Need a state-of-the-art website log-analysis tool? Try Lumberjack! Now you can see the forest.

Copyright (c) © (copr) 1997 all rights reserved by TJH Internet SP and Earth Operations Central. Transmission or rebroadcast to any non-Internet media, including radio or television, are expressly prohibited except by arrangement. Each unauthorized retransmission to non-Internet media will be billed at a minimum of $10,000 per instance, payable to TJH Internet SP - an unregistered Maryland sole-propriety. "We'll bill you later when you can least afford it." All comments are strictly my unsupported opinion unless you would like to come and see for yourself.
Perhaps you're looking for the Most-recent issue of the Washington DC page?

Last updated 26 December 1997 -- Move On to 1998 -- Move On to 1999

District Pages Header DCFRA Control Board Links Header

District of Columbia Executive Positions Available! If you're any darned good at all Your National Capital City needs you.

---

Get Netscape, Okay?
Otherwise you're missing out, bigtime. And you should only have the best.
Well, blimey, I got listed in Slate.

Other Voices, Other Visions are here.

What's happening here today? (this week for slow news days.)

Extremely scary and officious people insisted that I cease-and-desist in my attempts to scare normal people away from the District. And so, now my wild and wacky old page is here. I'd tell you to read it, but you're probably just interested in whether the monuments are still standing. Sure, the real estate is all still there, it's just in the process of changing hands.

.

The National Mall.

The Japanese Cherry Trees.

Welcome to Washington. You've always wanted to come here, and now here you are! Or maybe you're here.

You don't want to do the usual touristy things, or you've already done them? Washington is an interesting place. Like any city anywhere, it has its good side and its bad side. Increasingly, the cracks in the facade of respectability have begun to show themselves. Mayor Marion Barry, re-elected after his return from serving time for his videotaped cocaine use, promptly reverted to his tried and true method of securing power to himself. He quickly appointed personal friends, "long-time associates" and a lot of other losers, scaliwags and cronies to leadership positions in the municipal government where they promptly ran the city into the ground. At one point in time, the local utility company was powering-down streetlights for non-payment of bills and refusing to maintain traffic signals, so poorly mismanaged was the City of Washington. The water was declared unsafe to drink. The schools, once considered excellent in part because of their very high per-capita expenditures, not only continued a slide into physical disrepair to the point of judicially-mandated closures as unsafe, also were increasingly invaded by gangs of outsiders who roamed the halls freely, on one occasion severely beating an ROTC recruiter. As the summer of 1995 drew to a close, and winter closed in towards 1996, local conditions were coming to a head. With the blizzard of 1996, the mismanagement became apparent when the city was literally shut down due to the municipal government's completely appalling inability to even get the streets plowed. Combined with the deadlock in Congressional budget and funding processes, the Federal Government itself was shut down, twice, utterly cancelling any hopes of any quick Federal fix, and it may well be that the only thing which staved off open revolution in the city was close to three feet of snow covering impassable streets. The situation had grown grim to the point of impending disaster, and the blizzard might well be seen as a gentle push from the very gods, who carefully let us all know that if a mere snowfall could paralyze a Nation's Capital, the country itself stood on the brink of administrative collapse. While ideological battles raged within the hallowed halls of the Marble Zone, the elected representatives and their pampered assistants had not deigned to notice that the city in which they worked was so deteriorated that the former pomp of deliberations within the temples of democracy had taken on the air of a confederacy of apes amid ruins in a jungle.

Unrelenting pressure from outraged snowbound temporarily-unemployed Federal workers, local cognoscenti, various media, and even internet web-pages forced the creation of the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority, better known as the Control Board, which began to take emergency actions to fix Washington. Said actions have included the appointment of a former general to oversee the school systems (with a complete disempowerment of the School Board), firings of large numbers of municipal employees, scheduled future reductions-in-force, terminations of a great many Barry "associates" under whose care various departments had slid from mere fiscal chaos into utter disorder, and in general, while things are not getting much better, at least creditors are being paid.

