Check out my full story over at the Baltimore Brew.

Thanks for reading.

Jason

The storefront memorial to 51-year-old murdered shopkeeper Rufina Hernandez, in front of her shop, La Casa de Morata, on Georgia Avenue, NW.

A neighborhood adapts after shopkeeper is murdered, a local is arrested for the crime, and another resident is killed

The owners of Joy’s Seafood & Carry Out in the 5400 block of Georgia Avenue NW turned off the lights of their restaurant.  The woman surveyed the street as her husband quickly pulled down the metal storefront gate, and the two left for the evening.

A car idled in an alley across the street.  Its lights were turned off as the passenger scanned the block.

It was 6 p.m. on Nov. 16, nine days after 51-year-old shopkeeper Rufina Hernandez was shot to death behind her counter in Brightwood after cooperating fully with two men who entered her store demanding money, according to police.  Area residents were taking extra steps to protect themselves, and trying to comprehend the motivations for a brutal crime that set the neighborhood on edge.

A sidewalk memorial of stuffed animals and flowers marked the darkened storefront of La Casa De Morata where Hernandez worked.  Flyers on storefronts and telephone poles offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of her killers.

Brightwood lies just north of Petworth, with Rock Creek Park on the west side, Takoma Park and Silver Spring to the north, and Georgia avenue acting as an eastern border.   The area lies directly in the middle of the Upper Georgia Avenue Great Streets Redevelopment Plan, a coordinated effort by the DC Office of Planning to encourage commercial development and improved safety along Georgia Avenue.

According to the Metropolitan Police Department’s DC CrimeMap, there have been three murders  in District 4 since Nov. 7, the day Hernandez was killed.  Hernandez’s murder was one of three in the past month for the Fourth District, which recorded 79 violent crimes in the same period.  Nine of those violent crimes occurred within 1500 feet of Hernandez’s block.  The Fourth District has recorded 882 violent crimes in 2009, ranking the district second-lowest in violent crime of the city’s seven police districts.

Despite these numbers, local shopkeepers contended that the threat of violence is a regular part of their jobs.

Gebrehiwot Ayele, 27, has owned the Lucky Corner Market for five months, and has already had a gun pointed in his face once since buying the store.

A reward poster from the Metropolitan Police Department taped to the protective plexiglass booth in the Lucky Corner Market.

He says that he didn’t even hear the shot that killed Hernandez a few doors away from his, and he is now paying closer attention to who enters his shop.

“I work by myself, and I try to know who comes in here after 9 p.m.,” said Ayele.  “I want to know the regulars.”

He said a recent customer from California couldn’t believe that he stands behind a plexiglass barrier at his shop’s counter.

“Over there it is different.  You are allowed to have guns.  Here, they know you aren’t protected.  They even know how long it takes the police to respond.”

Azu Nwaolu has worked on this block for over ten years, and watched the robberies and shootings drive away other shopkeepers during that time.  He has been robbed at gunpoint four times in his tropical food shop.

“This is a very violent neighborhood,” Nwaolu said.  “Very bad drug problems here.”

He said that relying on witnesses to identify criminals was ineffective, because of the threat of retaliation and that many of his fellow business owners were reluctant to appear on camera after the shooting for the same reason.  A few days after Hernandez was killed, Nwaolu bought two new security cameras capable of monitoring the interior and exterior of his shop.

“I need to do something to give police an idea of what happens, if anything does,” he said.

An Arrest, A Press Conference

On Nov. 19 at a press conference in front of Hernandez’ shop, Mayor Adrian Fenty announced that 45-year-old Andres Lopez had been arrested earlier that day and charged with first degree murder in the case.  He was apprehended without incident by the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force in the area of 4th and Kennedy Streets NW – six blocks from the scene of the crime.

http://bubblesoftstore.com

Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier said that Lopez held no fixed address, but had numerous addresses over the past several years “in and around this area.”

Word of the suspect’s connections to the area spread quickly.

“I talked to a Jamaican lady earlier that told me she [Hernandez] used to give him [Lopez] credit when he was short on money,” Nwaolu said.  “The same guy.”

Chief Lanier credited the neighborhood’s willingness to cooperate in making an arrest.

“As we traveled through this neighborhood, all we got from everybody we talked to was what a wonderful person she was, and how well loved she was in this community,” Police Chief Lanier said.

