Police Beat: Crime in the White People's Streets

By Bart Vanzetti
Spy Police Reporter 

The story was huge news in Our Nation's Capitol last week:

Thanks, WTOP, uh, WUSA Washington.

News of that shooting at the corner of 14th St. N.W. at Riggs St. followed another shooting outside the Nationals stadium during a game, scaring the s*** out of thousands of spectators who had been enjoying watching their team underachieve.

Yep, crime is back, by which we mean that it's happening around white people.   That makes it news.

The shooting last week took place on 14th St. between R and S:

In a previous century, during the pacific glorious reign of St. Ronald of Bitburg, there was a 14th St., N.W. in Washington city, we recall.  It was paved and everything.  We lived there – well, not there. We're white.  In those days, no white person would go anywhere near 14th & S NW unless they had to buy drugs in an emergency.

There were plenty of shootings in that neighborhood then too.  If you don't believe us, just ask the BBC:

When Ruben Castaneda moved to the US capital in 1989 to take up a job with the Washington Post, he was struck by how easy it was to score crack.

Days after arriving in the city, he was taken to S Street Northwest by a "strawberry" - a streetwalker who offered sex in return for drugs.

"The moment she stepped out of the car, the drug dealers ran across the street and surrounded her," he recalls. "Coming from Los Angeles, I was a little taken aback by how casually all this went down."

Crime in the 80's: you couldn't believe
how bad it was

They were in the Shaw/U Street neighbourhood, less than two miles from the White House. ...

Drug markets were already established by the 1970s, but it was after dealers started selling crack in the mid-1980s that drug-related violence escalated.

"The city was going through a terrible time," says Castaneda, who covered endless shootings as a reporter on the night police beat. "Through the late '80s to mid-to-late '90s there were just unbelievable levels of violence behind crack cocaine, and fights over drug turfs, witness killings and retaliatory killings."

By 1989 the annual homicide rate had risen above 400, and Washington DC had become the "murder capital" of the US - the city with the highest rate of homicides in the nation. ...

In 1991, there were 479 homicides in the city, a record...."There was kind of an unspoken thing that nobody really lived east of 16th Street," says Horsley. "That was like a racial, social, political dividing line."

Nobody, in this context, as was understood at the time, meant no white people.  So nobody, in the sense of no white people, gave two s***s about crime on 14th Street, north of say P Street.

How things change.

Although crime remains low by historical levels, there's plenty of dangerous gunplay, most of which ends up hurting or killing – Black people.

Which has left people of color torn.  On the one hand, they would like to be protected against being shot down on the streets of Chi-Raq.  On the other hand, if the only protection they have is heavily armed mostly-white uncontrolled police force whose members can't quit choking the life out of them on the streets, that seems suboptimal, to put it mildly.

Which brings us to the difficulty of disentangling crime, the problem, from crime, the excuse for Republican-sponsored white supremacy.  

In the aftermath of reign of police terror that culminated in the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many others, one school of thought, led by but not exclusively comprising persons of color called for “defunding the police,” thus handing the Republicans a handy club with which to beat anyone advocating any effort to bring the police under the control of democratic government.

From the WBBM Chicago in the Crosshairs page

Bree Newsome Bass, who yanked down the treasonous Confederate flag that flew at the South Carolina State Capitol 150 years after General Sherman's U.S. Army tore it down, is on the side of arguing that the American police are an irredeemably racist institution and therefore it's got to go:

[Police] Reformists remain committed to preserving the existing system even though the idea of reforming it to be the opposite of what it was designed to be is an unproven theory that’s no more realistic than the idea of abolishing police altogether. The most pressing question remains: Why are we seeking to integrate and reform modern manifestations of the slave patrols and plantations in the first place?

There's one problem with the idea of defunding and abolishing the police, as Ms. Newsome admits:

One of the primary talking points against calls to defund and abolish police is that Black communities would have no way to maintain peace and order, and that a state of chaos would ensue.... The current political divide on this issue falls exactly along these lines, separating those who think the system is simply in need of reform and those who correctly define the problem as the system itself. The reality is that Black people fall on both sides of this divide, . . . 

In fact in turns out there are quite a few people of color who are not ready to chuck the entire police department overboard. Enough in fact to elect a mayor in New York:

He bluntly challenged left-wing leaders in his party over matters of policing and public safety. .... With his substantial early lead in the Democratic mayoral primary when votes were counted Tuesday night, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, demonstrated the enduring power of a candidate who can connect to working- and middle-class Black and Latino voters, while also appealing to some white voters with moderate views. 