As Mayor Barry said of the state of law-enforcement in the District, "Outside of the killings crime is actually down in the District". Well, maybe the reported crime was down, but that may well be due to the fact that most people just gave up on calling the police department. For one, they couldn't do anything - response times were on the order of an hour to two hours for assaults anywhere outside of the tourist zones, and due to the incredibly bad fiscal policies of Mayor Barry, over half of the cruisers were inoperable and many of those cruisers which were deployed had inoperable communications equipment, and the city's information systems are of a technical level appropriate to Zaire (there are interesting parallels between the looting of Zaire by Mobuto Sese Seko and the looting of the District by the Barry-Crony (tm) administration). At last, the Control Board decided that there might be something to the common allegations of Barry's cronies interfering with police prosecution of gang-violence and drug-dealing, and placed the police department outside of Barry's control, other than selection of the chief of police, Larry Soulsby. Mr. Soulsby promptly fired most of his top brass, which was long overdue. There will be extreme restructurings and personnel changes within the Metropolitan Police Department, which had only one out of ten officers actually on patrol, and a full third of the force had made no arrests whatsoever in the previous year.

The job is still incomplete, but where Washington was rapidly assuming the position of a fell harbinger of National Doom, we now have an increasing Federal Oversight presence, with assorted plans for rebuilding and restructuring.

All tourists should be aware, however, that Washington natives (although in some cases grateful that they didn't get a chance to personally experience a greatly-accelerated rehash of the Fall of Rome) are largely very resentful of the loss of autonomy, resentful of the fact that the Capital of a nation which prides itself on Democracy is now administratively an occupied colony of the United States. Home Rule is gone, up until the time when the streets can be made as safe as those of any other American city of comparable size. Many Washingtonians have long regarded tourists as at best a mixed blessing, as they are by far the greatest private-sector cash-cow for the region, which has almost no industrial production whatsoever. "Messing with tourists" (the actual terminology is not suitable for an informative page) has long been considered the sport that proves one to be a local. Despite the desperation for tourist revenues, caused by last year's disastrous tourist season, the rage at the occupation has in some sectors greatly elevated tensions and hostilities. Increased law-enforcement activity in some sectors has forced the former inhabitants of certain criminal ecologies into other sectors, and tourists can increasingly be expected to be prime prey for the desperate. Add to this an immense increase in heroin use and addiction, and the impending shutdown of all outpatient treatment facilities, and we have a recipe for disaster - however, it's one that is now being aggressively attacked by the newly unshackled Metro Police Department, in coordination with neighboring jurisdictions and assorted Federal agencies.

If you'd like some propaganda from the Mayor himself, here is his 1997 State of the District Address (9 April 1997).

If you want to read, from an unbiased source, precisely how badly and to what degree the Nation's Capital has deteriorated, please see this Washington Post article. (31 July 1997)

As part of the historic 1997-1998 Federal Budget agreement, it appears that the President and responsible members of Congress have decided that

• Hundreds of million in tax-breaks will be granted to the District, including a $5,000.00 tax credit to first-time homebuyers, and new businesses created after January 1998 (if emplaced in areas where more than 10 percent of the populace is below poverty level) would pay no capital gains taxes if held for five years or more and then sold, after doing 80 percent of their business in those areas.
• Mayor Marion Barry becomes largely ceremonial and loses the power to hire or to fire. Also, most importantly, those powers and others are to be handed to the Control Board, which is directed to bring in consultants to produce extremely swift changes in personnel, contracting, asset management and information technology.
• The present directors of the following agencies are to be reconfirmed by the Control Board (if the Board so desires), and the mayor's recommendations for those agencies are subject to Control Board approval. The mayor could fire those agency's heads only with the approval of the Control Board, which itself could fire or hire at will.
  The Agencies:
  • Police Department (already under the Control Board's authority)
  • Fire Department
  • Emergency Medical Services
  • Public Works
  • Administrative Services
  • Corrections
  • Human Services
  • Health
  • Consumer and Regulatory Affairs
  • Employment Services
  • Housing and Community Development
  • Public Schools (already under the Control Board's authority)
• The entire $4.9 Billion District Pension Shortfall is to be transferred to the Federal Government, thus removing the largest liability of the District.
• Lorton Correctional Facility (the District's prison complex) located in Northern Virginia is to be closed by 2001. The District is required to eliminate parole and make other changes to fit Federal truth-in-sentencing requirements. It must be noted that for years, much of the District's crime wave of terror was fueled by a pathetic system of revolving-door justice, where due to a lack of prison- or jail-space, persons already out on bail for multiple violent felonies were released on personal-recognizance bond ("word of honor") to re-offend, and the average time served for first-degree murder was, during the 1980s, three years before parole.
• The Federal government would pick up another 20 percent of the city's Medicaid expenses, creating a windfall (or lack of debit) of some $170 million dollars for health care for the poor. Federal officials would greatly increase their ability to input or control specific aid to the poor or disabled. Perhaps now there will be a lot less of the "dismal failure" as one Federal Judge described the city's mental-health program. Perhaps there will be less homelessness as well.
• A ten-year loan of $300 millions would ease the present cash-flow problems, which are astounding.
• The $660 million annual Federal payment to the District ends, being replaced by a "contribution" from the Federal government of $190 million per year starting in 1998.