“She was!” one of the gathered onlookers shouted.

“I know she was, and it was really that sentiment that got us here,”  Lanier answered.

“It is probably something that will never be explained, and something that business owners and people that live in this area will be living with for a long time,” Fenty said of the crime.

“Hopefully tonight we offer some solace, some comfort, and maybe a little bit of closure,” he said.

Mayor Adrian Fenty (right) talks with area residents after the press conference announcing an arrest in the Rufina Hernandez case.

According to Dr. Elijah Anderson, professor of sociology at Yale, the measure of closure may be less than city officials might hope.

“The cops come in, they make a statement, and they leave, but that doesn’t win the hearts and minds of people who would do this to you,” Anderson said.

Anderson is the author of “The Code of the Street,” a book that deals with the cycle of disenfranchisement in violent communities, and the coping behaviors adopted by residents.

When you are dealing with a regular threat of violence, reputation management is a critical step in protecting yourself, according to Anderson.

“You have to establish yourself as someone who doesn’t take that stuff,” Anderson said.

Anderson said that violent events like the Hernandez shooting can make residents feel as though the system has turned its back on them.

“When people believe that, they feel responsible for their own safety,” Anderson said.  “That’s why people arm themselves and face each other down.  When civil law is weak, street justice often fills the void.  It’s almost as though the community itself becomes toxic.”

Dr. Jeffrey Ian Ross is an associate professor of the Division of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Forensic Studies at University of Baltimore.  Ross said that for neighborhoods that deal regularly with violent crime, “there has to be something really, really dramatic” to spark long-term community outrage.

Ross cited the 2002 arson murders of the Dawson family in Baltimore as an example of how violence can galvanize a community.  The family of seven died in a fire started by a local drug dealer because of Angela Dawson’s work with police to fight the criminals in the neighborhood.  The family’s burned out home has since been converted to a community center.

“The victim can become something of an icon in the neighborhood,” Ross said.

Another Murder As Neighborhood Moves On

At 12:08 a.m. on Nov. 29, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, MPD received a report of shots fired in the in the 600 block of Longfellow St. NW, a few blocks away from the Hernandez shooting, and where Lopez was arrested. After reporting to the scene, the police learned that 23-year-old Edwin Reyes had been shot in the head.  He died later that morning from his injuries.  The shooting was five blocks from where Rufina Hernandez was killed.  Full size map of shootings and arrests in Hernandez and Reyes cases.

Brightwood was back in the headlines, just as its residents were putting the Hernandez shooting behind them.

On Dec. 13, almost a month after the Hernandez shooting, the storefront memorial had grown in size at La Casa de Morata.

Next door, a reporter was turned away from the barber shop at 5450 Georgia Ave. NW. The man running the shop said that he didn’t want to talk about the shootings, and that he was trying to forget about what had happened.

Across the street and up the hill a block at the Cricket Wireless store, 20 year old Juan Correa worked the counter and contemplated his safety.

“She worked the same shift as me,” Correa said.  “If she got murdered at 8:30 p.m., where were the police?”

Meanwhile, Azu Nwaolu had not yet installed his new security cameras.

The security cameras Azu Nwaolu purchased for his shop after neighboring shopkeeper Rufina Hernandez was murdered.

Nwaolu said he was saving money to afford the DVD recorder needed to store the video for use by police in the event of a robbery.  The total cost of his surveillance equipment was nearly $700.

“We are just keeping an eye on everybody, holding on as much as we can,” Nwaolu said.

Anthony Johnson, 51, stood under the awning at the Simon’s Wok & Grill and watched the rain fall as he waited for a bus.  Johnson works at the Italian Embassy, and has lived in Brightwood for ten years.  He said that his daily routine has been upended since the shooting.

“Her husband knew Italian, and I used to go in there and visit every day after work,” Johnson said.  “All I do now is go to work and come home.  It ain’t the same.”

On Friday I had the chance to sit down to lunch with the Aging Newspapermen’s Club, a group of former Baltimore Sun reporters, rewrite men, and photographers.   The group convenes every Friday at Enrico’s sports bar, at the corner of Pratt and Haven in East Baltimore, to trade war stories, catch up on each other’s latest ventures, and talk an impressive amount of shit.

