D.C.'s Reaction to Killings Misses the Point

A woman is stabbed in broad daylight near the Takoma Metro station. A man's throat is slit in a ritzy part of Georgetown. Tourists are robbed on the Mall. Scary stuff. Something must be done. Ring the alarm, cancel all police leaves, call out the feds.

Never mind that crime has been dropping for years, and homicides are actually slightly down from this time last year.

No, the city must take action. So Police Chief Charles Ramsey declares a crime emergency.

And in parts of the city where people swallow hard every time they step out of their houses, where every day feels like an emergency, resentment bubbles anew. Across Washington, we fall into another round of competitive suffering, an ugly sport that pits rich against poor and white against black.

We degenerate into measuring the comparative value of a life in one neighborhood against that in another. How many young black men in Southeast must be murdered to generate the same amount of police overtime as the slaying of one white man in Georgetown? Why does the Georgetown killing rate more front-page space and TV time than the deaths of any number of people in the rest of the city?

The answers make us uncomfortable. Scarcity is one of the primary measures of importance in almost any aspect of life. A rare coin is worth more than a common one, an attack on the Pentagon garners more of our attention than the latest flare-up between Arabs and Israelis, and one or two murders a year in Georgetown deliver more shock than the far too many murders in some poor parts of town.

All of which is beside the point, because if we're arguing about whose life is more important, we've already lost the debate, all of us. Whether the victim is millionaire or welfare mother, the question is: Who is breaking the social compact and why, and what are we going to do about it?

Answer: The same criminals commit violence against rich and poor, and we know what leads them to strike out against the lives and liberties of the rest of us. And as a society, we choose to do very little about it. We have collectively deemed the price of inaction -- a couple of hundred murders a year and a constant anxiety about who might be lurking on our street -- to be acceptable.

Watching TV this weekend, I tried to make sense of excited faces in Lebanon as young men set fire to American and Israeli flags and danced about while their country burned. And I struggled to understand Israelis who claimed to be carrying on with their daily lives even as rockets exploded in their neighborhoods. They have collectively decided to accept a certain level of violence in service of larger ideas about who deserves the land and who does not.

What's our rationale for accepting the violence of American life? We've decided it would cost too much to get the young people who commit crimes into productive lives.

It's true that some categories of crime, especially robberies, are up this year. But overall crime in the District actually declined 6.7 percent last year from 2004, with homicides, sexual assaults and assaults with a weapon reaching their lowest levels in five years, according to police statistics. But a few dramatic and frightening attacks in prominent places override any recitation of facts.

Here's a dramatic insight: According to the Justice Policy Institute, the number of kids sent to juvenile court each year rises and falls in lockstep with the unemployment rate for the 16-19 age group in the District. You can see the chart at http://justicepolicy.org .