Just as importantly, in his supporters’ eyes, Mr. Adams was perceived as having credibility on what emerged as the most consequential, and divisive, issue in the race: public safety. ....

“He was in the police force, he knows what they represent,” said Gloria Dees, 63, a Brooklyn resident who voted for Mr. Adams and described being deeply concerned about both rising crime and police violence against people of color. “You have to understand something in order to make it work better.”

Polls this spring showed public safety increasingly becoming the most important issue to Democratic voters amid random subway attacks, a spate of bias crimes and a spike in shootings. On the Sunday before the primary, Mr. Adams’s campaign staff said that a volunteer had been stabbed in the Bronx.

“I can say crime and white racists
will vote for me?”

“Being an ex-cop, being able to have safety and justice at the same time, was a message that resonated with folks in the Bronx,” said Assemblywoman Karines Reyes ... Mr. Adams won the Bronx overwhelmingly in the first vote tally. “They’re looking for somebody to address the crime.” 

It's beginning to sound as if defunding (as distinct from reforming or restructuring) the police isn't an obvious winner even among those who bear the brunt of police misconduct.

The, um, jury is still out as to whether Adams's approach can provide New Yorkers with protection from criminals, both badged and otherwise, but there's no doubt that people of color have more complex views on the issue that demand attention and respect.

Which distinguishes their views from those of white Republicans, who blame rising crime on the supposed Democratic effort to defund the police, which has succeeded in exactly 0.0% of American police departments:

NEW YORK — “SKYROCKETING MURDER RATES,” claimed the National Fraternal Order of Police. “An explosion of violent crime,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. ...On social media and in political speeches, some Republicans and pro-police groups say last year’s calls to slash spending on law enforcement have led to a dramatic rise in killings in cities overseen by Democrats.

The increases they cite are real, and several big cities did make cuts to police spending. But the reductions were mostly modest, and the same big increases in homicides are being seen nationwide — even in cities that increased police spending. At the same time, the rates for burglaries, drug offenses and many other types of crime are down in many cities across the country.

The effort to blame Democrats for crime may offer a preview of Republicans’ strategy for upcoming elections: a new twist on an old “law and order” argument from the party’s past, harkening[sic] back to President Richard Nixon.  

Wait, you mean Republicans have been pushing the same racist smear for over half a century?

Hey, it works.

Speaking of things that work, the obvious solution to gun-related crime is to crack down on the unregulated traffic in handguns, which are available in most red states on demand, like waffles.  The stricter gun controls in places like Chicago can be and are easily circumvented by entrepreneurs with a car and gas money.

The reason we can't require uniform national standards on access to lethal weaponry?  It's Republicans!

Remember how happy “Moscow Mitch” McConnell was after he blocked any gun legislation following the massacre of 26 innocents, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook?

He was happy not only because he taught another lesson to uppity Barack Obama, but also because doing nothing to limit gun violence and crime works for Republicans.

If we had limited access to lethal weaponry on demand, shooting and death rates might decline to levels found everywhere else in the civilized world.  But then white people couldn't be terrified into voting Republican.  The more people die from unregulated guns (as compared to Swiss Army Knives, to use an analogy favored by a bent Republican federal judge), the easier it is for Trumpublicans to demagogue the crime issue.

This is usually the place where we bemoan that nothing can be done as long as Republicans pursue evil policies for political gain  But that's not true.

As soon as Democrats get a working majority in Congress, they can enact real gun legislation, like outlawing insanely lethal assault weapons, closing the gun show loophole, limiting purchases to something shocking like two per year per customer, and requiring 100% background checks.

It could happen. The Congressional district once represented by loathsome fraud Newt “Polish My Rocket, Hon” Gingrich is now represented by a Democratic woman of color who knows all too well the toll of gun violence.  Repeat in a few more districts and states, and maybe you can take me out to the ballgame in D.C. without a bulletproof vest.

All it takes is for persons of goodwill to turn away from The Bachelorette for a few minutes, organize and turn out at the polls.

If we do, we can do something.  If we don't, as we didn't in 2010 and 2014, well, be sure to duck.

For Democrats to let their safety and democracy slip away because they couldn't be bothered to show up for midterm elections would be worse than a tragedy.  It would be a crime.