All in good humor, of course.

I was invited by Rafael Alvarez, a 20 year veteran of the Baltimore Sun’s city desk and a true Baltimore original.  During my visit, Alvarez recounted the time that he and David Simon pulled an epic April Fool’s joke on their faithful rewrite man David Ettlin, who was also at the table in the back room of Enrico’s.

Alvarez and Simon had conspired with the spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department to call Ettlin with a hot story about a former steelworker who stabbed his estranged wife through the heart with his Oral-B 60 toothbrush.  Ettlin breathlessly typed up the story with the phone pressed to his ear as Alvarez and Simon howled in laughter across the newsroom.  Ettlin recalled the details of the gag as if it had been phoned in to him yesterday.

The gang traded gifts for the holidays.  Among them: a framed and remarkably unflattering portrait of Bill Marimow – a former Sun editor whose name didn’t exactly stir feelings of holiday cheer,  a photocopy of an old Baltimore News American cover story featuring the unfortunate (and, many agreed, deliberate) headline typo of “pubic affairs”, and a shrinkwrapped copy of the last edition of The Evening Sun (pictured above).

This story is a bit short, since I opted to spend most of my time listening instead of scribbling notes. Truth is, it was a helluva way for a journalism grad student to spend an afternoon.

Thanks guys.

The Baltimore Sun, the paper of record for Baltimore and the largest newspaper in the state of Maryland, is steadily shrinking.  Multiple rounds of staff cuts have rendered the paper incapable of covering beats it once devoted multiple reporters to.

According to a Sun story by reporter Lorraine Mirabella, the latest cuts occurred in April of 2009, and left the paper with 144 total newsroom staff.  At the height of the paper’s strength, it had employed as many as 500 people to cover Baltimore and its environs.

Last year, the Baltimore Examiner, a free daily that launched in Baltimore in 2006, shut its doors.  The paper’s mission had been to cover a lot of ground with short, quick hitting stories, functioning as almost a localized version of USA Today.  Officials at Clarity Media Group, the Denver based media company that owned the paper, blamed declining advertising revenue and proximity to its sister publication in Washington, DC.

A pool of experienced, unemployed journalists had formed in the city.  Soon, entrepreneurial web sites began popping up, bent on covering stories that local print outlets weren’t able to focus on.

Flexibility and Growing Pains

Stephen Janis is a former city hall reporter for the Examiner, and partnered with a few of his colleagues to form Investigative Voice, a news site devoted to in-depth coverage of issues peculiar to Charm City.

A recent collection of top stories: a story on community activists struggling against prostitution and drug use in Pigtown, a piece on an 81-year-old healthcare advocate being sent to jail for trespassing during a protest, and an insider story on Mayor Sheila Dixon conversing with the attorney prosecuting her on corruption charges during a break in the trial.

“The idea would be to be topical, and not as regionally focused,” Janis said of the site.  “That we would have a certain type of story, and that story could be within the confines of the city.”

According to Janis, the freedom of the web has allowed him to dig deeply into specific conflicts in various neighborhoods, more than the Baltimore Sun is capable of with its thinly stretched staff.

“We just did a series called ‘Dispatches from Brooklyn’, with multiple stories and multimedia, where we get into the neighborhoods, get to know everybody, and find out where the point of conflict is,” Janis said.  “Legacy media can’t interview an average homicide detective or a crack dealer, but it works in our environment.”

There have been disadvantages to being an independent news outlet.  Janis has occasionally encountered what he called “digital segregation” at news events.

“One thing we did is make professional press passes with our logo that identified us,” Janis said.  “You have to act the part and believe in what you’re doing, and you have to use your skills to get people to talk to you.”

The site has been a learning experience for Janis, a veteran investigative reporter, on what readers of local news sites are looking for.

“We realized that the public values really strong watchdog journalism, and doesn’t value just having someone at city council hearings,” Janis said.  “You learn to come up with a mix over time that works.”

Jeff Quinton runs Inside Charm City, recently named “Best News Blog” in the Mobbie Awards, a blog awards contest run by, ironically, the Baltimore Sun.

“I try to post hard news, with some opinion, especially angles of bigger stories that might get missed,” Quinton said.  “I hear a lot of positives.”

Quinton recently started using Google Wave, a new collaborative multimedia communication tool, to cover local news and initiate discussion among readers.

