This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: DC Government

  • Safety vs. Civil Rights

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    Memorial Day weekend there were 9 shootings in Washington, DC’s “Trinidad” neighborhood of the Northeast quadrant of the city in the 5th District. The police solution to the problem was to cordon off the neighborhood with police barricades this last weekend. The Washington Post explains;

    D.C. police stepped up efforts last night to curb violence in the hard-pressed Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast Washington, choking off access to several streets there to force drivers to pass through the new anti-crime checkpoint, Chief Cathy L. Lanier said.

    The Montello Avenue checkpoint, where police demanded that motorists account for their presence in the neighborhood, was set up Saturday night for the first time, but some drivers circumvented it by using nearby streets to enter Trinidad, Lanier said.

    She said police were “going to be narrowing the funnel a little bit” by guiding the flow of traffic toward Montello Avenue. However, it appeared that the number of officers assigned last night was insufficient to fully implement the plan, and the strategy took on many aspects of a work in progress.

    “We’re looking at different ways to control traffic patterns,” Cmdr. Melvin Scott said.

    The police questioned people for their purpose of being in the neighborhood and turned back those who couldn’t verify their reason for entering the neighborhood;

    On Saturday, those who told police that they were going to visit a relative were turned away if they did not provide the relative’s phone number so officers could verify their claim, Hughes said.

    Leaders at the American Civil Liberties Union, who have criticized Lanier’s effort as heavy-handed, were in Trinidad on Saturday night. They questioned the statistics provided by police and said they estimated that 90 percent of cars were turned away.

    “Our analysis is different from theirs,” said Johnny Barnes, executive director of the ACLU’s Washington office. “We think most people were turned away.”

    He said it became a joke among his workers when they saw police stop an ice cream truck. It was eventually let through.

    So to what extent should we allow the government to go to protect us? Certainly they have the responsibility to control access to our international borders, but controlling travel within our own communities? The District of Columbia has been cavalier about rescinding the Second Amendment for it’s citizens so I guess they figure they can just revoke Fourth Amendment protections, too.

    On it’s face, the Metro police have overstepped their bounds, but Trinidad residents have refused to cooperate with the police investigation of the murders as well as countless property crimes in the neighborhood. Yet they demand that the police solve the crimes and prevent further crimes – but no one wants to help.

    There were even protesters at the police barricades according to the Post;

    About 15 demonstrators decried the checkpoints, saying they violate the residents’ rights. “Trinidad, yes; Baghdad, no!” they yelled. “Don’t turn Trinidad into Baghdad!”

    Well, it’s hardly Baghdad, but it’s un-American, nonetheless, on both sides. The police shouldn’t be restricting travel of citizens, but those citizens have a responsibility to police their own neighborhood instead of sitting on their behinds hoping someone else will do something to protect them. This sort of dependency on the government to protect us, without us lifting a finger to help ourselves is what got people killed in the New Orleans hurricane a few years back.

    Crossposted at Eagles Up! Talon

  • Incompetent boobery

    Harriet Walters

    Last year I wrote about master criminal Harriet Walters who was able to embezzle from the Washington, DC government between $50 and $80 million beginning sometimes in the 1990s (here, here, here, and here). Well, today the Washington Post reports that the District government helped Ms. Walters.

    Following Harriette Walters’ input, officials left her small unit out of the new software system, making it easier for her to escape detection as she allegedly produced fake checks that prosecutors say amounted to $50 million.

    Directors in the scandal-plagued tax department now want to scrap the $135 million system rather than try to upgrade it to make it more secure. The chief financial officer’s technology manager says the system, installed between 2000 and 2004, is too outdated and clumsy to be worth fixing.

    Before her arrest in November, Walters was a 26-year tax employee known among her colleagues as a problem solver with a knack for finding solutions by using the department’s antiquated and balky computers or finding a way around them. Although she did not have final say over the new Accenture Integrated Tax System, Walters contributed to the decision that her unit, which handled real estate tax refunds, be left out of it.

    Here’s an example of transaction that she was able to circumvent security procedures to accomplish;

    The charges in the Wright case include creating a false $40,000 refund in March 2007. Even though the check had been cashed, Wright used the Integrated Tax System to issue a replacement check on the grounds that the first check had been lost, according to the charges. Then she issued a second replacement check. Then she issued a third replacement check. At that time, the Integrated Tax System added $33.03 of interest to the check to compensate for the long delay in issuing the refund.

    “Wright thus exploited a deficiency that allowed a check to be ‘reissued’ even without any action being taken to cancel the first check or confirm that the first check had not already been negotiated,” according to the charging papers.

    The $40,000 checks fell below the threshold for requiring a supervisor’s approval, said David Umansky, spokesman for Gandhi. He said 77 personal refunds of at least $40,000 were issued last year.

