Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.
Dawn Powell (1896-1965), The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page (1998).
On August 21, 1791, a Vodou ceremony led by Dutty Boukman turned into a violent slave rebellion, thereby starting the Haitian Revolution.
We get anecdotes. For example, via tweeted responses to an invitation by the X account Washingtonian Problems to “push back against the negative narrative about our city. Share why you love our beautiful home and help show the world the real DC.”
Whether the appeal was meant ironically, a possibility suggested by Not the Bee, I don’t know. But a good many reports of non-beauty ensued.
● “I was called into court to give a statement about a man who’d exposed himself to me on the metro. He had over 200 charges to date. Court was delayed four hours for him to ‘calm down’. . . . Once he had, she dismissed the new charges and let him go.”
● “Less than a mile from the Capitol, kids tried to steal my backpack. Punched, for no reason, by a guy on the Metro. . . . Cops recently showed me videos they can’t release. What’s happening out there is more insane than most imagine.”
● “I watched a man kick a plate-glass door in at a 7-Eleven. 911 kept me on hold for almost five minutes before telling me not to call back, it was a property crime.”
Then there’s the news-making disgruntled DoJ employee who threw a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer.
From these reports and plenty others I think we can conclude that yes, crime has been a problem in Washington DC.
As has law enforcement.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.
The character “Manuel the Redeemer,” in James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption (1926), Book Four: “Coth at Porutsa,” Ch. XXV: “Last Obligation upon Manuel.” See also Beyond Life: Dizain des Démiurges (1921), pp. 45.
On August 20, 1866, President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.
Despite a few flights of fancy, the drama prided itself on its realism. It turns out that in reality, too, police department bosses may be willing to rewrite crime statistics so things don’t seem as bad as they are.
In Washington DC, a police sergeant, Charlotte Djossou, accused higher-up officers of repeatedly instructing lower-down officers to re-label everything from thefts to violent assaults as lesser offenses. All liberally confirmed by “[Metropolitan Police Department] emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts” seen by The Washington Free Beacon.
The MPD has now settled with Djossou, who sued the department in 2020 after it punished her for bringing the matter up.
One example that emerged in the legal proceedings is a 2022 deposition by Randy Griffen, an MPD commander. Griffen admits telling a police captain, Franklin Porter, to find “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics.” The solution was to recategorize instances of shoplifting and theft, now calling them “Taking Property Without Right” — “because TPWOR reports are not tracked in the DC Crime Report.”
The Free Beacon quotes extensively from court documents. Tweaking the crime stats was routine in DC for years.
The DC Police are not alone: other fictionalizers of crime statistics are known to have flourished in LA, NYC, New Orleans, and Columbus, Ohio.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A state is as sound as its thriftiest citizens. A social order is sick when it has to tax its thrifty citizen to provide for its poor. When a social order has no other choice but to so, that social order is doomed.
Whittaker Chambers, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” The American Mercury (April 1944), p. 94.
On August 19, 1919, Afghanistan gained full independence from Great Britain. Earlier, British attempts to maintain an imperial presence in this region elicited an infamous essay in protest by English sociologist and anti-imperialist Herbert Spencer (pictured), “Patriotism” (Facts and Comments, 1902).
On this day in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, a crucial event leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1999, a mass rally of Serbians demanded the resignation of Slobodon Milosevic.
In the context of President Trump calling up the National Guard to help police the streets of Washington, D.C. — “you’ll have more police and you’ll be so happy, ’cause you’d be safe” said Trump — Scarborough prompted Symone Sanders, a Democratic strategist, fellow MSNBC host, and wife of a former night mayor of the city, with cedar soaked in kerosene: “You don’t think more police makes streets safer?”
“No, Joe,” she said, helping Morning Joe viewers decipher her racial identity: “I’m a black woman in America.
“I do not always think that more police makes streets safer.”
Before you have time to wonder whether she’s advancing the law of diminishing returns in criminology, she quickly goes on: “When you walk down the streets of Georgetown” — a predominantly wealthy and white D.C. neighborhood — “you don’t see a police officer on every corner but you don’t feel unsafe. So what is it about talking about places like South D.C., right, Ward Eight (if you will), that people say ‘we need more officers to make us safe’?
“I think we have to rethink what safety means in America.”
While adding more police officers to a peaceful society won’t likely decrease crime much, a violent community is another story. People in these communities need greater safety to live their lives. Without becoming a statistic. Law enforcement that is visible on the street can surely help.
But rethinking the meaning of “safety” won’t.
So what’s burning?
Democratic hopes, maybe. We’ll see how Trump’s move to clean up the capital goes.
Yet, if he tries to use the National Guard in other cities without constitutional warrant, that’d go beyond mere policing, into police-state territory.
Just don’t consult Democratic strategists for a “rethink” of such distinctions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The “reality” he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.