“I’ve also gotten news tips there,” Quinton said.  “Someone posted a statement from Hopkins Hospital that they’d had a settlement with the union of their maintenance workers, before it appeared anywhere else.  I’ve also been using it for reader engagement and town halls.”

Despite its success, Quinton’s blog has ruffled some old media feathers around town.

In April, Quinton said he received an email from a Sun reporter asking him to stop excerpting portions of Sun stories longer than four sentences in his blog posts.  When another blogger at Inside Charm City posted Sun material that exceeded the request a few days later, Quinton received a cease-and-desist letter.  The story was picked up in WIRED Magazine.

Then in November, as Mayor Sheila Dixon’s criminal trial was winding down, Quinton posted a piece critical of Baltimore Sun reporters in their coverage of the trial, saying that they had “dropped the ball” by not tweeting from the courtroom.  Sun reporters fired back, citing a courtroom ban on the use of Twitter and pointing to the rest of their coverage.  Local news site Baltimore Brew chronicled the exchange.  Quinton updated the post to clarify the courtroom ban and downplayed the flare-up.

“It was one of those situations where it was a longer blog post, and not everyone read the entire thing,” Quinton said.  “I tried to let it blow over because generally I have a good relationship with the people I deal with at the Sun.”

Indeed, several Sun reporters that blog on the paper’s web site have linked to Quinton’s posts about problems on the MARC train to DC, or speculation of the Real World television show coming to Baltimore.

Hope for Collaboration?

Dr. Stacy Spaulding is a professor of journalism at Towson University, where she teaches courses on new media.  Before moving to academia, Dr. Spaulding was a reporter for the San Bernardino County Sun in California.  She is the author of New Media Mobtown, a blog on new media trends.

“I think what they’re doing is what alternative media has always done well, and that’s covering news from angles that aren’t being covered,” Spaulding said.  “Having a lot of vigorous, outspoken alternatives is actually quite in keeping with what we’ve known throughout our history.”

Spaulding said that the Sun’s streamlined staff has come at a cost.

“We’ve lost our most experience layer of reporters and editors, which means you’ve got decades and decades of the city and its institutions and its nonprofits and its people that are just gone,” Spaulding said.  “While we have some wonderful, enthusiastic, talented reporters on staff, I just don’t think they can make up for the lost knowledge.

Spaulding has seen the Sun link to several Investigative Voice stories, and is hoping for increased linking between blogs, news sites, and legacy media.

“Despite all this talk of competition, journalists have always collaborated.  We’ve always called the television reporter to tip him off on a story, and gotten tips from their sources too,” Spaulding said.

“You Get What You Pay For”

Scott Peterson is the spokesperson for Mayor Sheila Dixon.  He is responsible for fielding inquiries from the television, radio, print, and now web-based media outlets who want access to the mayor’s office.

Mostly, the web outlets aren’t calling.

“The majority of who contacts me are still the mainstream media,” Peterson said.  “The one exception is Investigative Voice.  [Stephen] Janis is still engaging the media relations office.”

Peterson said, aside from Investigative Voice, mainstream media is still the source of the stories that get the most attention in City Hall.

“These other sites are not breaking news stories,” Peterson said.

Rafael Alvarez spent 20 years on the city desk at the Baltimore Sun, before exiting the newspaper business and moving to Los Angeles to embark on a career writing for television.  His credits include “The Wire”, the crime and political drama set in Baltimore City and created by fellow Sun veteran David Simon.

Alvarez has returned to Baltimore and regularly contributes to Investigative Voice, Baltimore Brew, Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!, and other local sites.

However, Alvarez remains skeptical of claims that blogs and other types of news sites can replace a fully staffed city newspaper.

“The old patient isn’t dead, and the new baby isn’t really totally born yet,” Alvarez said.  “I think we’re figuring it out as we go along.”

Alvarez cited a story he worked on for Investigative Voice on stem cell research as an example of how newspaper reporters possessed a level of curiosity that “bordered on OCD.”

He was covering a conference of stem cell researchers in Baltimore, and he asked a doctor from one of the labs what the best tool for getting the real story of stem cell research out to the public had been.

