Street crime emergency

Reactions to the policy, which extends by two hours existing restrictions that allow teenagers to be out until midnight, have been mixed.

Some experts say such curfews are feel-good measures that make no real dent in crime statistics. Commentators have expressed dismay that it took a spate of attacks on white visitors to draw a dramatic intervention in a murder rate that more typically takes black lives.

But after one person in Washington a day was killed for the first 15 days of July, police say they have seen an improvement in the number of attacks since imposing the curfew expansion for 30 days at the end of July.

The ringleaders in the attacks that grabbed the headlines this summer were adults, but in each case, a teenager is alleged to have played a role.

A 15-year-old is one of the four people, including one woman who allegedly drove a getaway car, charged with the July 9 murder of Alan Senitt, a prominent member of Britain’s Jewish community remembered for his efforts to build bridges between Jewish and Muslim politicians. A 16- and a 17-year-old were among the five suspects accused of attacking 12 tourists in five attacks on the Mall in May and July. In one incident a couple was robbed, and the suspects are accused of dragging the 17-year-old woman into the shadows of the Smithsonian castle, where, at gunpoint, she was raped by one person and sexually assaulted by another. In another, on July 11, two men allegedly forced a Missouri family of four to the ground at gunpoint, took the parents’ money, their 9-year-old son’s camera and $5 from their 15-year-old daughter’s pocket.

The attack on Senitt has drawn the most interest partly because it was so shocking, but also because it highlighted the difficulties Washingtonians face even talking about street crime without clumsily stepping on race relation landmines.

Senitt was doing what hundreds of visitors to Georgetown do every night of the week - walking the streets after a night out, in this case to the cinema. He was accompanying his friend to her home in the basement of the mansion of a wealthy developer, for whom she had previously worked as a babysitter, according to local media.

At around 2am, outside the house, the attackers pounced from the shadows. Senitt, in town to volunteer for Virginia Governor Mark R. Warner, a Democratic contender for the presidency in 2008, tried to prevent Christopher Piper, 25, from allegedly trying to rape his friend. His attackers slit his throat and Senitt died.

What was so shocking was that Georgetown is without rival as a reliable spot for a night out, for visitors, students and residents alike. The clientele of its multitude of shops is far less monochromal than its residents, who are typically white, extremely well-heeled and/or well-connected members of the Washington elite, including the likes of Madeleine Albright for example.

In that sense it might seem like an obvious target for muggers, yet it is generally regarded as safe.

The killing was followed by much debate about its causes, including a community meeting at which Police Commander Andy Solberg made remarks that prompted his temporary suspension for being racially insensitive. “I would think that at 2 o’clock in the morning on the streets of Georgetown, a group of three people - one of whom is 15 years old, one of whom is a bald chunky fat guy - are going to stand out,” he said. “They were black. This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life.” Some might say that any group of people hanging suspiciously around the shadowy driveway of a Georgetown mansion ought to have drawn attention: black people are in fact not unusual in Georgetown, the nightlife hub of a majority black city. Solberg spent two weeks in charge of school security before being reinstated with orders from Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, who happens to be black, to build a lesson plan for police cadets around the issues of race, class, crime and police at the centre of the Oscar-winning movie “Crash.”

Some observers have commented that Mayor Williams went after the teenage element in these crimes because they are the only ones who cannot vote.

After Chief Ramsey declared a crime emergency on July 11, some experts were quick to point out that the murder rate was nowhere near where it was in the early 1990s, when Washington carried the unfortunate title of murder capital of the United States.

Yet police are able to tout statistics showing that since the crime emergency was announced, crime has fallen between 4 and 5 per cent year-on-year, and for the week after the curfew was announced, the number of juvenile arrests went up by 9 per cent and the crime rate fell by about 14 per cent compared to the same week in 2005. Meanwhile the number of curfew violations skyrocketed from 81 to 393 and gun recoveries leapt by 21 per cent. However, the homicide rate was virtually unchanged, with 21 in July and 20 in June. Still, police say they face a real increase in crimes by juveniles, having arrested 209 young people for robbery in 2005, compared to 153 the year before, while weapons violations in that group grew to 155 from 118 in the same periods.

Chief Ramsey blamed “irresponsible” parents for the need to impose a curfew. Others blame changes in policies that have prompted poor parents to go back to work, leaving their children unattended, and a lack of programs for Washington’s urban poor.

Dr James Alan Fox professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, blamed in part a lack of resources as more and more money is spent on homeland security rather than policing American towns, “because those people who are most effected by terrorism are wealthy and powerful.” He quoted one statistic that the number of police officers in the US had dropped by 8 per cent between 2000 and 2004.

“Many more people are killed every year in ordinary street crimes in poor neighbourhoods than were killed on 9/11,” he said in a discussion on National Public Radio.

He said that without wishing to weigh one death against another, it was “quite telling that we can get all excited about and concerned about terrorism, but we don’t have the same kind of excitement and concern for ordinary street crime.”

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