The call comes over the radio just a few minutes after Officer Kristina Cappello’s patrol car has crested the National Mall, the white dome of the Capitol gleaming in the darkness as she turns the wheel towards the less touristy streets of Washington DC. A fellow officer needs backup at the scene of an assault.
For officer Cappello, this is the kind of call that has become pretty much routine during a summer in which there has been a sudden spike in violent street crime after several years of decline. This reached international attention this month when a young Jewish activist from London was murdered as he walked a female friend home.
In an eight-hour shift, officer Cappello has had calls about an assault, a man shot in the leg on a housing estate, a car slamming into the side of a city bus, a domestic disturbance and a couple of suspected break-ins. ”It’s the heat,” she says.
Last week, Washington’s police chief, Charles Ramsey, declared a ”crime emergency” after the city registered its 14th murder since July 1, and a spate of violent robberies around Washington’s most famous monuments on the Mall. As well as the steep rise in homicides, robberies are up 14% and armed assaults 18%.
When we arrive at the address given out on the radio, the officer who made the call has already got a man in handcuffs and on his knees with his face pressed into the side of a battered blue sedan. It is a sweltering night, but he is wearing a grey hooded sweatshirt. He is babbling: ”I’m a man under fire.”
Officer Cappello begins searching his pockets and pulls out a knife. Another man sits on a chair in the pool of light cast by a takeaway shop. One hand clutches the right side of his face; the other rests on his white cane.
When the first patrol car pulled up, the man in the grey sweatshirt had the blind man in a tight grip, and was pummelling his head. No one at the takeaway, or the liquor shop two doors down, knows why, and the blind man does not say.
By now there are eight police officers gathered around the takeaway and a man in a white t-shirt waiting at the bus stop begins screaming: ”Break my fingers like you just said you would. Beat me like you said you would.” He lunges at an officer, and gets taken down. Officer Cappello finishes patting down the assault suspect. She unthreads the laces of his black boots, and stands him up. He wets himself. Officers bundle him into the waiting police wagon with the man in the white t-shirt.
This time it was an assault but it could well have been a murder. Twelve of the 14 murder victims so far this month were African-American males, shot dead in poor areas of the city rarely visited by tourists. The other two were an African-American woman and Alan Senitt, the Jewish activist.
Senitt (27) had his throat slashed as he walked a female friend home from the cinema in the early hours of July 9. His friend was sexually assaulted. The Briton had been planning to spend the summer working for a Democratic presidential hopeful, the former governor of Virginia Mark Warner.
There was nothing to suggest it would be unsafe to walk his friend home. Georgetown, with its genteel rows of houses, tucked-away mansions and smart shops, is one of the richest neighbourhoods in Washington.
The suspects in Senitt’s murder had set out that evening saying they wanted to cut someone, police said. Two adult males, a juvenile and a woman were arrested within hours of the killing, in bloodstained clothing and carrying Senitt’s identification papers. The men are suspects in at least two previous such attacks.
Ramsey’s emergency declaration, announced shortly after Senitt’s murder, led to the beefing up of patrols around national landmarks.
For those Washingtonians whose live in a clearly defined quadrant of the city that is mainly white and affluent, Senitt’s killing exposed a vulnerability. But it was, say some, a warning that a city known to outsiders for its monuments and harbours has some of the cruellest inequality in America.
Last January, a veteran journalist from the New York Times, David Rosenbaum, was beaten by robbers as he took an after-dinner stroll around his own upper-class neighbourhood in Washington DC. His treatment by ambulance attendants and emergency room personnel, who left him on a gurney for an hour without medical care, exposed a callous and shambolic emergency system. Rosenbaum died from his injuries.
William Chambliss, a sociology professor at George Washington University, notes that crime rates, in Washington as in other American cities, are cyclical. A few years of declining incidents will be followed by a few years of increased crime. But he believes Senitt’s murder is a product of other forces. Over the past 25 years, as the gulf between rich and poor has widened, the divisions between rich and poor, black and white, in Washington have grown more acute.
A property boom has turned the city into the third most expensive in the United States — good news for homeowners, but a blow to the 19% of Washingtonians living below the poverty line. (The national rate is 13%.)
In a city that is 60% black, African-American students have the lowest performance levels in the country; overall 37% of Washingtonians cannot read well enough to fill out a job application. Four percent carry the HIV virus — a higher rate of infection than any other US city. Chambliss argues that such divisions find an outlet in violent crime. ”It creates an anger and a callousness towards those people who benefit from society,” he says. ”There is a parallel with terrorism where the upper-class white people become the enemy just as the Western infidels become the enemy of Islam. I see this as a pattern that could be the beginning of a very serious change in crime, and where it is committed, and how it is committed.”
For a city that is the custodian of America’s heritage, the prospect of a migration in violent crime to the Mall or Georgetown is disturbing. Hours after Washington’s police chief declared his determination to make the streets safe again, two groups of tourists were robbed at gunpoint near the Washington monument by men wearing dark clothes and ski masks.
”Summertime just gets crazy,” says officer Cappello. ”I just don’t know what it is.” – Guardian Unlimited Â