“Without missing a beat, she said ‘newspaper reporters,” Alvarez said.  “She said if she had the budget, she would hire them. They became almost as knowledgeable as the doctorate fellows in the lab, because they were writing about it every day.”

According to Alvarez, the written word has never been worth less than it is now, and he questioned the quality of news content available for free online.

“If there’s one thing that’s true of America, it’s that you get what you pay for,” Alvarez said.  “There were families who drank Coke, and there were families who drank Shasta.”

“Who the hell wants to drink Shasta?  There’s a reason it cost 19 cents a can,” Alvarez said.

A fragment of the broadcast antenna from the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The wall of newspaper headlines from the day after the attacks can be seen in the background.

For Betsy Northrop, the prospect of forgetting about what happened during the 9/11 attacks makes about as much sense as the attacks themselves.

Her 28-year-old daughter lived in New York during the attacks, and had to walk barefoot across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of Manhattan, on her way to taking a train home to Williamsburg, Va.

Northrop, 56, couldn’t sleep for a month.

“For people to not remember this, or to think that it can’t happen again, I just don’t understand it,” Northrop said through tears during a Dec. 5 visit to the Newseum’s 9/11 Gallery.

Four days earlier, President Obama pledged a new plan for the conflict in Afghanistan that includes an increase in troop deployment. The goal of the plan is to root out al-Qaida, the group responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Northrop was optimistic about the new strategy.

“We either had to get out or rededicate in Afghanistan to succeed,” she said. “Now that we’ve done that, we have a better chance.”

Beth Borko expressed reservations about President Obama’s invocation of the attacks during his speech this week.

“It was pretty clear that it was geared to bring those feelings back,” Borko said. “For people who thought that 9/11 was directly related to the war, I think it worked, but for others I think it was frustrating.”

Randy Mcfayden is a 46-year-old private equity consultant, and his wife went to grade school with victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City. He said that he had just read former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” which gave an insider’s account of the war on terror. Mcfayden questioned the priorities of the past presidential administration in handling the dual conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We went into Iraq too quickly,” he said. “We should have taken care of Afghanistan first.”

A box of tissues greets visitors to the 9/11 Gallery Exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

The 9/11 Gallery at the Newseum uses a variety of formats to show how journalists covered the events that day, including a wall of newspapers from around the world and a jarring short film titled “Running Towards Danger,” with behind the scenes footage and commentary from journalists who covered the attacks.

Mike Mcnamara was a fourth grade teacher on the day of the 9/11 attacks.  He was critical of the decision by some newspapers to run photos of office workers jumping from the windows of the World Trade Center.

“All of my fourth graders were talking about it, and they were confused,” he said. “I don’t think it belonged in the coverage.”

Cory Watson, 24, works as a guard at the Newseum. He watches quiet, often crying patrons make their way through the exhibit every day. He acknowledged the emotional power of the exhibit, but for Watson, the wall of newspaper headlines held the most impact because it demonstrated the country’s freedom of speech.

“Everybody’s got something to say,” he said. “Every paper tells its own first amendment story.”

This is long overdue.  I hope that the blog doesn’t get bogged down too much into national stories.  Despite recent progress in the past decade, DC is still one of the most violent cities in the country and most local residents don’t have a clear picture of true crime narratives happening here.  This blog would be well served to dig deep locally and carve out a niche in local crime stories, instead of getting too distracted by high-profile national stories that every other outlet in the country will be sending correspondents to cover (for example, stories like the DC sniper or the Holocaust Museum shooter).  While the Post is a national outlet and needs to cover national stories, it tends to devote inordinate resources to these blockbuster cases while the day-to-day crimes happening every day and impacting DC residents in a very direct way are generally ignored.

The Crime Scene arrives just in time.  Jim Brady’s local news project looms on the horizon in 2010, and the Post seems to be beefing up its local coverage in preparation for a showdown.  It will be fascinating to watch how these reporters use this new space to capture the rougher side of what goes on in the District, and if they are able to lay a solid claim to this beat before the competition shows up.

A makeshift memorial on O St. NW, in DC.

Back in August, Aaron Brazell over at Technosailor did some enterprising digging at Everyblock, a hyperlocal news and statistics site recently acquired by MSNBC.  In his post, he reported that if you chop DC up into its quadrants, the number of crimes reported, according to Everyblock is highest in NW DC, a neighborhood that is known to be far safer and more well-to-do than any other part of the city.

