Another Terrorist Attack
On Wednesday, another man was killed on the 1300 block of Columbia Rd. The article in today’s Washington Post notes that there was an officer on patrol in the area, but it wasn’t enough:
D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who represents the area, said an increased police presence, while a step in the right direction, can’t solve a neighborhood’s ills.
Graham’s email to the listserv on Wednesday portrayed his absolute frustration with the homicides there, a feeling I think we all share:
Dear Friends,
Sadly I must inform you that an adult male (not yet identified) was shot five times in about the same location that Paul Jones was killed on January 9. He was pronounced at the hospital a short time later. This all occurred just after 10 PM.
This is the same block that has had a police post and a light tower every day for months.
The light tower was not up due to the rain. But Cmdr Kucik informs me that the police officer was at the post in the middle of the block at the very time this person was shot. Other officers were nearby and responded immediately.
This means that the shooting occurred just a stone’s throw from a police officer. He heard the shots and went to the body.
We are awaiting more information.
Yesterday, I was on a cheese bus with some students on the way back from a field trip and they were talking about their communities – one, in particular, lives by Ballou high school and talks about the drug dealing and prostitution that goes on outside her house. At that moment, the deejay from the radio station the bus driver was playing came on. He began talking about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum and asked why that man wasn’t considered a terrorist, just like suicide bombers in the Middle East.
He went on to then say that all the drive-by shooters and gang bangers and perpetrators of black-on-black crime in the hood should be considered terrorists as well. I asked my students what they thought of this.
One answered that because terrorism was a system of thought based on fear and terror, and a terrorist practices that, the deejay was right, in the sense of the word.
I was proud of the student because she was able to apply the concepts she’d learned in my class, but it also made me think of something: Our (meaning white) experiences in Columbia Heights with crime don’t go beyond mugging, leering, cat-calling, the occasional rock throwing, and generally non-fatal crimes. The senseless, fatal acts of violence in Columbia Heights? What’s been reported recently is black-on-black, targeted crime.
The violence in Columbia Heights gets reported more because it’s a rapidly gentrifying area – it’s no longer a forgotten, downtrodden part of DC like some parts of Northeast or Southeast still are. Many young professionals flock here, choose to live here – but let’s face it, though, the people to whom this crime is happening don’t exactly have the choice to live here or don’t have the means to get away. And if they did, what’s saying that things would be better elsewhere?
Jim Graham blames Clark Realty for negligence, and certainly they contribute. But what about the pervading urban culture of violence and retribution, the glorification and endless cycle of an eye for an eye, and the public taking notice only when it happens near the hip parts of town or the buildings of upwardly mobile, college-educated whites, blocks from where they ironically drink PBR, talk about iPhone apps and speculate about the Real World?
I don’t know what the solution is. How do you change cultures – both cultures overrun by fear, violence, and hopelessness, and cultures where self-interest masquerade as activism and outrage?