Here is the full text of the District of Columbia Revitalization Plan, and here is Summary.

Thanks very much to the Washington Post.

Mayor Barry predictably reacted angrily, to the news of this done deal, but after all the Mayor has had two years to attempt to fix the city for the people who elected him, and for those entire two years all he has ever done is to drag his feet, occasionally kick and scream, while as a rule trying to play any card including the race card, which would excuse his two-decade-long program of cronyism, kleptocracy and institutionalized malfeasance. He himself has done almost nothing, and all of the notable improvements, such as they are, have been the result of the Control Board or citizen action. Under this agreement, the office of the Mayor is reduced to a largely ceremonial position.

The city is expected to become a feeding frenzy for some of the nation's best consulting firms, which will be responding to the mandate to the Control Board, which is under orders to not only fix things but to fix things quickly.

Mayor Barry, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and other local officials declined to attend the Presidential signing of the Budget bill - Barry stated that "it's like going to watch your own death."

For better or for worse, two decades of kleptocracy under the Barry Administration have officially come to an end.

Barry had recently forced Department of Public Works head Cell Bernardino to resign for cooperating with the Control Board, which directed Barry to reinstate him. Barry complied, and also complied with the Board's requests for placements in the other nine agencies.

Here is a list of the heads of the nine agencies (thanks to the Washington Post, once again.)

Department	Acting Heads
Administrative Services	Richard P. Fite replaces Dallas Evans
Consumer & Regulatory Affairs	W. David Watts replaces Hampton Cross
Corrections	Margaret A. Moore
Employment Services	F. Alexis Roberson
Fire & Emergency Services	Donald Edwards
Housing & Community Development	W. David Watts
Human Services	Jearline F. Williams replaces Wayne Casey
Public Works	Cell Bernardino re-instated
Public Health	Allan S. Noonan appointed by Barry July 16

Dr. Brimmer, a former member of the Federal Reserve Board and an economist, was quoted by the Post as saying that "...while the [control board] did not seek this responsibility, we will not shrink from it." The Board ..."will be required to move decisively and swiftly to improve management and public services within the District government. And we intend to do so."

Most of District local politics is essentially up in arms against what they see as a complete rescenscion of democratic principles, and even Delegate Norton (who originally supported and indeed to a great degree co-authored the District Revitalization Act) now denounces it, and grass-roots campaigns are being organized to march on Capitol Hill. Mayor Barry predictably joined in denouncing those who have stripped him of the power to further mismanage the Nation's Capital.

Now for the plus side of today's stories - At a closed-doors morning meeting of the Control Board (of which Mayor Barry said, upon being excluded, "I didn't need to be lectured to"), Chairman Brimmer said, more or less, "The District and its citizens, deserve better government. We intend to provide it." He also made it clear that the acting heads of the nine major city departments responding directly to the Board had better make rapid visible changes in the condition of the city agencies, or start looking for new jobs.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Mayor Barry's longterm policies of patronage, nepotism and cronyism were politically-astute at least insofar as regards his maintenance in office - now that the Mayor is rapidly becoming a Lame Duck, there is increasing distress and disturbance in the ranks of city employees - who are justifiably concerned that the kleptocratic form of "management" will indeed be replaced with a competitive meritocracy. No city of comparable size in the nation has had such a high outlay of cash, nor so bloated a middle-management class, as has had the District. Extreme reductions in force are possible, should an efficient management structure be devised and emplaced. Mayor Barry can expect adherents to his brand of "democracy", since after all electing Mayor Barry has tended to keep people on the City payroll who might have difficulties in securing employment elsewhere. If a "democractic" groundswell of grass-roots resistance or activism emerges, it won't be agitation for democracy, I am sure, but rather a resistance of barnacles to being cleaned from the ship of state to permit more streamlining.

Anyone entering Washington who "intend[s] to provide" better government to the District of Columbia had better watch their back.

