Communities grapple with rise in violence

Josh Belzman Writer and producer • Profile • E-mail

Chris Crowder knew violence. The loud, brash man who advocated for black causes in the nation’s capital was put in a wheelchair by a bullet.

The 1990 attack that paralyzed him below the waist was a case of mistaken identity, Crowder would say, a crime by street punks who mistook the Howard University law student for an undercover cop.

Unable to walk, and unwilling to remain silent, the stocky man with close-cropped hair became a full-time gadfly in Washington. He got into fiery debates at City Council meetings and called for slavery reparations. In recent months he sparred with Bill Cosby over challenges facing blacks and filed to run for mayor as a member of the Green Party.

Then Crowder, 44, became a statistic, another victim in what has been an especially bloody summer in Washington and many other cities across the country.

‘A perfect storm’
Crowder’s was one of more than a dozen murders in Washington in early July. Police blotters in Seattle, Indianapolis, Minneapolis and other cities paint similarly violent pictures: After a decade of decline, violent crime is on the rise across the United States. Assault rose 2 percent between 2004 and 2005, according to the FBI’s latest report of national crime trends. Murder and robbery are up nearly 5 percent — the sharpest increase since 1991. Medium-sized cities of between 50,000 and 500,000 have been the bloodiest.

So many police chiefs have expressed concern that the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank, held a national crime summit on Aug. 30. Mayors and law enforcement officials from 45 cities — both those hit with a rise in violence and those, like Dallas and Chicago, that have so far escaped an increase — arrived seeking answers to a troubling riddle.

“We’ve been watching crime decrease or flatten out for the last 10 years,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the forum. “But last year we started hearing from police chiefs (about increasing violence) ... enough of them, that we started to wonder, what’s going on?"

It’s no fluke, Wexler and other law enforcement experts say.

“There should be a real sense of concern,” said Seattle police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, whose department is participating in the summit. “This is a wake-up call.”

Robert Sorbo / Reuters file An investigator photographs evidence in front of the Jewish Federation building where a gunman shot and killed one woman and wounded five others in Seattle on July 28. Gun-related crime in the city has increased 37 percent since 2004.

A string of recent murders in Seattle — including a deadly attack at a Jewish charity and a double homicide along a hiking trail — drew national headlines, but it’s street crime that Kerlikowske is most concerned about. Gun-related crime rose 25 percent last year in Seattle, and it's up another 12 percent this year.

Kerlikowske said violent crime is up nationwide because of renewed gang rivalries, population growth, budget cuts, pressure on local cops to work homeland security — his force alone has assigned 19 officers to anti-terrorism work — and the cyclical nature of crime.

It’s “a perfect storm,” he said.

A ‘crime emergency’
The storm is battering Washington, a city that gained a reputation as the nation’s murder capital a decade ago. That was during the height of the crack epidemic, when predominately black neighborhoods like the one where Crowder lived became killing fields.

Things had begun to change in recent years. Neighborhoods banded together. Shaw once was a thriving community of Victorian rowhouses that produced Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington but fell into decay after the 1968 riots. Development and gentrification that began in the 1980s brought new tensions to Shaw, but up until this summer, crime had dropped.

Now Washington is cowering under a new wave of late-night robberies and carjackings blamed mostly on youths armed with knives and guns. Last month in upscale Georgetown, assailants attacked a British man who had been volunteering for former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, slashing the man’s throat and attempting to rape his female companion. Last week, a 17-year-old girl was gunned down in southeast Washington. In her dying moments, she managed to save her infant godson by sliding him under a parked car.

The attacks have incensed local officials, as well as those who have eulogized the dead.

“Who would kill a man in a wheelchair?” asks Dr. Melvin G. Brown, the pastor who led Crowder’s funeral after he was killed July 8 near the apartment he shared with his mother in northwest Washington’s Shaw neighborhood. Crowder was shot seven times, his body found on the ground beside his wheelchair. Another man was critically wounded. There have been no arrests in the case.

“(Crowder) was a community activist,” Brown said. “Unlike many of these victims, he was actually involved” in trying to change things.

Outrage over the attacks prompted police Chief Charles Ramsey to sign an emergency order extending officers’ shifts, putting 300 more police on patrol and placing dozens of surveillance cameras in D.C. neighborhoods. Mayor Anthony Williams bumped the city’s youth curfew from midnight to 10 p.m. and extended it to every day of the week through September.

Since the emergency measures took effect six weeks ago, the city has reported a 29 percent increase in youth arrests over the same period last year and a 13 percent drop in violent crime.

Brown, who’s led northwest Washington’s Greater New Hope Baptist Church for the last 20 years, applauds the crackdown but thinks the city reacted only when violence crossed over into a prosperous area like Georgetown and claimed the life of a white man.

“All of a sudden they declared a crime emergency,” he said. “A lot of African American people — members of the church and throughout the city — are concerned about ‘zip code racism’ and how (police) approach crime and violence.”

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