    Are any of you in a business that wouldn’t miss 50-80 million bucks? Although this is big news locally, it doesn’t seem to permeate the Beltway – I wonder why? Everyone knows about the Enron scandal, how is this less important? Every time I write about Harriet Walters, I start getting Google hits from the Virgin Islands.

    Five accomplices have pleaded guilty thus far, including an IRS employee. The whole gang was finally caught, not by the FBI, not by local cops, not the Treasury Department, but by a bank teller at SunTrust who wouldn’t cash a $400,000 check.

  • Pull out now! The war is lost!

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    We must pull our police out of the war ravaged 5th District of Washington DC. This weekend’s death toll was 8 according to the Washington Post;

    As District residents and officials grappled with what was already shaping up as one of the city’s most violent weekends in recent memory, another young man was fatally shot and still another injured in Southeast early yesterday.

    No arrests had been made in the death of Edward Mitchell, 21, who was found bleeding from the stomach in the 4600 block of Livingston Road SE by officers on routine patrol about 2:40 a.m. The slaying remains under investigation, police said, as do the other shootings and stabbings in the spate that began Friday night. The weekend’s tally: eight people dead and at least eight wounded. (One death resulted from a police shooting in a domestic dispute. The man killed was identified yesterday as Clyde Tinch, 52, of Northeast Washington.)

    Most of the weekend’s killings took place in the 5th Police District in Northeast, despite increased police patrols since a crime surge in April.

    I lived in the 5th District until two years ago and moved when I saw the increase in crime. I warned my council member, Vincent Orange, a year before I moved that things were getting more violent, but he cited the decrease in murders as reason to be unconcerned. When it was apparent that no one was going to do anything, I moved.

    But, to use the Democrat’s proposed strategy in Iraq, we should just pull the police out of the Fifth District and let the residents fend for themselves. It’s probably the police presence there that’s causing this anyway.

  • ACLU consistency; ban assault weapons from police

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    Last night, four people were shot in Southeast DC in a drive-by shooting by an attacker using a semi-automatic high power  rifle. It comes at a time when the District is in the process of arming their police department with the same types of weapons. Despite the draconian gun laws in the District, nearly 3000 guns were recovered last year from people arrested in DC and as last night’s shooting demonstrates, the Metro cops are in dangered of being outgunned.

    CBS Channel 9 did a report last night on the impending issuance of more powerful weapons to DC cops last night and they interviewed a member of the ACLU named Johnny Barnes whose concern is more with keeping with the District’s gun laws than the ability of the police to protect the public.

    Phil Mendelson, District council member, also expressed concerns about the asthetics of having a fully prepared police department. He complained that the question came down to whether we want our police force to look like a military force or a police force.

    It just highlights that the Left places more importances on appearances than safety – the same way they approach the discussion of war. How will it look to the rest of the world? Just like everything else, the Left is more concerned with the emotional aspect of the issue than the reality of it.

  • Taxation Without Mindless Drivel

    When I lived in DC, I had to buy a bracket for my license plate to cover up the idiot “Taxation Without Representation” motto that the morons of the city government thought so clever. The first plate was given to President Bush for his limosine just after his inauguration. Now the nimnils of city government tried to inflict their intellectually vacant joke on the entire country (Washington Examiner link);

    The U.S. Mint on Wednesday rejected the District of Columbia’s proposal to include the phrase “Taxation Without Representation” on its quarter, deeming the slogan too political to be put on the country’s currency.

    The denial came less than a week after the District submitted three ideas for the commemorative quarter, all using the District’s protest of its lack of representation in Congress.

    The U.S. Mint informed city officials that the inscription failed to comply with the law prohibiting controversial subjects on the 25-cent piece.

    The city’s struggle to change how the District is represented in Congress is a political issue that the nation cannot agree on and is obviously political, U.S. Mint officials said.

    “The proposed inscription is clearly controversial and, therefore, inappropriate as an element of design for United States coinage,” U.S. Mint spokesman Greg Hernandez said.

    Mayor Adrian Fenty said the city was asked to submit ideas that were “emblematic of the District of Columbia.”

    “I can think of nothing more unique and characteristic than our status as the only American citizens without full voting rights in Congress,” Fenty said.

    Well, actually, DC residents have the opportunity to vote – with their feet. Five miles from anywhere in the city, anybody can be a resident of either Maryland or Virginia and have all of the representation they want. So DC residents CHOOSE to have no vote in Congress. The only people who really don’t have a choice are the DC politicians – and they’re the only people who should be upset they don’t have a vote. In fact they are the only people who are upset, and they’re trying to influence the rest of DC residents with the intellectually vacant motto.