Mayor Marion Barry, seeming oddly subdued, yesterday evidently decided to tone down the rhetoric wherein he likened his delimitation from control of most of the major agencies of city of Washington government, to a "rape of democracy", however reserving his right to "sound the alarm". DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton decided to give the Control Board and the Revitalization Act a year before returning to Congress with a demand that the "undemocratic straitjackets on the city" be removed. Noting that there's no ammunition, either pro- nor anti- the usefulness or efficacy of any of the Control Board's recent actions (or the Mayor's recent or not-so-recent inactions) in promoting a change-for-the-better in the Washington situaton.

She's decided to wait that year "because the city hasn't had time to show that things are indeed changing - or else nobody will listen to any bill that I propose", Norton is quoted by the Post.

Mayor Barry has also toned down his antipathy towards Board Chairman Brimmer, and for this among other things, he was applauded by Rep. Thomas M. Davis of Virginia.

One can only hope that he's serious about this. Time alone will tell.

Barry continues to claim responsibility for most of the changes in Washington over the last year or so. On the Today Show of 12 August, Katie Couric remarked, "Mayor Barry, as you well know, many people believe you are the problem, that you simply cannot run the city. It's in terrible shape. You've had your chance to get it under control and you've failed miserably."

In a masterful effort at spin-control at which he excels, Barry responded: "Most people reject that. This city is on the move. Of course we have problems. [But] crime is down by 20 to 25 percent. Streets are cleaner than ever before. Businesses are coming back to Washington. Development is happening downtown."

Barry seems to be claiming personal responsibility for Washington's relatively minimalistic inclusion in nationwide trends. Crime is down nationwide much more than in Washington. Violent crime in particular, outside of Washington (of which the Mayor once remarked "outside of the killings, crime is actually way down in Washington") has declined radically, with the exception of juvenile violence, long a mainstay of the District's "murder problem". Economic forces have reduced unemployment nationwide to a 25-year low, though unemployment remains high in Washington, especially in the poverty-stricken areas of Washington such as SouthEast Anacostia, where the Mayor's Summer Jobs program was once found to have spent exactly no money on summer jobs for disadvantaged youth, despite the Mayor's continual ballyhooing of the success of that program. While first-time home sales are up, primarily to childless couples of "yuppies" or investment combines, those homes have come on the market largely because of the precipitous flight of long-term middle-class residents, who in the last five years in the process of their flight reduced the city's population by fully one sixth, and its taxable (at 9 percent) income base by, some estimate, a full third.

It has also been noted that much of the recent increase in law-enforcement successes are quite probably more due to the Control Board's initial stripping of power away from Mayor Barry, wherein they gave free rein to Police Chief Larry Soulsby, removing him from the purview of the Mayor's power to hire and fire. Radical changes have occurred in the police department, and there were extremely visible shakeups throughout the department, among other things, officers are now expected to make arrests and are now being provided with equipment to do this.

Mayor Barry has consistently denounced the Republican Party, while touting his own "accomplishments": "I've been educating the American people, educating Washington." (The Control Board and assorted Federal judges disagreed; witness the recent disempowering of the School Board and the emplacement of General Becton to the head of the District Schools. It is widely understood that under Barry, Washington has quite blatantly been not educated.) "Now people are beginning to see that this was a pattern of the Republican Party... I was on BET last night, and I could tell from the tone of the questions that citizens are beginning to see how this rape occured, who did the rape. They're not looking at me. They're looking at the problem with the Republican Party. It's been very effective. I'm not finished."

Indeed, the Republican Party has been very effective. Less so with the District than with, for instance, ending Welfare-as-we-knew-it, with revitalizing the then-moribund American economy to the point of a prosperity unseen since the days of the Fifties, instituting policies which have vastly reduced violent crime, vastly strengthening America's ability to control the borders and stem the rising tide of illegal immigration, and in general making the country a much healthier, productive and safe place to live. Where a mere five years ago, the majority of Americans resigned themselves to "business as usual" and a slow decline of this nation and a speedy consignment to the ash-heaps of history, today we have the Republican Party to thank for a majority-satisfied resurgence of faith in our nation and its institutions. You'd think that Mayor Barry would realize that most of America is very much behind the new Republican Party and all of the good it's done. Only in Washington, the last stronghold of die-hard Democratic majority, are these changes left unseen. And now, thanks to the "very effective" Republican Party, it seems that change is at last coming home to Washington, which may soon again be the center of it all, rather than our national shame and the source of a huge sucking sound.

