Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, July 12 —
In the wake of a recent surge[2]
of violent crime here, local officials tried on Wednesday to calm fears that
the city was returning to the crime-infested[3]
days of the early 90’s when the nation’s capital was also called the murder
capital of the country.
Since July 1,
14 people have been killed, including a Briton[4]
whose throat was slit early Sunday morning while he was walking in Georgetown,
one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
In the past
month, robberies have increased 18 percent and assaults with a deadly weapon 14
percent, according to the police.
“It’s far too early to
draw any broad conclusions,” Mayor Anthony A. Williams said
Wednesday in response to e-mail questions about the trend. “The 1990’s were a
violent period for a lot of American cities. Just as New York, Los Angeles and
other large cities have seen a decline in murders in this decade, so has Washington, D.C.”
On Tuesday, the city’s police
chief, Charles H. Ramsey, declared a citywide “crime
emergency,” a move that enables him to shift officers’ schedules quickly
and reassign them to high-crime areas.
“Our officers are
already working very hard to combat crime,” Chief Ramsey said. “But we need to
be even more flexible and more agile[5]
in how we respond to crime problems.”
The city has
had 96 killings this year, only 2 more than by the same time last year. But recent crimes have
drawn public attention in part because they hit neighborhoods unaccustomed[6]
to such violence.
The latest case to grab[7]
headlines was the fatal[8]
stabbing[9]
of Alan Senitt, 27, a volunteer in the potential Democratic presidential
campaign of Mark R. Warner, a former
governor of Virginia. Mr. Senitt was escorting a female friend home in
Georgetown around 2 a.m. Sunday after dinner and
a movie when three men wielding[10]
a gun and a knife approached them, the police said. One man dragged the woman
down a driveway and tried to rape her while the others stabbed Mr. Senitt and
slit his throat, they said. The woman escaped uninjured[11].
“It’s the brutality of
it that has rattled[12]
our neighborhood and the whole city,” said Bill Starrells, a member of the
Advisory Neighborhood Commission from Georgetown who has lived in the
neighborhood since 1989. “Mr. Senitt doesn’t seem to have been resisting until the men started attempting to sexually assault his
friend. This crime would have been as shocking in an upscale[13]
area like Georgetown as it would be in less-advantaged parts of the city.”
Four people have been
taken into custody[14],
including a woman who the police say drove the getaway car[15]
and a 15-year-old boy who prosecutors say will be tried as an adult.
Among the other people
killed in recent weeks have been a popular store owner who was slain[16]
at closing time in a busy commercial neighborhood and a community activist
killed near the Washington Convention Center.
On Tuesday night, just
hours after Mr. Ramsey declared the crime emergency, two groups of tourists
were robbed at gunpoint[17]
on the Mall, the city’s tourism hub and an area that until recently had a
reputation as being safe from crime.
At a news conference on
Wednesday Mr. Ramsey said there had been a sharp rise in violent crimes carried
out by people outside their own neighborhoods.
No longer are criminals
staying within a mile of their homes when they set out for a night of robbery
and burglary, he said. Now there is a “trend where more and more people are
being arrested in neighborhoods they do not live in.”
Chuck Wexler, the
executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a crime-related
research organization here, said he did not think the jump in homicides[18]
should be cause for alarm.
“In 1990, when Washington, D.C., was called the murder capital
of the country, the city had 472 homicides, while last year there were
around 200,” Mr. Wexler said. “Expectations from the public and police
departments are much higher now, so reactions are stronger to sudden increases,
but I think this has to be kept in perspective.”
Mr. Ramsey’s efforts to
calm the city, whose population is 60 percent
African-American, were complicated this week after a police inspector,
Andy Solberg, was accused of making a racially insensitive[19]
remark at a community meeting to discuss the Georgetown killing. The official, who has been reassigned[20],
is white, and the people under arrest in the case are black.
Urging[21]
residents in the mostly white, upscale Georgetown area to report suspicious[22]
activity, Inspector Solberg said, “This is not a racial thing to say that black
people are unusual[23]
in Georgetown.”
Correction:
July 14, 2006
An article yesterday
about a recent surge in violent crime in Washington included an incorrect
paraphrase of an observation by Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police
Executive Research Forum. Mr. Wexler said the current increase should be placed
in the broader context of a large drop in homicides
since the 1990’s. He did not say the increase was no cause for alarm.