Police protection in D.C.: separate and unequal - unfair police distribution in Washington D.C

Washington Monthly, March, 1995 by Nancy Beiles, Michael K. Mayo

Washington's best cops patrol the city's safest neighborhoods

Every once in a while, from the window of Sgt. Brian Hubbard's police cruiser, you can catch a glimpse of the Capitol dome. Only a mile away, proudly lit, the immaculate marble looks like it's meant to--a monument to justice and power. But Hubbard has other things on his mind. He spots a group of young blacks sitting on milk crates and a pile of dirt in an abandoned lot, and he pulls up to tell them to move on. Near a cemetery, he interrupts a woman leaning into a gray, beat-up car and tells her to move on, too; he thinks she's a prostitute, he says, but there's no way he can be sure. And later, in the vacant lot at Montello Avenue and Queen Street, he tells yet another group to leave. "We're not supposed to do something like that," he says. "But they're gonna move along while I'm on duty." Asked why, he points to the scene beyond his windshield: run-down row houses, empty lots, liquor stores--not a lot of places for young people to go. Whether it's legal or not, Hubbard acts on the grim reality that most shootings occur when people are just hanging out.

Hubbard is the evening supervisor for Washington's Fifth District. He's a genial guy, a little edgy but clearly enjoying his work. But when he gets to thinking about the 85 homicides and 11,007 crimes on his beat last year, he can't help but get frustrated. "This is a jungle," he says. "The stats that we have here are worse than Vietnam per square mile. We go to war when we go to work."

That work is made even harder with his department's slim resources. There are fewer than 300 officers in the Fifth District. And fewer than 20 are on the streets at any one time--not enough to catch criminals, let alone deter them. Ninety percent of the budget goes to personnel expenses, such as pensions and salaries, leaving only $25 million to pay for everything from weapons and cruisers to heat and electricity. With little cash to invest in new technology, Metropolitan Police Department officers spend dozens of hours each week filling out reports by hand (hours they could spend policing the city) because the department's plan to computerize the process still hasn't been funded.

In such meager and dangerous circumstances, crime fighting can get grim. Police have almost given up preventing crime, and spend much of their time shepherding people off their own streets before they turn into victims. At one point on his patrol, Hubbard and his four-man Viper Unit descend on four boys, no older than fourteen, standing on a quiet corner at about eight in the evening. The kids, with their baggy jeans, workboots, and air of nonchalance are used to having policemen shine flashlights into their eyes and grill them with questions. After a night on patrol with Hubbard, waiting for gunshots and hunting for bodies in alleys, you realize the danger these kids are in. One of the officers tells the kids, who he knows won't listen, to get home and get inside: "This is gonna be your death, sho' nuff."

About 30 blocks across town, in the elegant neighborhoods that line Rock Creek Park, police have a problem of a different sort: boredom. The 300 officers in the Uniformed Division of the U.S. Secret Service cover every inch of the serene, tree-lined streets that are home to foreign embassies and to private residents rich enough to afford the company. With only one homicide for every 29 in the Fifth District, and few diplomatic crises more serious than a fender bender, these officers are little more than window dressing. If there is a bomb threat, political demonstration, or motorcade, the Secret Service calls in the Metropolitan Police Department to do the dirty work.

With so many forces in the city, it's often difficult to know where one jurisdiction starts and the next ends. That's why it took two civilians to stop Francisco Duran firing on the White House late last year--the Secret Service were patrolling the grounds, the Park Police the sidewalk, and the MPD the street. Before the different officers could figure out who had jurisdiction, two civilians had disarmed Duran and wrestled him to the ground.

Only in Washington could something so illogical be such an accepted fact of life. The Uniformed Division of the Secret Service are immeasurably better trained and better equipped than their counterparts in the MPD. When it comes to violent crime and homicides, Washington has few rivals, yet there are nearly 6,000 federal police officers keeping watch over the city's safest neighborhoods. There are 20 individual federal forces--including ones for the National Zoo, the U.S. Postal Service, the Library of Congress, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Washington, if it wanted, could literally put a cop on every corner. But as it stands, the safest streets in the city receive double or triple protection. The meanest streets get much, much less.

The reason for this blatant inequity comes from Washington's peculiar status as a federal city. In theory, the federal government--which occupies 41.4 percent of the city's land--compensates the District for lost tax revenue with a $660 million annual subsidy. But with the city's recent fiscal crisis--and with the eruption of violence associated with the drug trade--the chasm between the federal parts of the city and the rest of the District has grown ever larger.