We can only hope that one of Mayor Barry's few remaining full-control responsibilities will show as many improvements as are expected in the departments and agencies no longer under his control; he does retain control of the city's snowplows, and this is expected to be a winter with more than the average snowfall. Hopefully, he can at least prevent a repeat of the unplowed-streets debacle which as much as anything contributed to mainstream and national public awareness of his inability or unwillingness to manage.

These nominations must be approved by the Control Board (DCFRA) and once approved, Mayor Barry will not be able to fire them.

The DCFRA "Control Board" has retained the executive search group Norman Roberts & Associates (of Los Angeles), who have successfully placed over 28 City Managers in the last year, to find a City Manager for the District of Columbia.

Technically, the City Manager will be the Chief Management Officer (CMO) of the DCFRA, and will be tasked with oversight and management authority over the nine city agencies removed from the Mayoral authority.

By law, the DCFRA Control Board has less than 60 days to fill the position. The requirements will be extremely exacting, and the position will be one of the most demanding ever. The DCFRA has similar time constraints on developing a management-reform plan for the entire District Government, and every day saved before deadline in the hiring of this new CMO will be a day that the new CMO can bring their knowledge, skills and abilities to the design of management reforms. At present, the Board is staffed primarily by accountancy and financial personnel, few of whom have large-scale management experience.

The incoming CMO faces daunting prospects. Years of mismanagement (some say an utter lack of management) in some agencies have left a system with few internal safeguards on revenue flows, and almost no useful accountancy nor audit trails. It seems likely that any of the consulting firms which will be examining the District's management and accounting systems will suggest top-down rebuilds of many of the agencies and departments. The new CMO must directly oversee this process.

The festering bitterness of long-time City of Washington employees may be expected to provide ample stumbling-blocks for any attempted bottom-up rebuilding, though this may not cause much of a problem. A top-down approach to a management reform might simply develop new systems, hire new personnel and test and tune the systems as start data approaches, and simply drop the new systems and many new personnel into place in the existing physical facilities. However, it is more likely that City employees will sort out into two classes - those who are willing to work harder, smarter, and better for their fellow Washingtonians - and those who are not. Presumably these last will be quickly sacked, and replaced by persons eager to do a good job under conditions of extreme and extremely-rapid change.

Charlene Drew Jarvis, Councilmember from Ward 4, instead took the wise course, suggesting that a course of prudence should be the order of the day.

CFO Williams notes that this is a one-time windfall, coming as the Federal Government makes its final direct payment to the City of Washington. Other budget savings which accrue to the District due to the Federal assumption of the costs of the pension-liability, court and corrections operatings costs, and increased Medicaid assistance are expected to amount to probably only $63 million in subsequent years. This leaves an approximately $130 million windfall.

It must again be stressed that nine major agencies have just been assigned to the oversight of the DCFRA (Control Board) and with the upcoming appointment of a Chief Management Officer ("City Manager"), those major agencies are scheduled for a speedy and massive reorganization. CFO Williams sensibly suggests the setting-aside of some $20 million into a "productivity bank", a sort of slush fund for the rolling-rebuild of city government. This is in my opinion an extremely worthy idea - clearly, despite the apparent willingness of the Federal government to open the purse strings to "get Washington fixed", the city will seem much more responsibly-managed if it takes care of itself with money already allocated to it. No need to repeat the former process of spend-and-beg. CFO Williams also suggests a set-aside of another $3.5 million for debt-service on proposed $50 million capital borrowing intended for road and school repairs.

DCFRA Control Board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer has alread stated to Mayor Barry that funds redounding to the Federal bail-out for Washington won't be used as operating funds for extant programs, many of which are characterized as being grossly expensive for the amount of results they produce, and in many cases are indeed characterized as being completely "broken". For instance, the absolutely vital Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) has, due to inefficiencies, understaffing and assorted irregularities, allowed an estimated $3 millions in inspection and licensing fees to go uncollected. In fact, a recent Post article detailed the similarities (but did not draw the comparison) to the ancient Imperial Chinese practice of hiring policemen: The Emperor would select the man reputed to be the most virtuous in a district, declare him to be the constable, and then would provide him with a sigil, an official stamp, absolutely nothing else, and admonish him to perform his duties faithfully on pain of death. It seems that the DCRA employees worked under similar contraints; there was only limited out-of-pocket expense reimbursements, no overtime, nor city fleet vehicles, available to the various licensing inspectors, leading to chronic underinspection of various facilities such as houses, apartment houses, and so forth, in in fact, where most jurisdictions inspect foodservice facilities at least monthly, in Washington it's unusual for a facility to be inspected more than twice a year, and in many cases, restaurants with the best previous inspection facilities are allowed to inspect themselves.

