In Mt. Pleasant, A Divided View On Street Crime; Newcomers Push for 'Zero Tolerance'

When Jack McKay bought his house in Mount Pleasant 30 years ago,he wagered $22,000 that the drug dealers skulking outside his homewould not present too serious a threat and that the neighborhoodwould remain the kind of edgy, diverse place he loves.

The 61-year-old retired physicist endured the crack cocaine warsof the 1980s, the 1991 Mount Pleasant riot, a series of automobilebreak-ins and the drug dealers who never left. He said crime is downdramatically since those first years, and his investment is now worth$600,000.

"It's come a long way, and Mount Pleasant is still a wonderfulplace to live," he said.

Dominic Sale sees things differently. The 31-year-old managementconsultant moved to the Northwest Washington neighborhood two yearsago from Arlington, thrilled to be a quick stroll from Latinogroceries, a bakery, a hardware store and ethnic restaurants. On thesidewalk outside his condominium, the cadences of Spanish, Vietnameseand Amharic fill the air.

But after a rash of violent crimes in recent months, including twohomicides, the stabbing of a police officer and a string of home-invasion robberies, "I now think twice about going out to buy someice cream in my neighborhood," Sale said. "This is unacceptable."

His is the shock of hundreds of newcomers who moved into renovatedrowhouses or apartments during the historic neighborhood's mostrecent wave of gentrification, when crime was unusually low andhousing prices were soaring.

As longtime neighborhood liquor store owner Leo Vondas put it,living in Mount Pleasant in recent years was like "living inBethesda."

It hasn't felt like that lately. Now Sale and other newcomers aremounting an anti-crime offensive, staging rallies, demanding morepolice on the streets and crackdowns on people who commit pettycrimes, believing that such offenses as spitting and loiteringdegrade the neighborhood and lead to more heinous offenses. Theyspend hours debating the neighborhood's future on an often vitriolicInternet chat board, where some urge kicking awake sleeping drunksand others beg their neighbors to just get along.

But McKay and many other longtime residents say the newcomers areoverreacting. They note that Mount Pleasant's recent spike in violentcrime is in line with many other inner-city neighborhoods and eventhe nation. And they worry, like residents of other such swiftlychanging areas as Shaw and Logan Circle, that their community islosing some of the diversity and character that distinguish it.

"I don't understand why people are so frightened now," saidMargaret Hoven, 55, a folk singer who moved to Mount Pleasant in 1971and endured five burglaries and a pistol holdup in her first fewyears there. "I certainly feel safer now. Crime now is nothing likeit was in the '70s."

Simply put, many longtime residents said they believe it isn'tcrime that's changing in Mount Pleasant; it's the population.

While the newly minted Washingtonians rave about the new organicfarmers market at Lamont and Mount Pleasant streets, many also bringguests to their homes through Rock Creek Park to the west. Thatapproach might not be their quickest route home, but it allows themto avoid the homemade storefront signs and men hanging out at allhours along Mount Pleasant Street, the neighborhood's commercialthoroughfare.

The newcomers contend that the urban experience doesn't have toinclude crime, and they want to fight for the safety of all.

At a recent community meeting, a woman who lives in the part ofMount Pleasant that overlooks Rock Creek Park, where mansions havecolumns and trimmed hedges, was incredulous about the amount of crimeshe has seen on Mount Pleasant Street. "Let me tell you, otherneighborhoods would not put up with that," she said.

The most decisive action came last month, when the AdvisoryNeighborhood Commission passed a resolution calling on lawenforcement officials to begin zero-tolerance policing. Under such apolicy, officers would ticket people for such offenses as littering,double-parking and other nuisances common to urban life but oftenignored by big-city officers.

"I don't like being the bad guy, but I'll do it if need be," saidSale, an ANC member. The resolution, more symbolic gesture thanedict, passed on a 3 to 2 vote.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who represents theneighborhood, said that to his knowledge, the vote was the first ofits kind in the city. The resolution, he said, showed that therecently elected board is "very, very frustrated."

Longtime residents -- white liberals who moved to Mount Pleasantdecades ago and Latinos and African Americans who lived there beforethem -- said they fear that the newcomers and their differentpriorities will tip the delicate balance of the neighborhood.

"It's only a matter of time now before Don Juan's becomes aStarbucks," lamented Richard Hardy, who has lived in Mount Pleasantfor 42 of his 47 years. He fears that gentrification and a sweepingwar on crime would not only kill the offbeat pupusa shop he loves butwould make him a bigger target to police.

