I hate this city with a passion. I have been spending every Saturday for weeks fixing up my house so I can sell it. The people who reside it DC are much scummier than just across the border. I live on a block devoid of poverty where it is beautiful and wealthy people of all races are buying houses, some of which sold in the 7 figures and yet still last night at 12:08 am I picked up the phone and called the police when I heard gunshots.

When I was a kid I thought that poverty drove people to violence. Well, we don’t live in poor neighborhood at all. I thought lack of opportunities drove people to violence, well Graham’s intern had great opportunities and in 15 minutes on the subway every teenager in this city can be at world class museums.

I talked to a woman last weekend which was a story for POP in itself, but she told me she was looking for a job. What was her degree in, I asked? She never went to college. I told her I could not imagine trying to live in a high pressure city like DC without a college degree and suggested she either go back to college now or move to a place, like in North Carolina, where you can get a good job without a degree. I mean, right across from me are two couples, one mixed-marriage of lawyers and another where a black doctor married a black PhD. 15 feet from us was a plumber who is working on a house while driving in from west virginia. I reminded her that they can make it in this cutthroat city. And she stared at me, just stared at me like I was out of my goddamned mind. just stared and stared at me, as I told a friend “like she was trying to decide whether to hit me or ask me for money.”

One can only wish it was a gentrifier.

Neener, it’s best you move out of the city ASAP and leave it to those of us that love it here. You can soon be rappin to this soon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T1RMuoQnKo

Neener-

I’m not really sure what part of “those of us that love it here” translates into “those of us that love that attack” or “those of us that allowed a stabbing at Meridian Hill Park to happen.”

Get off your high horse – it’s possible for people who love this city to still want to see senseless crimes, such as rape and stabbings, stop occurring. Do you really think that because we love DC and love living in it, we also love all the bad things that come with this (or any) city?

If you “hate this city with a passion,” I wonder why you read and comment on a blog devoted specifically to this city.

I have a bit of sympathy for Neener – I’ve lived here since 1996, and every year I’m coming closer to moving away. DC is a fun place when you are in your 20′s or 30′s, but it’s not a place I can see growing old in. But, you can’t blame the city for that. I’m the one who has changed, not the city.

Actually DC is pretty much the same place it was 15 years ago. Same snobby, job-focused careerists, same enthusiastic young strivers trying to break into that world. Mixed in with a lot of hopeless folks who stand around on the corners. I guess the gentrification wave has pushed the lounge/restaurant zone a few blocks east. but the vibe of the city hasn’t really changed much with time.

Okay, Neener, that’s ENOUGH.

We are here, reading and taking part in this blog, because we enjoy and respect our city.

Move away. Stop reading this blog, stop partaking in the blogs/sites/sights/activities/festivals/whatever that this “scummy” city has to offer, and get the hell out. If you can’t take the good with the bad, we don’t want you anymore. Adios already, GEEZ.

Thanks again Christina, for your calm voice of reason.

Thanks Christina, again for your calm and rational thought.

I do have to say that yes, for sure, other urban areas are safer. I have spent a decade in Chicago and in San Francisco. While not ALL parts of those cities are 100% safe I can say that in the areas I lived in, I never ever worried about my safety, not even a little bit. I could happily walk down the streets in my neighborhood with my headphones on at night and not think twice about it. This was true not just for my particular block (I’ve never seen people drill down safety to even a few blocks let alone one particular block, the way PoP readers do) but for miles around, and included areas of public housing.

I don’t recall in all my time in either of those cities any serious criminal violence. There were some random incidences but nothing related to gangs or drugs. There were things like a homeless person trying to get warm on a winter’s night who accidentally set fire to a small apartment building and a woman died. A cab driver getting into a fight with a passenger and getting beaten up. Most of the time I didn’t even really think about the fact that I was living in a city of millions of people.

I have often thought since moving here that many residents accept DC’s violence as normal because they’ve just never lived in any other city, at least not long enough, to know that the crime problem here is NOT NORMAL.

