THE OTHER WASHINGTON SLUMS, CRIME AND FEAR IN THE CAPITOL’S SHADOW

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32562, 23 March 1971, Page 12

THE OTHER WASHINGTON SLUMS, CRIME AND FEAR IN THE CAPITOL’S SHADOW

(From

LILLIAN ROXON

1 in New York)

(Reprinted by arrangement from the "Sydney Morning Herald").

It has always been my complaint that what New York gives with one hand it irrevocably snatches away with the other. But the reverse is also true : that if it exacts a price for everything it gives you, it also has a way of charmingly compensating you for some of its more terrible shortcomings. That, of course, is why we all stick it out here.

Now Washington, where more power is concentrated per square foot than anywhere else on this globe, is far too dignified and full of itself to go in for this sort of social and emotional barter. You are either there because you have an important reason for being there, and that in itself is enough; or you are there because that" is where you happen to live. If so, heaven help you.

Everything in Washington that works is designed for the convenience of the former, not the latter. There are the great monuments to remind you that this is the capital of the most powerful nation in the world. Great buildings to accommodate the machinery that runs it. Great blocks to house the humans that run the machinery. And then, nothing. Chaos. Burnt-out stores. Neatly levelled-off parking lots where charred ruins once stood. Slums so shabby and so miserable that the dome of the Capitol or the needle of the Washington Monument looks nothing short of obscene beside them. If it were not for the Government industry, Washington would be one of the most pitifully run-down, grii y towns in the United States. In a way it is, anyway. It is just that the distinguished or casual visitor never gets to see behind the facade. The first time I visited Washington I stayed in the Watergate, a huge luxury apartment complex where tenants include the AttorneyGeneral, John Mitchell, and several other members of the Nixon Cabinet, a good smattering of senators and Congressmen, and all kinds of other people with important reasons for being in town. Watergate is self-con-tained, constantly policed and very elegant. It is completely unreal. So is Georgeton, another bastion of the rich and important, where the houses and shops are so cutely Georgian and diminutive you are convinced you have strayed into Disneyland. Most white Washingtonians (do they really call themselves that?) get by in this big, black slum because they live in Watergate or places like it, commute in from nearby Virginia and Maryland, or hide out in Georgian Disneyland pretending to themselves they are living graciously. Lately though, especially in the last two years, reality has been oozing into their sheltered little worlds like mud seeping through a wall. I sit in the Georgeton Inn, just around the comer from where Jacqueline Onassis used to live when she was a senator’s wife and a President’s widow. I have colour television, a four-poster bed, a white telephone in the bathroom and the choice of four restaurants from which to order room service. (The Four Georges each room named after a different king and with cuisine to match.)

Then I read the headlines. Man Is Knifed During Holdup Try. Housebreakers Shoot 80-year-old Man. Two Men Treated For Stab Wounds. Aide to Ted Kennedy Raped Near Capitol, Man Wounded By Shotgun Bandit. I know this story has been written before, that the stabbings and muggings of Washington are old hat. What is not old hat is that they are still going on, that they are doubling and tripling, that the most powerful ruler civilisation has ever known can send men to the moon but is incapable of halting the tide of crime in his own backyard. The lists the Washington “Post” has taken to printing each day of robberies, thefts and assaults are marked only by their sameness: This is a hold-up, I want your money , , . was robbed of his wallet and personal papers . . . produced a gun and demanded money . . . give me all the money and no-one will get hurt ... he said that he wanted money ... all right, give us the money, I know you have it . . . two men who snatched her purse . . . robbed of his wallet by two men . . . give me your money or else I’ll shoot your little boy in the head . . . robbed at gunpoint by two men . . . put a gun at her head and demanded money . . . I atn not even half-way through, and that was the list for one day alone.

Only the other day some big-wig or other warned, very pompously, that Washington was on the way to becoming a “wild” city on whose streets no-one could walk except in safe “island” areas. On the way to becoming?. It is already. I know it’s possible to walk its streets and not be robbed at gunpoint; but the odds are not good enough for most people. The fear is a bigger problem than the crime, say city officials, in an attempt to tone the whole thing down. Such toning-down does not work. Instilling fear into a city’s people is as big a crime as snatching their purses. What has been done to reduce the fear? Well, the Metropolitan Police Department' has started to teach bank tellers and store cashiers what to do during hold-ups—be calm. They also urge citizens to call police if a stranger is seen Infering

Not exactly dynamic solutions. The best way to avoid being mugged or hurt in Washington is to stay home, which more and more locals are doing at great cost to the city’s restaurants and clubs and movie theatres. Another good way is to cop out completely and move to the suburbs. Those who can afford to have done so. That means most whites and affluent blacks. Washington is now a town filled with poor blacks, who on the whole steal more from each other than from the 25 per cent of relatively affluent whites who stay in town because they have to. Atlanta and Newark, other predominantly black cities, have not had the problems of Washington for one very simple reason: they have been able to elect officials congressmen, senators, mayors and so on—who are paying at least lip service to the problems of the black majority. Washington, because it is America’s capital and Federal territory, does not elect representatives to the country’s governing bodies, and even its mayor is not elected but appointed by the President Getting funds to start the much-needed Washington subway or to rebuild the s! ms burnt out in the Martin Luther King riots three years ago has been the least of the concerns of the people whose job it is to take care of Washington, people who also do not have to answer to Washington voters. On the vhole, Washington is run exactly as if it were a city filled with important white men busy governing a nation. The fact that Washington will go to the polls for the first time in 100 years to elect a representative delegate to Congress is almost completely negated by the fact that that delegate will not have a vote. So the black schools continue to be under-financed and sub-standard, just like the black housing. Acres of burnt-out slums have not been rebuilt except for the Robert Kennedy playground, which is the smallest sop to conscience I have ever seen. They say the rising crime rate has a lot to do with the increase in drugs in the ghetto areas. When the ghetto areas just about are the city, drugs become an

even bigger problem than in, say, New York, where the problem, heaven knows, is big enough. And on top of all this, except for those who flirt with power and wear it, breathe it and eat it, and are therefore wholly sustained by it, Washington is very dull.

New York’s adrenalin and high energy will always make you glad you visited it, even if your purse is snatched. The only high Washington offers you is the high of history. For some visitors it is worth it. For most others, and the tourist figures reflect this in a town that needs that business, it is a trip they can do without.

Washington is disintegrating, not because it is predominantly black, but because no-one is giving those predominant blacks a social and economic chance.