Could Marion Berry Smoke this Truth?: As the Black Population of Washington D.C. Plummets, Civilization Returns

 “There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.”

Sorry Buffalo Springfield, it’s quite clear what’s happening.

Quite clear.

Will it be necessary when blacks are less than 10 percent of the population of D.C.?

With the removal of the black population from Washington D.C.,  - the racial population responsible for the crime, misery and blight found in the city - avenues and streets where vice flourished and commerce hid have been replaced with Caucasian Urban Renewal [Best Restaurants in Washington, D.C.'s 14th Street Corridor: A stretch of 14th St. N.W. is packed with trendy new restaurants and bars, Wall Street Journal, 8-30-13].

What was life like in D.C. just under 25 short years ago?

1989 [Battling for Customers : Crack Wars Leave D.C. Under Siege, Washington Post, March 26, 1989]:

New Murder CapitalAn anguished District of Columbia is America's newly crowned murder capital. Its homicide rate has more than doubled in less than 15 months. By Friday there had been 120 killings already this year in a city of only 650,000. 

An estimated 60% of the murders were drug related. "To suggest that the city is under siege is not an accurate reading," said H. H. Brookins, bishop of the district's African Methodist Episcopal churches, who came here last year after serving as AME bishop in Los Angeles. "Certain pockets, yes, but not all over." 

But among many blacks, who make up 70% of the district's population, and particularly among those who live, work or travel through the afflicted neighborhoods, an intense, hopeless kind of hand-wringing is taking place.  

Wrenching ReminderMore than anywhere else, Washington is a wrenching reminder that homicide is the nation's leading cause of death for black males between 15 and 34. Last year 90% of the victims and 80% of the suspects in Washington's murders were black, and one-fifth of the suspects were 18 or 19. 

Last November, after 19-year-old Vondalia Robinson was shot to death by cross fire between rival drug dealers outside a popular nightclub in a dangerous part of town, a local gospel station broadcast her funeral to try to stir citizen outrage."What can we do?" asked the station's commentator, broadcasting live from the funeral home. 

"What can we do?"Life now has disintegrated into "total chaos, a hopelessness that pervades every aspect of life," said Cathy Hughes, owner of another local radio station. "It means living in hell. The killings are taking place in the ghetto now. But the way the drugs were able to escape from ghettoes, so will the killing." 

What if “drugs” weren’t the problem? Flash-forward five years.

1994 [Washington Is No Longer U.S. Murder Capital, Washington Post, 12-31-1994]:

The number of people slain in the District of Columbia dropped 11% this year, the largest reduction in homicides since the mid-1980s, when the widespread advent of crack unleashed a seemingly unrelenting tide of violence in the eastern half of the city. 

As of Friday, 414 people had been slain in the city in 1994, down from the 467 homicides that occurred in 1993. The year ended with 780 nonfatal shootings, a reduction of 14% from the previous year. Overall reported crime dropped 8% in the district.

More than 90% of the homicides continue to involve young black men and teen-agers as victims and killers. Again, the vast majority of the year's homicides--82%--were committed with firearms. In most cases, the victim and killer were associates, and in many cases had one time been friends.

Four years later, and the trend remained entrenched.

1998 [Dubious Progress in a Deadly District, Washington Post, April 19, 1998]:

"The police department's performance in fighting homicide has been so bad for so long that it invites lawlessness," said Joseph E. diGenova, whose five-year tenure as U.S. attorney for the District ended in 1988. 

From 1987 through 1997, among cities of more than 400,000 population, Washington had the highest homicide rate in the United States. 

And black males stood squarely in the killing zone: Of the city's 4,390 homicide victims in those 11 years, 87 percent were African American men. A black male in Washington who turned 18 in 1989 had a 1 in 24 chance of being slain by 1995, the most extreme ratio in the nation, according to a National Institute of Justice study. 

"The police department's performance in fighting homicide has been so bad for so long that it invites lawlessness," said Joseph E. diGenova, whose five-year tenure as U.S. attorney for the District ended in 1988. 

From 1987 through 1997, among cities of more than 400,000 population, Washington had the highest homicide rate in the United States. 

And black males stood squarely in the killing zone: Of the city's 4,390 homicide victims in those 11 years, 87 percent were African American men. A black male in Washington who turned 18 in 1989 had a 1 in 24 chance of being slain by 1995, the most extreme ratio in the nation, according to a National Institute of Justice study.

