crime

I'm at work, and I started reading about crime in Washington, DC. It's strange that I live so close to DC yet I feel like don't really know anything about it. I read the DCist pretty much every day when I wake up, and it gives me the scoop about what's happening here in my favorite city. I find plenty of entertaining articles for me to read about mayoral campaigns, the best restaurants in town, and the pandas at the National Zoo, but I only just realized that there's a disparity in the information that I'm presented every day.

This morning, amid articles discussing a film project happening at St. Elizabeth's Hospital and photos of the construction occurring on 17th Street, there was one article in particular that caught my eye. A 27 year old man was shot Sunday night outside of the Capitol Heights Metro Station. And it wasn't even the fact that I live a mere 3 Metro stops away from Capitol Heights that caught my attention. Nor was it the fact that I have friends who grew up and live in Capitol Heights. But rather, it was the startling, sobering fact that this was the third homicide to occur within a quarter mile radius outside of the Capitol Heights Metro Station in the past two weeks.

That fact was absolutely baffling and I was left stunned.

So I started reading about crime in DC and swimming through all sorts of statistics. I found out that while crime in DC has been slowly decreasing since the early 1990s, its crime rate remains four times the national average. One statistic that made me sad was:

In 2008, 42 crimes in the District were characterized as hate crimes; over 70% of the reports classified as hate crimes were a result of a bias against the victim's perceived sexual orientation.^[13] Those findings continue the trend from previous years, although the total number of hate crimes is down from 57 in 2006,^[14] and 48 in 2005.^[15]

--From Wikipedia: Crime in Washington DC

So right now, I'm just kind of chewing on this information and thinking lots of thoughts like:
Where's the DCist of the poor?
Who's blogging about the problems in SE?
Who's doing something about the crime that's happening?
What's the source of all of these problems?
What can I do?
Does education play a role in the decisions that people make to commit crime?
If we improved education in DC would these problems get better?
What if I joined Teach for America?
There has to be a way to fix this.

[steven]