All that said, I too, would like to hear some actual knowledge about this alleged stabbing at Meridian Hill Park. The circumstances influence my level of concern, but so does the reliability of the information. A resident who heard a doorman say that another person told him there was a stabbing hardly equates to factual news. Outside of PoP and DCist (which is repeating PoP news) there is no word at all about this. For all we know, someone was just out for a picnic and dropped their cutlery on their toe.

Neener has stated before that he desperately wants to leave but that his significant other won’t “let” him. Just tossing this out there – but my guess is his disenchantment with this city may have more to do with problems in the home-life than real or perceived crime all around him.

Anon 12:25 and Victoriam, thank you.

Anon 12:55, I agree that it must be worse here than a national average, but it seems more fair to compare urban areas to urban areas. Do we have more crime than New Orleans? Detroit?

Forbes did a story on this (unfortunately, it’s a stupid slide show, not a simple list) and there are some other cities listed before us:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/23/most-dangerous-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-dangerous-american-cities_slide_2.html?thisspeed=25000

I used to live in Miami, and I can tell you that place was full of crazy shit on a daily basis. I mean CRAZY — violent crime that was also gruesomely creative, like body parts washing up on the beach, people getting beheaded, that kind of thing.

But I’m not trying to argue “DC is really safe!” to anyone, because that’s foolish. It’ll come across like I’m trying to say that DC is some utopia and everyone is just imagining all the crime — I’m not an idiot, I know that’s not true. I just still have questions as to whether its worse here than other places, or the fact that we live on top of each other makes it feel worse.

In the end, though, that doesn’t matter – if you don’t feel safe living in a place, you have to try and leave.

The perception of violent crime in DC is much greater than it actually is (IMHO, partly because the second anything anyone anywhere hears about/sees online what might have been an act of crime, 75 people start blogging about it).

Neener might be surprised to know that DC didn’t even make the top 20 most dangerous cities in the US last yearm which were:

1. New Orleans
2. Camden, N.J.
3. Detroit
4. St. Louis, Mo.
5. Oakland, Calif.
6. Flint, Mich.
7. Gary, Ind.
8. Birmingham, Ala.
9. Richmond, Calif.
10. North Charleston, S.C.
11. Cleveland
12. Baltimore
13. Miami Gardens
14. Memphis, Tenn.
15. Youngstown, Ohio
16. Atlanta
17. Compton, Calif.
18. Orlando
19. Little Rock, Ark.
20. Minneapolis

http://www.infoplease.com/us/cities/safest-dangerous-cities.html

And violent crime down significantly thus far this year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071902154.html

This is not to say we live in Shangri-La. Any violent crime is too much. But stop letting the blogsphere overwhelm the facts.

Also – there’s plenty of violence in Oakland, if not San Fran.

Bobadbloggity rocks.

Anon 3:03 (wish you had a name). How about we include East St. Louis, Camden, NJ and Oakland in our assessment?

I think a lot of other major cities have crime-ridden satellite cities. Our violent neighborhoods happen to be within the city limits.

I could be wrong about this but I also think it’s more complex than it appears on Wikipedia.

so, was there a stabbing or was the building manager just speculating?

As any college freshman can tell you, Wikipedia is not a credible source.

I made a comment around 2:30 that is still “awaiting moderation,” apparently because there is more than one weblink, so i’ll post the same without the links. Sorry that this may be repetitive at some point.

The perception of violent crime in DC is much greater than the violence actually is. I think this is partly because the moment anything anyone anywhere hears about/sees online that suggests there might have been an act of crime, 75 people start blogging about it.

Neener (and others) might be surprised to know that DC didn’t even make the top 20 most dangerous cities (per capita) in the US last year which were:

1. New Orleans
2. Camden, N.J.
3. Detroit
4. St. Louis, Mo.
5. Oakland, Calif.
6. Flint, Mich.
7. Gary, Ind.
8. Birmingham, Ala.
9. Richmond, Calif.
10. North Charleston, S.C.
11. Cleveland
12. Baltimore
13. Miami Gardens
14. Memphis, Tenn.
15. Youngstown, Ohio
16. Atlanta
17. Compton, Calif.
18. Orlando
19. Little Rock, Ark.
20. Minneapolis

(per the Congressional Quarterly crime stats analysis released this year)

People…we’re behind MINNEAPOLIS, for pete’s sake.

