Mother's Day in D.C.

Metropolitan Police Department

Mother’s Day

WHEN D.C. POLICE ARRIVED at the apartment in Southeast Washington that Friday night, the man’s 22-year-old son was standing in the yard holding a handgun. People were running for cover. The son had allegedly shot two neighbors and had emptied the gun firing at others. Someone had hit him in the jaw, slurred the father, who apparently had been drinking. “That’s why my boy shot his butt.”
A call comes in to the 9•1•1 operators room on the sixth floor at D.C. police headquarters on Indiana Avenue NW. The operator is sitting before a cream-colored computer console. Her fingers flick quickly across the keyboard, routing the caller’s information automatically to a dispatcher 20 yards down the hall who is supposed to try to send police officers to the scene. “We’ll be there as soon as possible,” she tells the caller.
“I called the police an hour ago,” the caller informs her. “Nobody showed up!” He’s calling from a rooming house on Massachusetts Avenue SE. He is raging mad. Now he’s yelling to a friend: “Lock the gate there! Close the gate!”

IT’S FRIDAY, May 1, 1987, and it’s Mother’s Day in Washington, D.C. No, not the Mother’s Day that comes once each year in May. This Mother’s Day comes the first of each month when welfare checks are distributed.
Within 48 hours, over $5 million in public assistance funds are funneled into the poorest neighborhoods of the city, causing as much chaos as comfort where a lifestyle based on an underground economy, fueled by drugs and auto thefts, had been institutionalized right along with the welfare. Within the boundaries of the city’s 7th Police District in Southeast Washington, where about 6,000 families received almost $2 million in welfare checks today, police received nearly 300 calls for emergency assistance during the day.
The increase in crime is roughly 11 percent during the first two days of each month, and on May 1, as on other such occasions, most of the calls were predictable: men, usually strung out on dope and liquor, either fighting with each other or, worse yet, breaking into their girlfriends’ homes, forcing sex and trying to get their hands on those checks. Routine occurrences for the first of the month.
At the scene of one of these complaints an officer saw a woman try to comfort a baby who had just watched his mother get beaten up by a man wielding a knife. “Come on, be a big boy,” she said.

THE CALLS ARE POURING IN STEADILY — 264 in the last hour. That’s busy but not outlandishly so by D.C. standards. The callers click automatically, one after another, into the 9•1•1 operator’s headset. Some of them are going to have to wait for officers to arrive. The D.C. police department is short of street officers and overwhelmed with calls.
Police still get to the most serious emergencies — shootings, rapes — relatively quickly. It’s the next tier of callers who face delay. Especially in poor, high-crime neighborhoods, emergency callers menaced by enraged ex-boyfriends or neighborhood thugs or loitering drug dealers often wait hours because there aren’t enough available officers to respond quickly. And if the complaint is car theft, burglary, vandalism, a missing person, drug dealing or even a very serious crime that has already ended, callers in some neighborhoods can expect exceedingly long waits — two hours, five hours, sometimes even eight hours before police respond. Officers are knocking on doors at 3 or 4 in the morning, waking up residents who had called at 6 the previous evening. Routinely during peak night hours, 40, 60, even 80 calls back up in the queue awaiting an available officer.
A woman clicks into the operator’s headset complaining about noise in a nearby apartment. She sounds as if she is on the verge of tears. “Yes ma’am, this is my third call,” she says. “If they wait till 5 a.m., it’s not going to do me any good.” She has a funeral in the morning, she says. She’s told that the police will respond as soon as they can.
“She won’t get no sleep tonight,” the 9•1•1 operator says to herself as she disconnects from that caller and another call clicks in.

DOWN THE HALL from where the 9•1•1 operators sit, a dispatcher sits before another computer screen. The reports typed in by the 9•1•1 operators flash onto the dispatcher’s screen as he tries to assign, on a priority basis, available police cars. That isn’t easy, especially when you’ve drawn 7D.
He’s trying to find officers he can send to an apartment on Robinson Place in Southeast, where a woman has just reported that her boyfriend is beating her. The dispatcher depresses a foot pedal beneath his console and speaks into his headset.
“Any unit available for a boyfriend-girlfriend dispute,” he says in a crisp, clipped voice. “Complainant states boyfriend is getting violent at this time.”
“Any unit available?” he repeats. Silence. “No acknowledgment. 20:44,” he notes, marking the exact time for the record.
There are no units available to respond.
A few minutes later, another emergency is radioed to patrol officers. “Children unattended,” the dispatch begins. “Ages 4, 2, and one month.”

THROUGHOUT THE EVENING, the calls continue unabated. By 9 p.m., four pages of backlogged nonemergency calls have accumulated at the 7D dispatch console. Each page holds 10 calls. Before police can handle traffic accidents, they have to deal with the car thefts, the purse snatchings, the drug sales.
At the Chinese-owned carryout at 14th Street and Good Hope Road SE, which members of the Union Temple Baptist Church had vowed to close because the owner pulled a gun on a black woman, business was booming. Late-night alcoholics and drug users were spending cash like crazy. Just two nights earlier, police had arrested a man in the carryout parking lot with 54 vials of “crack” cocaine and a cocked pistol in his belt.
“Gang fight,” the dispatcher announces after a talent show at an elementary school had ended. “Fifty people . . . no, 200 juveniles, some with knives and guns.”
The police are a study in frenetic, well-intentioned but ultimately useless motion, speeding from one emergency to the next, hauling away an irate boyfriend from one place, dispersing crowds of irate men from another.

