayor the last time, in 2006, he didn’t seem grass roots at all, and didn’t seem all that particularly interested in us over here in the TC. Now, if we were Brookland, different story. With the 2006 election we flexed some muscle, then candidate Fenty came to a fundraiser at a Richardson Pl home, the candidates for Ward 5 were falling all over themselves to be a part of BACA garden walks, clean ups, what-have you. Other positive in 2006 2C ANC Leroy Thorpe was ousted, sorta. With politicians discovering we existed and voted and not ignoring us we got more attention with city services. Cars get ticketed now. No longer do I have to deal with more-than-likely stolen/ obviously abandoned cars sitting on my street for weeks on end.

Yes, and some improvements to my quality of life came from some neighbors leaving, and here the ‘better’ gets dicey. The neighbors who will not be missed are the crackheads. Which crackheads you may ask as we had several. Not Velveeta (yes, that was her name), but the ones who left their friend for dead bleeding on the sidewalk outside their house. I suspect down in the southern tip of the TC (unit blocks from Bates to N) do not miss the clusters of subsidized housing that housed loud, drugged out if not drunk poor excuses for parents and their feral children. Not to say everything is rosy now, there still is the odd halfway house and the people who cluster around S.O.M.E. Yet the poor, including crackheads and people who can’t keep it together need housing too.

Fears about front yard gardening

You can learn a lot from the kinds of questions people ask. As some of you know I have an edible front yard. It has tomatoes (that are dying), herbs, a few edible flowers, arugula (lots and lots of arugula), Swiss chard, purslane and beets. One of the questions I get often is “Aren’t you worried someone’s going to steal your tomatoes/ herbs/ whatever?” No. The only thieves I worry about are furry, bushy tailed and have a recipe for them in the Joy of Cooking, I’m talking about the g*d2#mned squirrels. The two legged thieves only go for the identifiable stuff and most people only know parsley when it’s garnishing their plate or in the supermarket labeled “PARSLEY”.  Also their only value is as an edible and people can be really funny about that wondering if that’s really a tomato or is it a large poisonous red berry that just looks like a tomato? So no, I don’t have a problem with people stealing my edibles.

The other frequent question is about rats. Before and after the garden I’ve never had a problem with rats. Field mice, lots of problems, but not rats. The field mice are more interested in getting into my kitchen for warmth in the winter. The only thing interested in my lettuces are slugs and bugs. The tomatoes tend to be up high, and the only rodent bothering them are bushy tailed.

Right now my biggest problems in the garden appear to be blight, crowding and slugs.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on July 20, 2010 8:43 AM.

Warning about Lockboxes

Lockboxes are those things you see outside of houses for sale, it is a lock and a box in one. Well this weekend someone broke the lockbox that was on the fence of a neighbor of mine. The neighbor is having work done and the place is a construction zone and there aren’t any major appliances in there. But someone posing as the ‘drywall guy’ was poking around, then later the lockbox was missing, the house unlocked. The lockbox was found later in a treebox, sans keys. From the looks of the lockbox it appears the guy took a vise grip and squeezed it popping the lock. The thief ran off with a couple of saws and other tools.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on July 12, 2010 8:45 AM.

Trust, a fragile thing

The only reason why I’m mentioning this article from today’s Washington Post, “The Court of Vanished Dreams,” is because the court in question is in the TC. According to the article a homeless fellow had a good idea, create a basketball league, involve area teens to keep them out of trouble. Problem was James Russell, the homeless fellow who started it, bailed on the teens and the other homeless men who were to be coaches and timekeepers, taking $1,000 with him. Being charitable, one could say Russell couldn’t battle his own demons which part of him meant well but another part didn’t and that part won. Not being charitable, Russell was a con man who not only took away people’s money but heavily damaged their trust in others. Trust is a very fragile thing and when it is damaged it hardens the hearts of the victims and makes it that more difficult for the next person who might not want money, but good will, time, mercy, patience, and or faith.
According to the article, the league used the basketball court at 1st and Florida on the Shaw side of Florida, opposite the Big Bear. I’ve seen groups playing there but never really thought any of it was organized. Next time, I’ll take another look and be a bit more observant.
There is a bit of a bright light to this story of a bum that let his colleagues and the kids down, another homeless fellow, Wade Simmons, who was coaching for the league took over. Though the whole thing is less than kosher, meaning if it were run by some responsible non-profit a number of the participants might be excluded. But it is good in that it allows the usual recipients of charity to be charitable and it is better to give than receive.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on July 8, 2010 8:13 AM.

Steal this bike

Steal this bike This was the weekend of careless bike owners. I spotted this bike Saturday morning. The lock was on the bike handlebars and it looked like it was in the blind spot of any of the workers inside the structure being worked on. Later that day I spotted another women’s bike parked on my street so poorly locked it seemed to be asking to be stolen. The rear wheel was locked to the street sign. Anybody could have just popped the quick release rear wheel off and run off with the rest of it.
So what is it to me if some stranger’s bike gets stolen? For one, it helps increase the perception of my area being a high crime area when it does get stolen. Second, there are the periodic emails and messages from folks who’ve had their bikes stolen asking for help. I’d assume that the victims did take some caution in protecting their property. But that willingness to believe people made that effort to prevent their bike from being stolen gets eroded every time I see a poorly locked or unlocked bike.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on June 28, 2010 7:43 AM.