And on 19 July, the WaPo reported that violent crime in DC is down significantly thus far this year. (web link omitted)

This is not to say we live in Shangri-La. Any crime is too much. But people shouldn’t let the blogsphere overwhelm the facts.

I still don’t know if there really WAS a stabbing in Meridian Hill Park. I’m not doubting it, but are any further details out about this?

Meanwhile, when I was watching the news, I heard about two people shot outside a Chuck E. Cheese this weekend, (A Chuck E. Cheese! Is no place safe?) one of whom was an innocent bystander. Now that’s scary. But I’ll probably continue visiting Silver Spring.

DC is no crime-free paradise. There is FAR more work to be done. But I do think there is a human tendency, quite understandably, to amplify reports of crime that are close to where we are. I know I don’t care as much about crime in Miami as I did when I lived there.

But perception is important. It doesn’t matter where DC really ranks on any list; if people don’t FEEL safe, that’s a big problem.

I’m stuck on the “college” comment… My partner and I do not have college degrees and we are doing well living in the city. We grew up in the suburbs and know crime happens everywhere.

Why aren’t we discussing what we can do to prevent crime and help our neighbors?

My sister lives in rural KS at the moment and she doesn’t have a college degree. She can’t find a job that pays her enough to live. I have to give her money every month so she can eat.

I couldn’t get a job in that town with a graduate degree. I keep trying to get her to move here so she can at least bartend somewhere and make a decent amount of money. She is having a hard time leaving because of the memories from the town we grew up in. Our parents are gone so that town and the house she lives in is all we have left of them. She is only 26 so I don’t blame her for trying to hold onto them a little longer. If I could actually make a living there I would probably do the same thing.

My point in that is that it isn’t always as simple as “just move to a place that is cheaper or move to a place where you can make more money.”

Washington, DC is not as crime ridden as it is reputed to be. The reason it seems so much “worse” is that its “peer cities” are places like SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Portland– places where young professionals migrate to.

DC’s crime profile puts in in a category of places like Cleveland and Baltimore, and Bufflo– the sort of places that people leave in favor of more vibrant cities. The city simply attracts people expecting a place more like Boston or Seattle, and that’s why you have a lot of complaints about crime. It’s not that DC is much worse than other cities of similar size. It’s that the professionals who move here are comparing DC with their other viable options, all of which are safer cities.

I hate these statistics. They really mean nothing. My guess is that if you took 600,000 people from anywhere and put them in an urban setting and ran multiple simulations, crime rates/100,000 would vary drastically with every simulation. in 100 years none of these statistics will matter and we’ll all be dead, so go volunteer or something and try to improve someone’s life.

So much of this violent crime is relationship based. While muggings and “the dead innocent bystander” are certainly part of urban life, systemic violence really only affects those who are associated with potentially violent situations. Neener seems to think that living in DC is the geographical equivalent of living with an abusive spouse; he anonymously rails against it when he can but, day to day, he silently soldiers on, biting his lip, hiding the black eye. Be strong, Neener. Be strong.

For the rest of you, assuming you aren’t dealing drugs, turning tricks, getting drunk and punching “innocent bystanders,” running guns or illegal immigrants, you should be fine. really, the odds of you getting randomly stabbed, shot, or raped are very small, so relax and enjoy the fact that you live in a city and not a flyover (where, I assure you, all these problems exist too)

I don’t “feel” safe in rural North Carolina, where Neener wants all the under-educated people to go live.
——–

ha! I don’t “want” “all” people to do anything other than to work for themselves and not ask me to solve their problems via a handout or worse. This woman lives with her mother, is borrowing the car from an elderly neighbor, parking the car in the garage of a house under construction, left her kids with a sister, you know kind of a leech. As I said she’s a story in herself.