    When the District politicians were so certain that a Democrat Congress and a Democrat President would give them the vote back in 1992, they voted for three straw politicians awaiting the magic vote from Congress – Jesse Jackson, a Chicagoan who’d never been a resident of the District was one of those straw Senators. People that stupid shouldn’t be represented in Congress.

    Since DC is mainly Democrat (the city council has two Republicans and one of them is gay and the district voted 90% for Kerry in the Presidential election of 2004), it’s just a ploy to get two Democrat Senators in Congress and one Democrat representative in the House.

    Oh, and I’m pretty sure the District gets way more money from the federal government than it’s residents pay in federal taxes. The ONLY thing that would change for the District is that there’d be more jobs for the political elite.

  • Government crucified for our sins

    You may or may not have heard of the welfare mother squatting in an abandoned building in southeast DC who eventually murdered her four daughters. By the time the police found the drug addict’s children’s bodies four months later, they were so badly decomposed that no cause of death could be determined. Rightly, the citizens of DC are outraged – outraged that it could happen under their noses, so to speak. Outraged that the city government failed to follow up despite calls from school officials and neighbors. Outraged that the city won’t hold anyone responsible.

    Well, the city finally fired six welfare workers – yesterday an administrative judge returned three of them to work (Washington Examiner link);

    An administrative hearing officer has ordered three fired child welfare bureaucrats put back on the job, overturning a decision by Mayor Adrian Fenty who blamed them for failing to help four sisters whose bodies were discovered last month.

    The employees, whose names were withheld, were ordered back on the job because Fenty had violated their due-process rights by summarily sacking them amid the Banita Jacks scandal, the hearing officer ruled.

    Jacks is charged with murdering her four daughters. She and her family were reported to welfare agencies for years, but nothing was done to help them. In late April 2007, a school social worker begged a child welfare hot-line worker to take action, saying Jacks was holding her daughters “hostage.”

    But the case was closed because no one answered the door of the row house in which Jacks and the girls had been squatting.

    Now, relatives of the four victims are filing charges against the city (Washington Post link);

    Relatives of the four girls whose decomposed bodies were found last month in a Southeast Washington rowhouse have hired lawyers to pursue claims against the D.C. government for failing to prevent months of neglect and abuse.

    The lawyers served the city notice as the children’s mother, Banita Jacks, remains jailed without bond on murder charges. In letters to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), two lawyers used the mayor’s public statements to make a case that city agencies had warnings that the children were in trouble but failed to act aggressively to get the girls away from their mother.

    Lawyers formally set the groundwork for legal claims on behalf of Jacks’s mother, Mamie Jacks, and Jessie Fogle, grandmother of the two youngest children. In addition, a lawyer for the estate of the second-oldest daughter was retained by her father, Kevin J. Stoddard. The lawyer said yesterday that he plans to sue the city on behalf of the estate.

    The bodies remain at the D.C. medical examiner’s office, yet to be buried after their discovery Jan. 9 by deputy marshals serving an eviction notice at Jacks’s Sixth Street SE address. The medical examiner’s office was unable to say what led to the deaths of the girls — ages 5, 6, 11 and 16 — but the case was ruled homicide. Jacks, 33, has told police that the children were possessed by demons and that they died in their sleep, authorities have said.

    Where is the shame? If a relative of mine lived in an abandoned building with her four daughters and a crack habit and I didn’t do anything about it, I’d expect someone to bring charges against me for neglecting my familial responsibilities. In my family, we take care of each other – we don’t expect an unfeeling and broken bureaucracy to care for our family.

    For one thing, the whole welfare department should be fired, because there’s apparently a culture within that fostered the whole situation from the beginning. Secondly, the family should have done something long before the lawyers came along and convinced them that it wasn’t their fault (the whole court process is the family’s way of washing their hands of responsibility).

    We hear constantly that government fails the people that it claims to represent, yet we continue to think of government as a solution to all of our problems. But all government has become is a scapegoat for absolving us of our personal responsibility for all of our bad choices. The judge that lets this case go forward is only perpetuating that illusion.

  • More DC government corruption

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    Photo from Washington Examiner

    This time corrupt workers in the Washington, DC government have committed a crime which may affect the entire country (Washington Examiner link);

    Law enforcement officers raided the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles branch in Georgetown on Wednesday, arresting one city employee and four other suspects on charges they set up a scheme to sell fake District driver’s licenses.

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  • A real cryin’ shame

    Banita Jacks murdered her four daughters and their decomposing bodies were found this last week in the Northeast DC house in which the family had been “squatting”. It’s a crying shame, a REAL crying shame. How can you avoid moist eyes when you think about a mother murdering FOUR daughters in this day and age? And yes, it’s the mother’s fault completely, I’m not making excuses for her – like DC Mayor Adrian Fenty made excuses for city government yesterday (Washington Examiner link);

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