Eknoor Kaur, 3, stands with her father Guramril
Singh during a candlelight… (Jason DeCrow/AP )
Back in the crack-infused 1980s, young men with
guns and drugs ruled the single block of Hanover
Place NW. People who lived in the two-story
rowhouses one mile north of the Capitol fell asleep
year round to the sounds of the Fourth of July, a
pop-pop-pop that they hoped was firecrackers. It
rarely was.
But after two decades of consistent
and dramatic declines in homicides and gun violence
in Washington and many other major cities, Hanover
Place is mostly quiet these days. Complaints to the
police tend to be more about kids shooting craps on
the sidewalk than about drug dealers shooting at
rival street crews. On a block where houses were
unloaded for as little as $30,000 in the 1990s, the
most recent sales have ranged from $278,000 to
$425,000.
As welcome as such changes have been,
explanations for the nation’s plummeting homicide
rate remain elusive, stymieing economists,
criminologists, police, politicians and
demographers. Have new police strategies made a
difference, or have demographic shifts and
population migrations steered the change? Could the
reasons be as simple as putting more bad guys behind
bars, or does credit go to changes made a generation
ago, such as taking the lead out of gasoline or
legalizing abortion?
Mass shootings such as last year’s searing
incidents in
Newtown, Conn., and
Aurora, Colo., have put gun and
mental-health policies back atop the nation’s
agenda. But the narrative of crime over the past
two decades runs in a different direction. Law
and order has largely vanished as a political
issue — in 1994, more than half of Americans
called crime the nation’s most important
problem; by
2012, only 2 percent of those surveyed by
Gallup said so.
Today, there are more theories
about why crime has fallen than there were
slayings on Hanover Place in the past decade.
The drop in deaths from firearms and in
slayings overall — over the past two decades,
homicide declined by 80 percent in the District
and overall crime fell by 75 percent in New York
City — has come even as the economy has tanked,
the number of guns owned by Americans has
soared and the number of young people in the
prime crime demographic has peaked.
“There has been a real drop in crime, and
anyone living in New York or Washington sees
it,” said David Greenberg, a New York University
sociologist who has tested theories for the
decline. “In principle, we should be able to
explain it, but it’s easier to determine what
factors don’t contribute than it is to say what
does.”
On Hanover Place, residents are quick to name
two reasons the nights when they heard as many
as 75 gunshots are a fading memory: The cast of
characters has changed, and the police cleaned
out the place.
Starting in the mid-’80s, D.C. police focused on the
open-air drug market Hanover Place had become.
Emptying onto North Capitol Street, Hanover could
not have been better designed for drug dealing and
the gun violence it spawns. Entered through a warren
of alleys, the street gave bad guys any number of
quick exit routes — through back yards, walkways and
unmarked alleys — but prevented police in squad cars
from seeing anything from adjacent streets.
“It’s
not an easy place to get into, even though it’s the
perfect walk-in spot for drug sales,” said Andy
Solberg, police commander for the 5th District,
which includes Hanover Place.
So when the city got serious about taking down
dealers such as drug kingpin
Cornell Jones, whose family home was on the
block, they set up a trailer on a vacant lot and
created at least the illusion that the cops were
always there, always watching. Then the D.C.
government, using federal, local and private money,
worked with a community development corporation to
buy vacant properties, build houses, and sell them
at cost to people with jobs and clean records.
The result is a very different population, said
Joyce Robinson-Paul, a 32-year resident and the
advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area.
“The new neighbors are very quiet,” she said. But
“the real crime problem didn’t leave until many of
the dealers were arrested and went to jail.”
The explanations
Since Solberg became a police officer 25 years
ago, the prison population has tripled nationally,
the result of anti-drug and anti-gun enforcement
efforts, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the
widespread elimination of parole. Most studies agree
that increases in incarceration explain part of the
decline in violent crime, though Solberg and many
criminologists say the warehousing of young men
convicted of nonviolent crimes causes as many social
problems as it solves.
Police and residents also credit community
policing, in which officers meet with local
activists and keep close tabs on known bad guys. But
studies of police tactics such as New York’s
stop-and-frisk campaign or the “broken windows”
emphasis on enforcing minor infractions conclude
that those measures have little impact on crime.