Since August, the numbers haven’t really changed.  NW has more than double the number of crimes reported in the past month at 1,428 than NE DC, the next closest quadrant, with 701.

According to Everyblock, they are getting their numbers from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), which hosts a searchable crime statistics database on its site.  While the MPD’s data isn’t searchable by DC quadrant, it is searchable by Ward.  However, Ward borders weave in and out of the quadrants, making the assembly of current crime statistics by quadrant very difficult.

Northwest DC is certainly the largest quadrant in geographic size and population, however there are entire swaths of NW for which crime simply is not an issue, and crime is a far larger problem in Southeast or Northeast DC than it is in Northwest.  So why the lower reported crime numbers in those areas?

At this point, the common problem of police distrust in those neighborhoods has to be a contributing factor.  I’d be interested to explore the relationship that Southeast DC residents have with the MPD, and what that relationship has in common with relations between residents of East Baltimore and the BCPD.

The other problem here is the relative indifference that residents of Northwest DC have for the rest of the city.  It starts with the dearth of coverage given to these neighborhoods, specifically by the Washington Post.  I’ve lived in DC since April and have scoured the Post for coverage in Northeast and Southeast DC to get a feel for the other side of the city, and my resulting knowledge of the problems these areas face is nebulous at best.  For people in Northwest DC, Anacostia might as well be another country.

Part of what I’ll be working on in my MA program will try to clarify the crime narratives of areas outside of Northwest DC.  Stay tuned.

Last year I interviewed Page Croyder, a former Assistant State’s Attorney in Baltimore.  During that interview, she credited Rod Rosenstein with many recent successes in crippling gangs both locally and nationwide.  Croyder indicated that much of the local success that the Baltimore area has seen is a result of his office.  In the WYPR interview, Rosenstein demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the gang structure and how to attack it in a way that does lasting damage to the organization.  He also comments on how a good partnership with law enforcement is crucial to success, a philosophy that Jessamy would do well to embrace.

Jessamy expressed reservations about the current law, and how it makes it difficult to determine who is in a gang, and who is not, in a court of law.  She recommended an enhanced punishment for those who recruit young people into gangs, and also mentioned a drafting committee that has gotten recommendations from police, prosecutors across the state that is looking at a new law.  Harford County public defender Kelly Casper expressed concern that an enhanced anti-gang statute would encroach on civil liberties.  Jessamy was firm in her recommendations, and, perhaps for the first time ever, I agreed wholeheartedly with her assessment.  Kelly Casper is the Harford County public defender.  I have to ask – what on earth does she know about the realities of fighting a losing battle against gangs in Baltimore City?

In Baltimore, there seems to be more attention paid to violent street crime, or crimes related to gangs and the drug trade. Crime coverage seems to be more unified, with an eye toward emerging trends and how crime is rising and falling in various neighborhoods.  Because of this comprehensive coverage, I now know that the Black Guerilla Family is a strong Baltimore gang, and that the Tree Top Pirus are a local sect of the national Bloods gang.  I know that there is an old rivalry between the drug crews of the east and west sides of town, with the occasional New York interloper thrown in, who could face violent interference from either faction.  I know some of the worst drug corners, and places where violent crime occasionally spills over into more well-to-do neighborhoods.  This is especially remarkable when you consider how dramatically the Baltimore Sun newsroom has been downsized by buyouts and staff cuts, and that the Sun is the only daily in town. 

In DC, crime is essentially non-existent in many NW neighborhoods, and coverage of the violence taking place in other neighborhoods must be sought out and found.  Most crime coverage is being treated one case at a time by, for example, the Washington Post.  I have no feel for the highest crime areas, aside from a neighborhood called Trinidad where there were nationally publicized police blockades last year due to an outbreak of shootings.  There’s almost no linear coverage of gang crime or the drug trade, though both are problems here.  The most I can find are one-offs of shootings.  The Post seems to be more focused on white-collar crime.  This city is pathologically obsessed with national politics, and that obsession hampers the public’s knowledge of what is going on in its own backyard. 

The new local news venture owned by Politico and helmed by former Washington Post editor Jim Brady would be well advised to take a close look at the metro crime beat when the new site launches.  It’s being neglected and many stories are going unreported.