The terrifying Saturday night sound of multiple gunshots outside Nationals Park echoed the sounds that rang out Friday night in the Congress Heights neighborhood of Southeast Washington.
Police said the shots in Congress Heights came from a gray, four-door sedan passing the commercial corner of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X avenues.
The Nationals Park incident, police said, was gunfire from at least one car toward another on South Capitol Street; they recovered one of the vehicles believed involved and are seeking another.
Drive-by shootings, the common denominator.
As with the fans at Nationals Park, 6-year-old Nyiah Courtney and her mother, father and sister in Congress Heights were also engaged in an innocent pursuit. They were walking to their nearby home.
The stadium, after all the commotion, was emptied safely. A ballpark fan and two others, however, were injured by gunfire.
But Nyiah and her mother didn’t make it home. Nor will Nyiah ever go home again. She was killed, and her mother, struck and wounded, was still hospitalized as of Saturday night.
It will come as cold comfort for visitors to this city, our shrines or Nationals Park, or to residents in neighborhoods traumatized by fear of crime, that the mayor has come up with a scheme that she calls “a first-of-its-kind in the nation to deploy a public health approach to gun violence prevention.”
It’s called “Building Blocks DC,” and the program is supposed to be aimed where gun violence is regularly happening.
Bowser’s anti-crime team has come up with, as her news release states, “a place-based, data-driven approach that uses comprehensive block-by-block analysis to pinpoint specific areas where gun violence is regularly happening.” Building Blocks DC uses 2020 crime data, she says. And she’s launching her program in several blocks east of the Anacostia River in Ward 8.
It is not immediately clear just where South Capitol Street and Nationals Park fit in Bowser’s place-based anti-violence approach. Nor how other crime-battered District neighborhoods can attract the kind of attention Bowser is offering Historic Anacostia.
It may be a hard political truth for City Hall to swallow, but gun violence, as Nationals Park showed the whole country, is affecting a wider swath of the nation’s capital than just the eastern side of the Anacostia.
To say, as Bowser touts, her program will concentrate on “151 blocks that represent nearly 2% of all blocks in the District, but were the site of 41% of all gunshot-related crimes” leaves residents in the rest of the city’s blocks — especially those in wards 1, 4, 5 and 7, located in Northwest and Northeast D.C. — to cry out, “What about us?”
Just before noon Sunday, a news release from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence arrived with a national read on our problem.
“For decades, Southeast DC — like many impacted communities — has experienced chronic disinvestment without adequate resources. What has been flowing into the community is guns, which is a lethal combination: lack of resources and unregulated access to firearms,” the group said.
And — ready, aim, fire — from the coalition: “One place where the gunfire was ignored was a mile and a half north of Nationals Park — at the United States Capitol where Republican Senators are blocking life-saving measures while the gun violence epidemic rages. The inaction of Republicans has created this nightmarish reality; a nation flush with guns and few resources directed to the communities who need it most. These very lawmakers who shamelessly block life-saving policies to address gun violence are the same ones politically blaming others for the carnage their neglect has created.”
The coalition’s call for legislative action is as urgent as it is familiar.
Around the same time Sunday morning, I received another message from a longtime, hands-on community activist who was en route to a shooting scene. It read: “Meeting [location deleted] but these Youngins [sic] running wild and … police hands are tied and parents are horrible. I ride around and see all these young children with nothing positive to do.”
“Public health crisis” — “unregulated access to firearms”— “children with nothing positive to do.” Debate your heads off.
People are running scared, and the bodies keep falling. We have, however you cut it, an emergency on our hands.
Read more:
"Opinion" - Google News
July 19, 2021 at 04:38AM
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Opinion | The emergency on our hands - The Washington Post
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