Welcome back to Washington, averaging more than a murder per day during the first 11 days of July 2006. Police Chief Charles Ramsey has declared it a “crime emergency.”
The District of Columbia saw 14 homicides between July 1st and 11th, from the murder of John Jackson by automatic weapon fire in Southeast to the stabbing of Alan Senitt on Q street in Georgetown. Jewelry stores have been robbed in the middle of the day and residents are nervous. The recent string of murders is nowhere nearly as severe as the outbreak during the early ‘90s, when the homicide count reached 482 killings in 1991. But the city has responded with stricter curfews, six-day work weeks for the police force and a network of 48 security cameras strategically placed around the city as part of a temporary emergency crime bill passed by the D.C. Council on July 17th.
The $11.3 million bill is split between police wages, neighborhood improvement and security cameras. Of the funding, $8 million was allocated to cover the cost of increased police overtime between July 11th and the bill’s expiration on October 21st, while another $1 million funds the cost of other government agencies’ improving neighborhoods by repairing streetlights, towing abandoned vehicles and cleaning graffiti and blighted buildings. An additional $575,000 was requested to expand current anti-gang and rehabilitation programs for juveniles. The final part of the bill allocates $2.3 million for top-of-the-line surveillance cameras. A stricter curfew for those 16 and under was also imposed.
“We need to give our police and other law enforcement agencies the help that they need to address the crime increase and to continue the progress we’ve been making over the past decade to reduce crime city-wide,” Mayor Anthony Williams explained in a press release thanking the D.C. Council for its 17-1 approval.
If that sounds like a lot of changes, it is because a lot has changed. The bill covers a wide range of issues, and it has quickly become a source of contention between mayoral candidates, the Metropolitan Police Department and privacy advocates. So what is the difference between the District of Columbia students left behind in May and the District of Columbia they have returned to?
Increase in Police
Perhaps the most visible difference in Georgetown itself is the fact that the officers of the 3,800 member Metropolitan Police Department are working overtime. Each officer is working six days a week instead of five. That works out to about 300 extra officers on the streets at any given moment, a fact reflected in the now-frequent sight of multiple police cars patrolling the same block.
Groups such as the Citizens Association of Georgetown are pleased with the increased presence and have urged the Metropolitan Police Department to focus the extra manpower on patrol by both foot and car. Many studies have shown that a regular police officer on foot is the most effective deterrent to crime. It is also the most expensive, costing $8 million for 90 days of increased patrols.
The extra manpower is making a difference: overall crime has dropped 12 percent from the same period last year since the passing of the bill. But 12 percent is a far cry from the 50 percent reduction Mayor Anthony Williams was shooting for.
Such an ambitious goal would likely require a long-term increase in the size of the police force, but there have been no public announcements yet of any increased recruiting efforts. The other possibility is that the new force of ever-vigilant security cameras could be more effective than anyone predicts.
Surveillance City
The Synchronized Operations Command Center is a large room on the fifth floor of police headquarters downtown. Looking more like NASA’s Mission Control than a police station, it sports enough flat screens to watch 22 video streams simultaneously. It is the technical nerve center of D.C.’s finest and ground central for the newly expanded video surveillance network being built in the city.
The original network consisted of 19 ‘permanent’ video cameras placed in various public areas throughout the city and was intended for monitoring public events like rallies or marches. They are only activated during such events and have very visible flashing lights and markings to alert on-lookers that Big Brother is watching.
Though originally slated to begin service in late Sept. 2001, the network was pressed into service on Sept. 11th to monitor the city’s public spaces for evidence of terrorist threats. Since then they have also been activated whenever the terror alert level rises to orange.
The emergency bill authorizes the placement of 48 new ‘neighborhood cameras’ at intersections throughout the city to compliment the original 19. As of August 29th, 19 have been installed, including 10 cameras in Northwest. The rest of the cameras are still on order, but the MPD plans to have about half of them up and running by the end of August, with the rest going up in September.
Kevin Morrison, Director of Corporate Communications for MPD said the cameras were the most advanced of their type and would cost about $25,000 each. Though they lack microphones to record audio, the new cameras can zoom in, rotate 360 degrees and tilt 180 degrees up and down, leaving no blind spots in their coverage. A secure wireless antenna allows officers at the SOCC to both adjust the cameras and receive the encrypted analog video being broadcasted back. It is truly top-of-the-line surveillance.
“Our hope is that criminals will think twice about committing a crime,” Morrison said.
But some experts are skeptical. Instead of having officers monitor live video feeds and look for suspicious activity, the MPD will engage in a practice called ‘passive monitoring,’ in which the video will be recorded and stored for ten days. The idea is to deter crime by making criminals aware that the MPD will have access to video records as evidence.
“That’s not gonna stop crime. That’s gonna help you solve crime,” explained Inspector Thomas Nestel of the Philadelphia Police Department. Nestel wrote his Master’s thesis on the use of closed-circuit television cameras. He favors the Chicago Police Department’s approach of actively watching the monitors from laptops in squad cars and taking preventative measures when necessary. Think a Diet Coke version of Minority Report.
“They’re very proactive about intervening,” Nestel said of the Chicago police. For the record, the Chicago cameras work. According to a CPD report, homicides decreased from 20.3 per 100,000 people to 15.2 in the year after the surveillance program was initiated.
