Just because trends favor the city doesn't mean that you aren't responsible for taking care of yourself

DC's police chief thinks that we can have 100 murders or fewer this year, even though that means 3/month for the next four months. See "D.C. police set homicide bar at 100" from the Washington Times.

In the meantime, the people trying to create a diner on Bladensburg Road (believing all the hype about H Street I guess, but not too clued into the difficulties of "market development" and being an early entrant).

The Capital City Diner blog reports on their negative experience of not only being robbed, but of the police who responded to their call trying to talk them out of reporting that they were robbed. See "Matt & Pat Robbed; MPD Discourages Reporting the Crime."

My response (from a local e-list):

while of course this story of police inaction is ridiculous and the officers should be reprimanded, it's amazing that successive new "immigrant" groups into the greater H Street neighborhood are surprised when they get robbed/burgled, without regard to how their behavior contributes to their being victims of crime.

While it wasn't out of the question for me to ride from meetings on Capitol Hill to Mount Rainier (I lived there for a brief time in 2007-08) via Bladensburg Road, at times between 9 pm and 10 pm on summer nights, I was always wary and moving on a bicycle I moved more quickly, plus I didn't ride too close to the curb, and I never liked it.

My sense is that the future proprietors of Capital City Diner have never read either of the books Streetwise or Code of the Street by Elijah Anderson. I often joke that I wish that the books had been available and I had read them before I moved to the H Street neighborhood in Sept. 1987, just as the city was moving into the period of the crack "epidemic" and dozens of people were murdered within a few blocks of where I lived.

I've lived in the city for most of 22 years, and I would still be wary about walking on Bladensburg Road between Mt. Olivet and H Street late at night on a weekend, even if the pedestrian master plan identifies Bladensburg Road as a priority corridor for improvement...

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This reminds me of a crime blotter story I read in the late 1980s or early 1990s, in either the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Washington Post. A young lady from Washington DC was lost in Philadelphia, and she stopped and asked for directions, and the people she asked for directions instead stole her car. But she stopped at an intersection at something like 4:30 a.m. Wouldn't you stop and think why are all kinds of people up and about at 4 or 5 in the morning, and maybe they are up to no good?

I'm really not trying to blame the victim here. And I hate to use the phrase "common sense," which is often overused. But there is a need for some common sense in order to survive in what can be difficult places.

Center cities are still difficult places. And you should never take your safety for granted, regardless of where you happen to be in the city. (I joke that I never go to ATMs or buy gas late at night in the city--it's actually not true, I will, but I will only do it in certain places, and definitely not on Bladensburg Road NE.)