Murder Capital
Tidwell, Mike
THE LAST WORD Mike Tidwell Murder Capital I work in Washington, D.C., in the 1300 block of Park Road NW, two miles from the White House. From corner to corner, this block is a twenty-four-hour...
...What's happening in Washington will soon happen in most big American cities...
...When I reach the house at 4 p.m., I find the residents coming home from new jobs or sessions with their social workers...
...But the worst streets of Washington, D.C., horrify me too, and they're getting worse...
...The mayor has declared a "crime emergency" and the city council has passed legislation that denies bail to drug dealers and attempts to put a curfew on youths under eighteen...
...At midnight my shift ends and I walk out onto Park Road, which is now bursting with business...
...Now, in an important test case, Bennett and the Washington police will work together to try to end the drug trade in the capital...
...The next morning I'll rise with the rest of Washington and read the latest body count on the front page of The Post: Night of Violence Leaves 4 Dead...
...The transition house is surrounded by crack houses, boarded-up apartment buildings, and the ramshackle tenements of the few fearful residents who haven't left yet...
...As a counselor for the D.C...
...I walk to the bus stop, scarf across my face, averting my eyes and shaking my head when I'm asked to buy drugs...
...Three months ago, a woman was murdered here, shot in the head during a drug dispute...
...At least legalization would shut down the insidious crack houses...
...After they fail—does anyone believe they'll succeed?—we will, I believe, have three choices: accept the drug situation as it is, declare martial law in our inner cities, or legalize drugs...
...On Valentine's Day alone, there were thirteen shootings in the city...
...There have been 176 murders in Washington this year because there is an enormous appetite for drugs in the city...
...I shake my head and keep walking...
...There's no reason to think otherwise...
...People who want to take drugs will take drugs, whether legally or not...
...The police department has deployed 400 new officers made up of desk-job administrators and recruits with less than half their required training...
...Short of assigning a cop to every dealer and user, the "get tough" route will never work...
...The next step, some civic leaders say, will be to call out the National Guard...
...Perhaps William Bennett will declare their cities "drug crime emergency assistance" zones too, and they'll get part of the $5.9 billion Federal drug pie...
...The cops were already coming by Mike Tidwell lives and writes in Washington, D.C...
...Ten minutes later, the market is bustling again...
...Among my responsibilities is to tell the men that drugs are debilitating and that they should avoid them...
...There is a siege mentality here...
...Coalition for the Homeless, I help manage a transition house on Park Road for some of the city's 10,000 homeless people...
...William Bennett, the new Federal drug czar, has said he will declare the District the Federal Government's first "drug crime emergency assistance" zone as part of yet another high-sounding program to clean the streets...
...At night, we lock the front door and listen to the police sirens, the angry drug disputes, the macabre screams, the crackle of gunfire...
...From corner to corner, this block is a twenty-four-hour open-air drug market...
...Men in army coats, collars up, approach me selling crack...
...But a $100 billion-dollar law-enforcement program wouldn't stop what's happening on Park Road and streets like it...
...She was the 101st victim of a District homicide explosion that now stands at 176 for the year, a harrowing 60 per cent increase over the number at this time last year...
...Twelve-year-old boys stand on corners, paid to spot cops...
...Eight years of a law-and-order President, with George Bush coordinating anti-drug efforts and the First Lady telling everyone to say no, didn't reduce that appetite...
...Half have been made homeless by a life-wasting addiction to crack cocaine, a substance almost as abundant here as air...
...about every hour, and they still do...
...This is where the country's rising drug use and attendant law-enforcement reaction are heading-more and more of both, with drugs winning handily...
...it would end the murder and anarchy on streets like Park Road by taking a lucrative market out of the hands of a lawless subculture of profiteers...
...If they take them legally, however, we can catch them on their way out of the drug stores...
...The first two options are unacceptable to me...
...We listen to the sound of a city that has lost control of many of its neighborhoods...
...Washington is just setting the pace...
...From the nation's capital the message goes out: This is the future...
...Drug-related violence is up everywhere...
...I take the bus to work and walk the final three blocks...
...Most of the residents at our facility are black men in their twenties and thirties...
...He has just completed a book about Africa entitled "Paradise of Paradox...
...I pass lawns strewn with debris, walls defaced with graffiti, trash whirling and looping in the wind...
...They'll declare crime emergencies and put desk officers on the street and toy with the idea of imposing curfews and deploying the National Guard...
...With their bullhorns, they order people off the street...
...As for the third, the thought of marijuana and cocaine for sale at corner drug stores horrifies me...
...Critics say the $70 million package falls far short of meeting the city's needs...
...Money saved on law enforcement, moreover, could be channeled to drug education and treatment...
...I work the four-to-midnight shift at the Park Road house...
...And there's no reason to think officials in other cities will react differently...
...They question people outside the crack houses...
...We can counsel them and try to help them without constantly looking over our shoulders and dodging bullets on the streets...
...Since the crime emergency began in Washington, we haven't noticed a sustained increase in police presence on Park Road...
...Cocaine consumption rose four-fold under Ronald Reagan...
...People kill each other with guns on Park Road...
...But when the men leave the house—to go to work, to buy eggs at the store, to attend a counseling session—they have five opportunities to buy crack before they reach the bus stop...
...They make searches and frisk bodies and arrest suspects...
Vol. 53 • July 1989 • No. 7