Another objection to the deterrence argument is that relatively small surveillance networks have a tendency to simply move violent crime out of sight of the camera instead of stopping it, a phenomenon referred to as ‘displacement.’ Only dense coverage forces criminals to commit crimes on-camera or leave the area, and even the expanded CCTV system would average only 1.4 cameras per square mile of D.C.
“There aren’t enough cameras to really do what we all think cameras would do,” Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Bill Skelsey said. “The resources just aren’t there.”
Since there are so few cameras, and because Georgetown has so few homicides compared to other parts of the city, like the 7th district, it is unlikely that Georgetown will receive more than just a couple of the 13 cameras requested by the ANC in August. “I think we’re only going to get two or three in the end,” Skelsey said.
That concern is why neighborhood groups are stepping in to fill the gap. One group called Georgetown Crime Stoppers hopes to organize a private network of security cameras within residential Georgetown. Their goal is to have at least two cameras on every block. Kathy O’Hearn, leader of the organization, said that they have received “an amazing amount of verbal support” from residents, as well as the blessing of 2nd District police commander Andy Solberg. They are hoping to begin installing cameras within the next six months and, while they expect that residents will control the cameras directly, they are currently discussing with private security firms the feasibility of connecting all of the cameras into a single network.
“It sounds like a daunting task to connect all the cameras,” O’Hearn said, but that would be the goal. The group also hopes to create an easily accessible and updated database of crimes in the area.
As far as privacy concerns go, very little has been heard except from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Few people interviewed seemed concerned about privacy or discrimination. “I don’t think this is going to be a 1984,” Skelsey said.
An issue for students is whether or not the cameras could be used as evidence against them for minor offenses, such as public intoxication, but O’Hearn was taken aback when asked about the similarities between her proposed camera network and efforts to gather video evidence against rowdy Georgetown students back in early 2004. “That’s just not the concern,” she said. “The
Kids, Cops and Curfews
The cheapest and possibly the most controversial element of the emergency plan involves the disclosure of juveniles’ crime records and the extended curfew. The basic curfew regulations in effect were established in 1999 after the D.C. Court of Appeals verified the constitutionality of the Juvenile Act of 1995. It states that those age 16 or younger are not permitted to be on the streets without an adult between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. through July and August.
Aside from exceptions such as travelling from a community event, standard police procedure for dealing with curfew-breakers is to bring the juvenile to one of two detention centers in the city, where their parents are called to pick them up. At 6 a.m. the leftovers are sent to the Child and Family Services Agency (any child under 12 is sent to CFSA immediately). Violators could be fined up to 25 hours of community service.
Part of the emergency bill granted Mayor Williams the ability to change the curfew hours, a power which he exercised on July 31, by moving the curfew up from midnight to 10 p.m. until September 28. “This earlier curfew hour is necessary in order to protect them from becoming victims of crime or from becoming involved in crimes at night,” Williams claimed.
But youth advocacy groups such as the Youth Action Research Group are outraged at the change, as much because they feel that youth are being wrongly blamed for the recent spike in crime as for the inconvenience.
“We are not criminals,” the group states on its web site. “A 10 p.m. curfew means that we can’t go to an eight o’clock movie without adult supervision. We are on lock down in our own city.”
Whether or not they are criminals, kids are increasingly being picked up by the police. For the week ending August 27, there were 321 curfew violations, 212 of which would not have been violations of the old midnight curfew.
The other issue at hand is how much the MPD needs to know about the juvenile offenders. One of the provisions of the new bill requires the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which handles judicial matters for juveniles, to inform the MPD within 48 hours of the release or transfer of juveniles arrested for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, violent crimes or weapons offenses and for third-time offenders. This information was previously available only on a case-by-case basis at the specific request of the MPD. The bill also allows police to hold suspects without bond in the case of armed or violent robberies, including those involving imitation firearms. It is true that this information could be useful to police, but it is essentially a step towards treating minors, who have traditionally received special treatment, in the same manner as suspects over 18. One thing for sure is that one doesn’t see as many youths on the street, and if there is a bad apple in the neighborhood, the police know about it.
A real solution or a “feel-good” measure?
The question, of course, is whether or not all these measures actually make the city safer. After all, the increased police presence and curfew are temporary and studies have not conclusively shown that cameras are effective in reducing crime. Some people, most notably councilman Adrian Fenty, the frontrunner in the upcoming mayoral election, have called the bill a “feel-good” measure and accused it of being a quick fix masquerading as a solution.
“I think people know that these are not ways to solve crime,” he told The Washington Post. “At worst, we are putting forth that we are doing something about a crime emergency when everyone in the rooms knows that we are not.”
One thing that everyone agrees on is the need to reduce the factors that foster crime by cleaning up neighborhoods and creating youth programs to keep kids out of gangs. Chief Ramsey even broached the idea of year-round school to keep children busy. The main debate is not whether or not the emergency bill will be effective, but rather whether it will be effective enough. Chief Ramsey phrased the issue well on the WTWP radio program Ask-the-Chief, describing the crime emergency as “putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”
There is little question that the students who arrived during NSO returned to a safer D.C. than those who came back before the emergency measures were initiated. The statistics are clear on that. The question is whether we will still be safe after the expiration of the legislation at the end of October. For the answer, we’ll just have to consult the cameras; they’ll be watching.