I had a friend who grew up in the projects in Newark. His father was a Wall St bathroom attendant and street preacher. After he got his master’s degree he convinced his father to move to North Carolina where he went from living in projects and working as a bathroom attendant(!) to owning a church and store. There are simply some areas where poor people can (or rather could during economic boom times) thrive and areas like DC or Manhattan where they can’t. I am pretty sure that my friend paid for all of it, house, store and church and the whole thing was affordable. Try buying a house, store and church in DC for your parents.

The reality is that a million dollar townhouse in DC and a million dollar house in McLean both cost $1 million. It’s not like living in DC is cheaper than the suburbs like it once was.

I never imagined that so many PoP readers wouldn’t know what “per capita” means. All crime stats are per capita so the size of the city or suburban town is irrelevant. Crime stats are incredibly useful in all kinds of ways. Without them, we wouldn’t know that DC is in fact getting safer.

And living in one place for a long period of time does NOT give a person insight into what other cities are like. Quite the opposite.

And we still have no info on whether or not this alleged stabbing even took place. Given that it appears in the news absolutely nowhere, I think it didn’t happen at all.

Maybe PoP could hold back on some of these “I heard a helicopter…” and “I heard thirdhand that….” stories until there is concrete evidence of an incident. Posting without any real facts just inflames readers and perpetuates the perception that our streets are dangerous.

Also, what I find problematic about comparing NY to Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland is the monetary outlay to expose oneself to a level of per capita crime. Which is to say that a neighbor paid $1.05 million for his house and it’s a nice house, but there’s a drug dealer next door. The drug dealer’s parents own a house worth, at worst, $800k. That basically means they aren’t in the hood and in a wealthy neighborhood. So when someone spends $1.05 million on a 4000 sq ft house then are they getting $262 per sq ft worth of safety compared to someone buying a 2000 sq ft house in Cleveland for $11,000 or $5.50 per sq ft. The reality is that no one thinks about these kinds of real world economic calculations until one is living in the real world combining housing costs, real estate, commute, crime, home repairs, use of the space due to crime and safety concerns, etc. The reality is that to find a comparable house in Montgomery County I will likely pay less than what I will sell my house for without the crime. So the economic trade off is (crime+ difference in housing costs) = commute.

“You’ve said before that you live north of the Petworth metro up by Taylor. There’s no way anything there on your block went for 7 figures.”

I live in Mt Pleasant.

“Neener, your understanding of the economic situation in this town is stunningly ignorant. I don’t know what you do for a living, but it obviously doesn’t involve contact with anyone other than people like yourself. The metro area has a huge middle class that owns houses in the inexpensive homes in PG County and the other multitudes of less expensive suburbs that you’ve apparently never seen or heard of because you’ve never been someplace that isn’t accessible by a metro line you feel “safe” using.”

I grew up in the area and I have no idea what you’re talking about or how it relates to what I said. I rarely ride metro. How does inexpensive housing in PG help someone who wants to live in DC?

“DC isn’t really a high-pressure, cutthroat city that requires multitudes of high-priced degrees to even think about living in. It’s simply that way for those who have a certain set of geographical and lifestyle requirements. In short, if you are a cutthroat person with lots of money, then DC is a cutthroat place. If you aren’t, it isn’t.”

I cannot even believe you wrote that. Poverty isn’t cutthroat? The homeless are living the Life of Riley lazing around the sidewalks? If poverty isn’t cutthroat then who was asking me for money?

The reason no one here will ever change my mind is because I have the facts of the situation and so many people who question the facts are off in la-la land.

DC is a city and cities have crime what were you expecting Neener? And since you have been around so long, you can’t tell me that the crime situation was better in 1996 because from what I have seen in statistics and anecdotally, it has gotten much better since 1996.
————

I was expecting that DC crime was based in poverty and that by improving poverty situations and neighborhoods, cleaning up the neighborhoods and volunteering for local school and related neighborhood improvement projects over a 15 year period that life would get better. I believed that residents could change a neighborhood by planting flowers and picking up trash. I also never understood how much crime occurred and went unreported. For me it’s gotten worse and there are real reasons why.