Hardy, who is black, said that the neighborhood commissioners whourge zero tolerance, all of whom are white, "don't understand thekind of racial profiling that already goes on in this city and whatzero tolerance [would] bring." As he walked home recently from thedry cleaners with 13 dress shirts over his shoulder, he said, apolice officer slowed his patrol car to look him over.

Hardy and other longtime residents said they remember the lasttime police tried a zero-tolerance approach to policing in theneighborhood. In 1991, a black officer fatally shot a Salvadoran manwho was being arrested for disorderly conduct, setting off thebiggest clashes in the city since the 1968 riots after theassassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Jaime Carrillo, who has lived in Mount Pleasant since 1986, said asharper focus on nuisance crimes would have the effect of singlingout the neighborhood's longstanding Latino population.

"I am against crime, of course. And we have our share of crime.But it's not like it was years ago," said Carrillo, 52, who openedhis own restaurant, Don Jaime's, on Mount Pleasant Street seven yearsago.

"Zero tolerance isn't about going after real criminals," he said."It's about going after the Latinos who are standing outside on MountPleasant Street, doing petty things that the people who recentlymoved into Mount Pleasant don't like to see."

McKay, who uses such words as "balderdash" and "hogwash" todescribe the current fear of rising crime, said he moved to MountPleasant decades ago because he "couldn't stand the thought of livingin an all-white neighborhood." In 2000, the neighborhood was about 35percent non-Hispanic white, 31 percent Hispanic (who can be of anyrace) and 26 percent non-Hispanic black.

After years of passively watching neighborhood politics, McKay ranfor a seat on the neighborhood commission in 2002, aiming to bringperspective to a board dominated by newcomers.

He approaches his ANC job like the scientist he is, creatinggraphs and charts that he distributes to other residents, backing uphis theory that crime isn't so bad in his beloved neighborhood.

"Compared to Chevy Chase, sure, Mount Pleasant has a high crimerate," he said. But compared to Columbia Heights, a neighborhooddirectly to the east, "it has a low crime rate. It's all a matter ofperspective."

"There's a big field of research in the perception of hazards.People tend to vastly exaggerate some risk and neglect others," hesaid. He likes to remind neighbors that getting in a car and drivingis riskier than living in Mount Pleasant.

McKay maintained that the recent homicides -- one in October, theother in November -- weren't proof of rampant lawlessness in theneighborhood because the victims were targeted specifically,according to police, and they didn't live in Mount Pleasant.

According to D.C. police statistics, overall crime in the policeservice area that includes Mount Pleasant declined by 15.5 percentlast year compared with 2002. But violent crimes, such as robberiesand homicides, increased. The peskier property crimes that havedogged Mount Pleasant for years -- thefts from cars, burglaries andauto thefts -- all dropped, some dramatically.

Inspector Robin Hoey, who helps oversee police in the area, saidhe was surprised to hear the plea for more policing. And he saidpolice don't plan to change their crime-fighting strategies.

"We already have a zero-tolerance approach to crime, but we alsodo it reasonably," Hoey said. "We're not going to go out of our wayto ticket a 76-year-old lady double-parked to get her medicine.That's not our way of doing things, and that doesn't make crime godown."

Nitza Segui, 39, a Latina who has lived in Mount Pleasant forabout 14 years, said newcomers who complain about crime are usingthat as a way to address the quality-of-life issues that distinguisha gritty part of the city from the manicured, more homogeneous partsof Washington.

"The people they want to arrest for drinking in public? Those arethe Latinos who can't afford a $7 beer at Bella Roma, and all theycan buy is cans of beer," she said. "They don't have big, comfortablehouses to drink their beer; they drink it on the corner. And now,instead of putting police resources into arresting drug dealers,[police] will spend their time arresting these Latino men."

But Sale said that seeing people drinking in public or urinatingon lawns creates an environment where other crimes are tolerated.

"This tells criminals that it's okay to do business in MountPleasant," he said. Cracking down on such offenses as vandalism andgraffiti gives police and the community a psychological advantage, hesaid.

A dirty and crime-ridden neighborhood is not the inevitableoutgrowth of a racially and economically diverse community, Salesaid. "There's a theory I would like to debunk: An ethnically diversecommunity means you're going to have more crime. That's just notright," he said.

Sale said new residents aren't trying to take the vibrancy out ofMount Pleasant; they simply want better service from the city.

"We are over-taxed and under-served," he said. "Maybe some of thepeople who have been around a long time got used to it, but we're notgoing to tolerate it."