DC Crime 2 -Lesson of Seth Rich

Seth Rich was murdered in July 2016 in DC Ward 5. His assailants did not take his wallet and valuables, leading to speculation that it was a planned murder of a leaker of embarrassing emails from the DNC. It generated a great deal of what turned out to be unsupported speculation and litigation. The police said it was a botched robbery which was also not entirely believable.

He had defensive wounds which, to my way of thinking, made both the planned hit and botched robbery scenarios unlikely. The killer(s) had a gun. The most efficient way to do a street armed robbery is to make the gun visible to eliminate resistance (and I say that as a former DC resident and armed robbery victim and attempted robbery victim). Nor would a planned execution involve preliminary fisticuffs. The evidence suggests to me that it was a spontaneous attempted beatdown of a white man walking at night. He was shot in the back while grappling with one of his assailants as the attack escalated and the thugs left quickly after the gunshots.

It is highly likely that it was just that pointless, vicious and mindless.

It was also typical of a lot of DC crime in that attempts to make a violent crime make sense will fail or lead to wrong scenarios that entail a search for reason, discernible motive or net gain when the real cause was blindly stupid, hateful emotions in the moment by persons with significantly defective self-control mechanisms.

The enormous array of programs and paid professionals in DC dedicated to diversion, rehabilitation, etc., seems a bit like a massive failure to learn the main message of Clockwork Orange—there are spiritual and psychological states so predisposed to wrongful acts that counseling and environmental adjustments will have no significant effect. Don't deny second chances to youths but don't believe in magical sociological methods either.

People speak of Ward 5 as “gentrified.” Not quite. Georgetown is gentrified. In the 1960s, during the Kennedy Administration, it became more fashionable. The black neighborhoods (Epiphany parish on the east side of Georgetown was originally a Josephite mission for outreach to blacks) were bought out, as were the tougher waterfront and M Street areas which had some no-go zones for Georgetown students in the 1940s. The white working class was later driven out of neighboring Burlieth. My teammates at the old Jelleff Boys Club 60 years ago were typically sons of carpenters and plumbers. All that area is completely upscale now.

Gentrification in DC has a more complex history. Consider the following data:

White flight was initially sparked by school desegregation, crime and riots as entire neighborhoods changed rapidly. But often overlooked is the huge drop in the black population after the peak in 1970. That is the departure of a large share of the black middle class, mostly to neighboring Prince George's County, Maryland. The city was then comprised of the upscale white Ward 3 west of Rock Creek, the adjacent black “gold coast” in Wards 3 and 4, and many neighborhoods in decline, with only a few pockets of the remaining black middle class. Rich and poor, but many fewer in the middle. It also meant that it was now cheaper and easier to acquire and clear properties in edge areas. The convention center and new arena were built over the remnants of properties still empty from the fires and destruction of the 1968 riots. Southwest DC has been almost entirely rebuilt. And there has been a steady push north from downtown into neighborhoods that were once poor and underpopulated.

Some gentrification (like in Adams Morgan) followed the SF Castro Street model in which entrepreneurial homosexual men buy properties, displace low-income renters, and create an attractive ambience. These eventually get largely displaced in turn by hip heterosexual couples.

Ward 5 has new buildings with an influx of young whites but is not close to being fully gentrified. I used to be more familiar with that part of town a long time ago. A few blocks over the line in Ward 2, in the late 1960s, my father used to sometimes take me with him on weekends to a Catholic mission and clubhouse about four blocks from riot ground zero. Among his other volunteer undertakings, my dad arranged games with JV and middle school teams for the club basketball team. He said his players achieved a kind of living refutation of the notion of innate black basketball superiority. He did other outings with those kids. Some of those kids ended up badly.

An old friend grew up in that neighborhood. A former juvenile delinquent, he was later a speech writer for Carter, a frequent op-ed contributor in the Washington Star and a lecturer in Russian history at American University. He was a childhood friend of locally famous gadfly Petey Green, also a young troublemaker. It was said that sometimes the police would arrest young Petey just to bring him to the station to sit him on the front desk, gather and listen to his unique monologues. As an adult, he had a show on a public TV station where he would rail against the “GS minus ones” who ran the city government.

That mission house was not far from where Jesse Jackson used to own a house. In a candid moment he recalled walking to that house at night and hearing footsteps behind him. He turned and saw it was a white guy and felt relieved. That realization shocked him, he said, both because it meant that he had internalized a negative perception and also because it was not groundless.

I suppose gentrification will reduce (or maybe just move) the physical environments that produce sociopathic behavior, but reclaiming and rebuilding people - and not just property - ought to be a goal. I wish I knew how to do that. Magical thinking about "root causes" probably just makes it harder to recognize these kinds of acts for what they are.

Thank you for staying with this ramble till the end. Cheers.