Link to story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060402205.html)

I'm not in DC at the moment, so I cannot see this happening firsthand, but it's been getting an increasing amount of media attention.

Chief Cathy Lanier is Washington DC's high school dropout police chief. There is no doubt that DC has a problem with crime, but her initiatives to curb it have done nothing but raise peoples' ire.


Basically, she has targeted certain sections of the city as problematic due to murders and such, and has placed police officers at the entrances to these neighborhoods, who will check the ID of every vehicle entering the area. If you do not have what they consider a 'legitimate' reason to be there, you will be turned away. Given the relatively non-existent right to privacy you enjoy in your car, I can see lots of fun searches resulting from this.

What happened to our right to assemble? People are being prohibited from traveling down PUBLIC roads in the capitol of our country.

Some of the other brilliant initiatives Chief Lanier has proposed and enacted include having EVERY single police officer employed by the District of Columbia on the clock during certain days, so you basically have hundreds and hundreds of police officers, all on the tax payers dollar, sitting on every single damn corner in the city to show how big our guns are.

She also has proposed that police go from door to door in rundown areas, 'asking' residents if they can search for illegal contraband. Again, I'm sure this will all be done respectfully and with the consent of all citizens. :rolleyes:

Oh, and she wants DC cops to have semi-automatic rifles...

You expect this stuff from some places, but to have it going on in Washington... :eek:

Yea thats a bit much. They should just flood the streets with more cops in that neighbor hood, a surge if you will, and root out the evil. Hire more cops that walk the beat...I don't know but might it work?

Since she, and her cronies, took over in DC the crime rate has gotten out of hand.

Heard on the news this morning that the gun related crime rate is off the charts, blowing Gary Indiana out the window by a goodly margin.

Isn't this the city that has a handgun ban in place. Dahell do the crooks doing breaking that law!!!

Since she, and her cronies, took over in DC the crime rate has gotten out of hand.

Heard on the news this morning that the gun related crime rate is off the charts, blowing Gary Indiana out the window by a goodly margin.

Isn't this the city that has a handgun ban in place. Dahell do the crooks doing breaking that law!!!

Thats not entirely true. Crime rate always was out of hand, our last police chief was fired by our new mayor Fenty because it was too high to begin with. I really think the new mayor is doing a great job trying to make some changes, though its not hard compared to the crack addled mayor of the past decade.

This city is difficult. You've either got the very rich (the business and government folks, diplomats, etc.) or the extremely poor (those who live in this neighborhood or Anacostia for example) with a very narrow middle ground. Most of the people who work in DC don't live in DC, they live in Maryland or Virginia, and their taxes don't go to DC which certainly doesn't help any. So the school systems are flooded with exceptionally poor kids, while all the rich kids go to the private schools. This leads to a circle of poverty and as the baseball stadium was built down on the waterfront and the MCI (now Verizon) Center was built downtown its pushing the poor into a smaller and more confined area or out into PG County. So you find a lot of bored, hostile, and pissed off predominantly black males who aren't educated enough to get a job and resort to crime and making kids who end up not able to get education and recycle themselves into the same mess their parents were in.

I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt on this one. It supposedly worked in New York, so why not give it a shot.

Extremely disappointed with DC. They should abolish the gun bans so that people can protect their families.. An armed society is a polite society.

Apparently there was a press conference about this today. Basically, there were no murders or violent crime in the neighborhood this weekend compared to 8 there last week and they want to keep it going.