IT’S NEARLY 11 IN THE EVENING NOW, and officers in 7D are still trying to get to calls from that afternoon and a couple from that morning. It’ll get worse as the night progresses and more and more calls come in. Somebody on Irving Street has been waiting to file a missing person report since 6:03 p.m. A woman on First Street SE reported a burglary at 3:15 p.m. On Southern Avenue, no officers have responded to a simple assault from 11:30 a.m. Likewise for a “robbery/snatch” on Robinson Place at 8:31 p.m.
All told, there are 70 calls across the city waiting for service. By the time midnight shift arrives at 11 p.m., the oncoming dispatchers will find 35 or more calls which have been waiting for service for nine or 10 hours, simply because there aren’t enough units on the street to deal with what’s happening.

THE DISPATCHERS SIT IN A CUBICLE with a map of their dispatch area tacked to the wall separator. On the wall in the hallway outside a plate glass window is a yellowed, framed page of the Sunday Star, June 2, 1935, heralding the advent of radio-dispatched police cars in the Washington police department.
A 9•1•1 operator down the hall takes a call from a woman in Congress Heights. That’s 7D. Someone is trying to bust into the apartment next door. It’s the neighbor’s ex-boyfriend, the caller says. She speaks in quiet, urgent tones: “He’s kicking in the door,” she says. “Please hurry.” The operator types in the details.
The call flashes on the dispatcher’s computer screen — it’s a priority one. He puts out the call: a B-1 in progress, Burglary I under the D.C. Code, burglary of a dwelling while the dwelling is occupied. An officer in one of the 7D cruisers calls in that he’s available to respond. But there’s no backup available, and the officer cannot take action until one is found. Police procedure requires that at least two officers respond to potentially violent scenes.
“Any unit to assist?” the dispatcher asks. His repeated requests for a backup are met with radio silence. Minutes later, he is still trying. “Any unit to go assist. A B-1 in progress . . . Any supervisor to respond?” he finally says, broadening her search for another officer. Still, no one answers. No acknowledgment. No help can be sent.
Forty minutes later, a car finally arrives at the Congress Heights address. No one is hurt. The ex-boyfriend has left. The police are too late; the incident is over.
Another call pops up and starts flashing on the dispatcher’s screen: a shooting just occurred. Half a dozen police cars soon gather at the shooting, and officers go to work securing the crime scene. Nobody knows yet what the shooting might be about. Drugs. Girls. Gambling. Who knows?
This is why 7D puts more strain on the city’s 911 system than any other district, and why its residents wait longer than any others for police response. Typically, 7D leads the city in murder, rape and violent assault — the kinds of crimes that most drain police resources by tying up lots of officers and cars, often for hours.
Some very basic facts make 7D immune to anybody’s quick fix. The number of one-parent families is the highest in the city. The unemployment rate is the highest in the city. Teen pregnancy is the highest in the city. High school dropout rate is the highest in the city. The quality of life is almost zero for a lot of the people who live there. A community needs to offer some sort of hope. You look around here, and nothing’s happening.
As shift change approaches, the dispatcher is pumping his foot pedal like an organist. He’s sliding his chair back and forth between his dispatcher’s terminal and a separate computer, the WALES — Washington Area Law Enforcement System — terminal that provides information about criminal records, license plates, and outstanding arrest warrants. He shouldn’t have to be doing all this himself, but his assistant is on break. You have to take your breaks, otherwise you just burn out.
He’s dispatching for two police districts now when he should be dispatching for one. The oncoming midnight shift is short of people so the radio channels have been combined. Over in the 7th District, a woman is screaming for help. In the 6th, there’s a violent boyfriend-girlfriend dispute. There are kids in the apartment. Of course. There are always kids in the apartment.
In the midst of the madness that is Mother’s Day in D.C., the people whose lives are most disrupted are the children. What chance do they have of breaking the cycle? How can they be expected to overcome the behavior of their parents? Will they ever come to think of hearts and flowers when they hear the words “Mother’s Day,” instead of bitterly remembering the long, long nights when the world seemed to go mad?

THE CALLS KEEP COMING IN.
A security guard at a check cashing service on Martin Luther King Avenue has reported that somebody has been shot in the stomach outside the store. Several officers respond. The first on the scene radios that no one has been shot, but that a street person apparently is ill. The dispatcher broadcasts an update, releasing cars for other assignments: “No shooting. Homeless guy holding his stomach.”
An out-of-town visitor has driven into a bad neighborhood, broken down, and is waiting for police to help him. He calls repeatedly, but the dispatcher has no officers to send.
Requests from police officers to check license tags and relay messages keep pouring in. The radio crackles with two police districts’ worth of officers who need to speak to one dispatcher Finally, it’s all too much. “Shut up, people!” he yells. His foot is off the pedal, so he’s off the air, and no one can hear save the handful of folks working in nearby booths. Without losing a beat, he depresses the foot pedal and is back on the air. His voice resumes its normal repose. “Units, unless you have a priority, please stand by for a minute,” he purrs.
They’re supposed to be calm, cool, and collected. The soft answer turneth away wrath and all of that. But it’s difficult. The stresses of a dispatcher’s life are hard to overstate. The work feels like a crushing weight.