By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

It was a warm afternoon in the District's Trinidad neighborhood, and a group of boys was walking shirtless in the streets, some with pants hanging down below their behinds.

"You see that?" said Willie Dorn, 67, a retired corrections officer, nodding toward the group from his front porch. One of the boys had thrown a plastic soda bottle at a youth passing by on a moped, nearly causing a crash. "Unsupervised teenagers -- that's part of the problem," Dorn said. "Now, how they're getting a hold of all these guns and drugs, that's the other part."

Two blocks away, D.C. police officers were setting up an ID checkpoint. For two hours each night for the next week or so, motorists trying to enter the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE will have to show identification and give a legitimate reason for being on the block, or they'll be turned away.

The Neighborhood Safety Zone is the city's response to a recent spate of homicides in and around Trinidad. And its kickoff last week made for a profound incongruity in the news: on the one hand, a black man making history by locking up the Democratic presidential nomination; on the other, a desperate move to stop what are mostly black-on-black killings.

How far we've come, how much farther still to go -- the incongruity was not lost on residents of Trinidad.

"Obama's talking about getting us out of Iraq, but the city he's hoping to call home is starting to look like Baghdad," said William "Doc" Robinson, 60, a retired D.C. public school teacher who lives on a restricted block of Montello Avenue. "We're living under martial law in the nation's capital."

Throughout much of Barak Obama's campaign for president, the hopes of many black Americans have soared with the belief that headway can be made against problems that plague neighborhoods such as Trinidad. The Illinois senator's urban policy platform includes plans to "end the dangerous cycle of youth violence," "address gun violence in cities" and "reduce crime recidivism by providing ex-offender supports."

In fact, there's not much difference between Obama's vision and the urban policies of D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who has campaigned energetically for Obama. But so far, the Fenty administration's boldest crime-fighting initiatives -- stepping up police surveillance, arming police with high-powered rifles, asking residents to consent to having their homes searched for guns and setting up ID checkpoints -- could have come right out of a conservative Republican "law and order" playbook.

And not everyone is objecting.

"I think the checkpoint is a good idea," said Jerry Green, 46, a truck driver who lives in Trinidad. "Some people just don't belong in this neighborhood and until we can come up with a better way to keep them out, this will have to do."

Linda Sheffey, an accountant who lives in the neighborhood, expressed dismay as she passed Robinson's house, headed toward the checkpoint.

"This is crazy, isn't it?" she said to him. "All of those years when people were getting shot up every night, people being run out of their homes by drug dealers, and the police were nowhere to be found."

Sheffey was referring to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when cocaine kingpin Rayful Edmond had his base of operation in Trinidad and the city's annual homicide count came close to hitting 500 year after year.

Last year, there were 181 killings.

Robinson chimed in: "As soon as the neighborhood starts changing -- people fixing up these shacks and selling them for $400,000 -- you get police setting up checkpoints and treating those of us who have been living here all along like suspects."

After noticing a group of teenagers hanging out on a corner away from the police checkpoint, he said: "I know many of the kids around here. I probably taught half of them. And I can tell you that the ones who are up to no good are just standing around looking at the police, waiting on them to do what they always do: be here one minute, gone the next."

Dorn was disgusted, too, but not so much with the checkpoint as with the boys milling about in front of his home with their underwear showing.

"Maybe a President Obama could help restore some pride in the black community," he said.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com.