Washington DC official have decided that when a group of young males get together and commit violent acts, they are not "gangs" they will now be called "crews".
By early Saturday three more had been shot, one was wounded right around the block from the police station.
The Police Chief, Cathy L. Lanier, immediately put together three emergency conference calls with the department's command staff to discuss stepping up patrols to get a handle on the situation.
According to Groomes, "We're not just going to be using every officer to patrol, like we've already been doing. We're going to start pulling from administrative positions, too."
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) later joined Lanier at a news conference to decry the latest violence and promise additional action. The city has had 50 homicides this year, the same number as at this point last year. But in recent weeks, violence has been increasing, with 18 killings in April alone. Officials are concerned that violence, which typically spikes in late summer, is escalating early.
Particularly "frustrating," Groomes said, was the fact that one of the homicides -- a 2 a.m. shooting at Morse Street and Montello Avenue NE -- was the eighth slaying in the city's 5th Police District since April 14 and took place despite a major recent effort to boost police presence in the area.
Bottom line here is Washington DC has a gang problem as well as a violence problem and the two are intimately connected.
Today I see a report showing what part of the Anti-gang effort will entail: Call them "crews".
When is a gang not a gang? When it's based in the District
Police officials in other districts have weighed in, describing this move as counterproductive and Captain Charles Bloom of the Philadelphia Police Department, who has some experience in gang related crime as well the steps needed to help reduce it, says, "The very first step in dealing with gangs is denial. Then you get to the point that you can't deny it any more."
The reason that D.C. police, lawmakers and community activists want to make the distinction is because they believe that these "crews" are not gangs because their members are mostly teens who band together for personal protection.
They go on to say that this distinguishes them from conventional gangs, which are created for a criminal enterprise such as drug dealing.
The problem with that line of logic is when Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier acknowledges that the "crews" appear to be connected to some of the 10 homicides in the past two weeks which includes the four this past weekend and they are "connected to hundreds of shots fired and a dozen shootings late last year in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Northwest."
To some, those "crews" are still sounding an awful lot like "gangs".
One police official from the San Francisco Police Department, a Sgt. Wilfred Williams, puts it very clearly when he asserts, "In our law, we don't have crews. We prosecute gangs, not crews."
Chicago has just suffered their own horrible weekend a little over a week ago, which Lew waters reported on here at Digital Journal.com, and Officer Marcel Bright of the Chicago Police Department, when asked about the term "crew" said, "The term 'crews' has never come up here."
Spokespeople for Baltimore and Los Angeles police departments made similar statements.
As of yesterday, DC had 50 homicides, just one fewer than at the same time last year, according to numbers from the department.
Seventeen of the killings have been in the Fifth District, which is double the number at this time last year.
It does bear noting that Washington DC and Chicago which have both suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in the month of April, have very strict gun bans in their cities although DC's has suffered setbacks as the Supreme Court seems set to declare their blanket handgun ban unconstitutional.
A gang is a gang and calling it a "crew" will not change the fat that when someone gets shot by said gang, it hurts or kills them. Death is death either way and one has to wonder if the DC has a new word for murder somewhere in the repertoire.
(H/T Michelle Malkin)
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