Criminal justice reform or gentrified urban neighborhoods

By Hunter Wallace

Disingenous White Liberals who live near Capitol Hill in Washington, DC are facing a terrible dilemma: go along with the fashionable trend of supporting the #BlackLivesMatter movement, demonizing cops, and supporting criminal justice reform, or oppose it because releasing more violent black criminals into the streets turns them loose into their own gentrified urban neighborhoods:

“That may be what’s happening on the national level but locally, it gets complicated, especially in more liberal neighborhoods.

A 22.3 percent increase in violent crime over the past year on Capitol Hill is driving the debate. From mid-October 2013 to mid-October 2014, there were 298 such crimes: robberies, assaults with a deadly weapon, rape and murder. For the same period in 2014-2015, there were 364 such crimes, according to the Metropolitan District Police.

Conservatives believe increased violence stems from the reluctance of police officers to aggressively enforce the law in the wake of the rioting in Ferguson, Mo. in August, 2014 and in Baltimore last April after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray — the so-called “Ferguson effect.”

Police officers and other public officials in the District of Columbia also point to a new volatile class of synthetic street drugs: “They can go from half asleep to combative and raging,” Holly O’Byrne, a paramedic, told The Washington Post, noting that “The drug is a game changer.”

The results of the spike in crime are reverberating across the Capitol Hill neighborhood. On the local listserv, newhilleast – an email network of residents who live within a few blocks of the United States Capitol — a single subject line crops up repeatedly: “DC’s Reign Of Terror.”

A small sampling of recent day-in, day-out neighborhood crime highlighted on the listserv includes a midafternoon sexual assault on a mother by an intruder who “violently beat and assaulted her while she worked from home”; a flash mob attack on a local 7-Eleven; and the videotaped beating of a 69-year-old man by a 19-year-old at a subway exit.

Business leaders have been holding meetings this week with police and city officials in an attempt to deal with small crowds gathering daily at the corner of Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a fashionable commercial area of upscale bars and restaurants. Capitolhillcorner.org, a local news blog, reported that the business owners’ concerns include “vagrancy, trash, drug activity, public urination and public sex acts.” …

The escalation in crime has revealed a split within the generally progressive community of Capitol Hill.”

Remember Kevin Sutherland? The Democratic policy wonk who opposed “institutional racism” and supported Freddie Gray, but who was slashed to death on the Washington Metro on July 4th? Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how gentrified neighborhoods, which were made possible by “mass incarceration,” cope with the Ferguson effect and the consequences of criminal justice reform.

These White liberals probably read in The New York Times that flash mobs and Knockout King are rightwing myths. They’re outside walking their little dog on the sidewalk, pondering the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates article in The Atlantic, and then WHAM, reality hits them!