Mount Pleasant DC Forum

[jack]

[ClancyMac]

I absolutely would agree that is an acceptable solution.
Just as I would hope that if your hypothesis is correct and the drunks shifted elsewhere---then the affected residential area would lobby for its own singles ban. The point being that there is nothing wrong with discouraging unacceptable public behavior, and if it has to be done one neighborhood at a time until such behavior is being discouraged city-wide, then so be it.

What I think is irresponsible is our ANC telling the residents who live closest to Lamont Park that "Gee, you should have to put up with people passing out in your front yard and peeing against the side of your house until such time as the District manages to realize a utopian and comprehensive strategy that will alleviate public alcohol abuse forever."


Providing wet shelters and treatment programs is only one part of addressing a more complicated problem. Those are the "carrots", while making it increasingly more inconvenient to engage in public drunkenness and associated unpleasant behaviors such as public urination are the "sticks". They are not mutually exclusive.

[jack]

[New Neighbor]

[Jeanne]

Neighbors' Consejo is fully certified by the D.C. Department of Health as a substance abuse treatment facility. They are the only intensive, all-day program in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area that specializes in homeless Latino(a) with co-occurring mental illness and chronic substance abuse problems.

[godzilla]

Jack,

Would you oppose Neighborhood Watch programs or a plan to assist in the provision of burglar alarms to Mt. Pleasant residences because such efforts would push burglars and other miscreants to other neighborhoods?

Using the standard you propose would mean giving up on efforts to do many things that would improve the neighborhood "because it would just push the problems elsewhere."

[Andrei]

[DCCharles]

[New Neighbor]

[DCCharles]

[New Neighbor]

[godzilla]

Or perhaps DCCharles and Jack also would answer my question above: Would Neighborhood Watch programs be objectionable because, if successful, they would force criminals to ply their craft in other neighborhoods?

[ClancyMac]

Or, to augment Godzilla's inquiry---

The Mt.P residents of Monroe and Newton streets frequently battle the on-going open-air drug market. If they are successful in their efforts to make life so tough for the dealers that the dealers shift their operations to the southern end if Mt.P near our house, would I think that the residents of Newton and Monroe are selfish and unneighborly?

Not at all. I would applaud their success and ask them to share their insights and methods for ridding their streets of the dealers, so the southern end of Mt.P could do likewise.

[DCCharles]

I think decently thought-out anti-crime measures tend to depress crime rates generally not just move the criminals among the various neighborhoods, and of course support them. Although a significant amount of crime is committed by professionals or the truly desperate, a lot of it is opportunity-based - someone wants to get stoned, someone sees a camera in a car, whatever -- and if the opportunity disappears or the opportunity cost (potential for imprisonment or embarrassment) rises, the crimes don't get committed. It's not a zero sum game; we all benefit.

But consider a (not so) hypothetical: you read in the paper that the DC cops have mounted a massive anti-prostitute/drug dealer/whatever operation, but succeeds only in pushing the miscreants a couple of blocks away. You'd think to yourself "another moronic waste of money and effort" and, if you had a friend in the new ground zero you'd get an earful of complaints about the cops and the neighbors.

While I'd take a certain selfish joy in having drug dealers chased away from my block, as a resident not just of Mt. Pleasant but of Washington, D.C. I am not pleased with that type of approach, since nothing has been solved and my friends and co-workers outside of Mt. Pleasant are now at greater risk. There are whole exurban (and some urban) housing developments wrapped in walls and gates and populated by people who want to enjoy the good things life in America offers without helping to ameliorate the challenges we face as a nation or a community -- even to the extent of paying the taxes needed attack these problems. I find that mindset loathsome and -- that word again -- reprehensible, and no more attractive in liberal-ish urban dwellers than conservative suburbanites.

It should also be noted that simply chasing a problem away almost ensures that it will find its way back.

And so, if an orange hat patrol or singles ban is actually addressing a problem, it has my full support. If it is simply chasing it away, I find it irrelevant, or worse. To paraphrase FDR, We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad urban planning.

And, as for my New Neighbor who, with this comment

[New Neighbor]

If our neighbors were helpless to address any problems that exist or come to exist in their neighborhood I would feel a heightened obligation. They are not.

Inherent in the "but we are just forcing this upon others" is a belief that the others cannot fend for themselves. I do not subscribe to that paternalistic view.