What happens when you point out the obvious correlation of crime and race in Washington D.C., especially in an area that has remained (Hunter S. Thompson wondered if Georgetown would surrender to the black menace in 1972) solidly white throughout decades of intense blackness in other parts of the city?

Well, residents of white Georgetown would ‘wince’ at such a suggestion.

Not needed in majority-white areas of the city...

2006 [Police Chief Declares D.C. Crime Emergency, Washington Post, July 12, 2006]

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey reacted yesterday to a recent surge in homicides by declaring a "crime emergency," a move that gives him the freedom to quickly adjust officers' schedules and restrict their days off. 

Thirteen people have been killed since July 1 in the District, and police are being pressured to take action by residents at community meetings and vigils to honor the dead. The victims included a popular store owner slain at closing time, a community activist killed in a park and a British citizen whose throat was slit in Georgetown. 

The declaration came on the same day that Ramsey transferred a police official who was accused of making a racially insensitive remark at a community meeting Monday night in Georgetown. Ramsey temporarily reassigned Inspector Andy Solberg, who urged residents to report suspicious activity and said, "This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown." 

Police have linked robbery and homicide in the slaying early Sunday of Alan Senitt, 27, a British citizen who was caught by surprise while walking a friend home along a tree-lined street in Georgetown. Senitt's throat was slashed and his friend was nearly raped, police said. Four suspects are in custody -- including a woman who allegedly drove the getaway car and a 15-year-old who authorities want to prosecute as an adult. Senitt had been working in Washington with a political action committee set up for former Virginia governor Mark R. Warner (D). 

Two of the suspects in Senitt's killing -- Christopher Piper, 25, and Jeffrey Rice, 22 -- had criminal records. Piper was paroled this year after a prison term for armed robbery and a drug charge. Rice was released in May after serving time for a drug offense and probation violation. Authorities said the two are suspects in at least two robberies that took place in Georgetown in the weeks before Senitt's attack. 

About 400 people crowded into a church in Georgetown on Monday night to discuss the Senitt killing. Solberg, the commander of the 2nd Police District, was addressing that forum when he made his remarks about race. Senitt was white, and the suspects in the case are black. 

"They were black," Solberg said. "This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life." 

Bill Starrells, a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission from Georgetown who was at the meeting, said he "winced" when he heard the comment.  

"Obviously it was out of place," Starrells said. "It was out of character for him. It was an unfortunate comment." 

“Out of character.”

From an evolutionary perspective, Starrells is mouthing the correct philosophy in Black-Run America (BRA), but such a flippant attitude to the reality of black crime won’t provide immunity from being the victim of black crime.

Yet it remains persistent in Washington D.C., even as CUR sweeps aside the rubble found in vacant lots, replacing it with overpriced restaurants and streets no longer abandoned after 6 p.m.

2013 [In D.C., bullets leave another child fatherless: David Robinson tried to escape the violence all around him. Instead he was killed four months before the birth of his son, Washington Post, 9-15-13]:

In 2012, more than 90 percent of the dead were African Americans and nearly seven in 10 were younger than 35. The city’s homicide rate has gone way down – the annual body count dropped from a record high of 482 in 1991 to a half-century low of 88 last year – but the casualties don’t change. Like David, many of the fallen loitered in the danger zone, in the vicinity of the killers and the killed, always in the shadows of trouble. 

Victims who aren’t perceived as innocent tend to draw scant public notice or sympathy, and the shooting of David Robinson appalled the civic conscience only briefly, owing to the dismal particulars of the crime: He had died in a gunfight after being robbed of his new Nike sneakers. 

“The circumstances are not only tragic, they are incredibly disquieting,” Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said hours after the slaying as he appeared at a previously scheduled church vigil against violence.”A life for a pair of Nike tennis shoes? C’mon, ladies and gentlemen! It’s time for us to be able to end this tragic violence in our society.”

No, the circumstances are not tragic.

The tragedy is the story of Inspector Andy Solberg, who in merely mentioning the racial element of crime in Washington D.C caused white people to ‘wince’.

Still, the chords of Buffalo Springfield’s song echo throughout a D.C. undergoing CUR, providing an uncomfortable question that will need answering at some point soon.

R-A-C-E. 

Four letters that, when combined, explain everything.

Take away the 'r' and the 'e' and add a 'g' and 't', well, you then understand why for decades Washington D.C. was the murder capital of America, and why today it's on the verge of an unprecedented comeback.