Generally, from what MPD and the Council have told me it’s worked out this way:

There were areas where there was a LOT of non-violent crime and a lot of it went under-reported. Those areas cleaned up during the boom, gentrification, etc. However there were criminals and crews on those blocks who were kept in check by other crews. The Euclid St crew is one of these. The removal of two or three surrounding crews allowed the Euclid St crew to grow much larger in power. The police harassment of their home base moved them to new territory. So suddenly you can see new, angrier drug dealers in a new location causing totally new violence.

I think we can all agree that the total elimination of drug dealing in DC is impossible. However what would happen if a 50 year old drug dealer who did everything inside his house and didn’t allow riffraff to buy from him moved out and angry gun-carrying 21 year olds stood out in front of his house while the new owners did nothing? Would drug dealing stop? No. Would the intimidation level be entirely different? yes! See how statistics might be interpreted?

Then look at the obvious- TIME, the 4th dimension- I was not street hassled when I was a young buck who could take them, but 15 years later I’m hassled on the street. Regardless of what kind of quality of life there was in the 1990s, people didn’t get in my face.

I didn’t want to hang out at a dirty old park, so I didn’t care if someone got stabbed there. Now I do. I didn’t really care about the parts of the schools I couldn’t see (I always volunteered to do external painting and clean-up), now I do. I didn’t care if guys cussed me out as I walked past them because I knew I was better than them, now I’m sick of it.

I used to believe that my focus in life created my reality. Several shootings later I realize that what I believe in my heart has nothing to do with the level of crime in my neighborhood. I can have a wonderful night and be woken up with a police helicopter flying right over my house. Crime level affects me whether I pay attention or I don’t. There is no “blog effect” in the arc of history- crime will find you over time.

But most importantly, if I saw someone arrested once or getting in a gang fight once, it’s a fluke. Getting arrested twice or getting in a fight twice and I roll my eyes. Getting arrested a third time and getting into a fight a third time and I send an email to Jim Graham. Now I’m looking at the same exact neighbor getting arrested for the 8th time and many of those times I didn’t know about until I looked on the DC Court website.

This is why my length of time in DC matters. I’m seeing one or two guys arrested for the 8th time and the prosecutor not following through. Very different than if I just moved here and I see a guy arrested once and gets off once.

If you don’t get it, that’s fine, but don’t try to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

In defense of my “scummy” comment. I recently attended BBQs in the suburbs in areas more racially diverse than DC where houses cost less. I never met anyone’s cousin who filled up “plates” to take home, leaving the rest of us with no food at all. I never met someone’s cousin’s kid who fought or hit little kids. I never met someone’s cousin who hit on underage girls. I never met someone’s cousin who tried to whip out a joint. I never met someone’s cousin who got drunk and disorderly.

The reality is that we DC residents have accepted petty criminal behavior for too long and we don’t need to and other jurisdictions arrest people before they get on to stabbing.

Has anyone verified what exactly happened in Meridian Hill Park on Saturday?

I have just confirmed that there was a stabbing. I will provide more details as soon as they become available this evening.

Neener~

You sound clinically depressed. Your problems are much bigger than PoP & DC.

I live in the n’hood too and get frustrated, but I wanted to be closer to work. So there ARE some aspects of city life I have to get used too. Are there aspects that I think are unacceptable…yes. But in order to get through the day I have to work on the things I can change. I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to “set up shop” here. If you know that, YOU need to work on yourself and get out.

FTR~ I am from NC. Your anecdote is….well, let’s just say it’s just an anecdote. Someone who is struggling here will struggle even more in a place with no support.

wow

Does anyone know what happened last night / this morning at Meridian Hill Park? There are a bunch of police cars parked up in the main area, with crime scene tape roping it off…