District Grapples With Continued Gun Violence

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Photo of D.C. police officers manning a checkpoint in the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast on Monday by Alex Wong/Getty Images

IT WAS ANOTHER bloody night in the District last night. Eight people suffered gunshot wounds in three quadrants of D.C. and just over the District line in Prince George's County. (Get details here.) No deaths were reported, but the violence follows a spate of deadly shootings earlier this month, including one night in which seven people were killed.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty reacted to the crimes this morning, The Post's Clarence Williams reports:

Interviewed on WRC (Channel 4) this morning, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said he was troubled by the spate of shootings and working to get more police officers onto the street to address it. But he noted that the homicide rate remains far lower than it was a decade or two ago, and he said crime prevention efforts had to focus on stanching the flow of weapons to the streets.

One of those efforts, the military-style checkpoint that D.C. police erected in the crime-scarred Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast last weekend, received renewed criticism today from Post columnist Marc Fisher. And, he says, he's not alone in his opinion:

[T]wo men who ordinarily find themselves on opposite sides of law enforcement issues -- the head of the D.C. police union, Kris Baumann, and the legal director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, Art Spitzer -- agree that the checkpoints unconstitutionally infringe on our freedom to move about and that they create the aura of taking action but don't much interfere with the thug life.

"We end up bothering the good people of the world," Baumann says. "It's a PR move."

Spitzer notes that homicides are actually relatively flat citywide in recent years, though there's been a big jump this year in that part of Northeast. "The sad answer is that there may be nothing that prevents crime in a crowded urban area in the summertime," he says.

Is violent crime in the summer months a sad, uncombatable reality? Are the D.C. police on to something by trying new tactics to keep gunslingers out of hard-hit neighborhoods? Or is the checkpoint really just a heavy handed publicity stunt?

What do you think? Leave your thoughts below in the comments section.

» "Eight People Shot During Violent Night" [WaPo]
» "Liberty Takes a Holiday in Occupied Trinidad" [WaPo]