It may take all $20 million of CFO Williams' suggested set-aside just to revamp the DCRA. In an effort to completely revitalize the nine major agencies, it's highly likely that a huge infusion of revision and turnover will be required, and every available cent of this "windfall" of roughly $130 million should be squirrelled away against the coming storm. As for Barry's suggestions that some of these monies be used for programs such as his notoriously-ineffectual (it seems that last year, exactly nobody actually got a cent from the program) Summer Jobs program, considered emblematic of the cronyism and funds-shifting that characterise the Barry Administration, we agree with Chairman Brimmer that "...using these additional funds to support ongoing programmatic expenditures was inappropriate".

As part of the Revitalization effort, W. David Watts was named acting director of the DC Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), and his appointment to this position is expected to be confirmed by the DCFRA Control Board. He will then be a primary liason between the existing framework and the teams of management consultants who must be, by law, hired and working by approximately Hallowe'en. Already, Federal officials in HUD are moving to bring the DC DHCD up to speed, particularly insofar as would assist the HUD in making sure that the moneys in their block grants do indeed reach the intended recipients, and do so efficiently, and demonstrably/trackably so. As it is, part of the DC DHCD is essentially as conduit between HUD and the people who are intended to be benefitted by their dispensations of grants, and it behooves all concerned to see that this conduit is made accessible to the most needy, and that system-abusers are weeded out of the process, and also that red tape and inefficiencies are rooted out. Mr. Watts is reportedly eager to cooperate and welcomes Federal assistance in this reorganization, since clearly the streamlining of process can assure that the most money possible goes where it's most needed. And after all, that's what the job's about.

Despite a two-page letter from Mayor Marion Barry, alleging managerial inadequacies in her recent tenure as acting head of the City of Washington Department of Corrections, the DCFRA Control Board named Margaret A. Moore as the confirmed head of that troubled agency. The Department of Corrections is scheduled to be swiftly turned over to Federal authority as part of the District Revitalization Act which became law on 5 August 1997. The City's Lorton (Virginia) Reformatory in recent years has been rocked by scandals including religious schismatics delivering drugs and sex to inmates, allagations of total availability of weapons and narcotics, and has a reputation of being completely unsurvivable by other than those who essentially grew up in "Washington's only rural neighborhood". Corruption and apathy have been rumored as to be so entrenched that it is most likely that when the Federals take over, the facility will be quickly emptied and demolished. Certainly the City of Lorton has plans for the facility, which will probably end up as a public park once the structures have been razed.

Mayor Barry, independent of any Revitalization Act authority, is moving to transfer some 400 more (900 have already been transferred) medium-security prisoners to a Youngstown (Ohio) facility run by the Corrections Corp. of America, an outfit out of Tennessee. These prisoners are now being transferred under a one-year contract with a four-year renewal option, whihc means that depending on future events, they might be transferred into the Federal Corrections system in roughly one year, or in five. At any rate, though there have been allegations of mistreatment and abuses at the Youngstown facility, certainly inmate maintenance must be better than it would be at the Lorton facility, and it probably costs the District, excuse me, the Control Board and the Federal funding agencies, considerably less than would incarceration at Lorton.

Ms. Moore was confirmed by the DCFRA Control Board over the objections of Mayor Barry. It should be noted that she was appointed by Barry's predecessor in the office of Mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon (married in office, now Sharon Pratt Kelly), whose own term in office, mostly while Marion Barry was in jail or recovery, was not without scandal nor controversy - the mid-80s witnessed the infamous Adams-Morgan Riot, among other things, and in the early 1990s, the city went fairly rapidly to hell, though some will say that this was more due to policies of the previous administration (Barry's) which had acquired such inertia that they could not be speedily reversed. Washington became the "Nation's Murder Capital" under Barry, but retained that dubious distinction throughout most of Pratt-Kelly's term in office.

The Control Board, as directed by the Revitalization Act, had 30 days during which they were required to allow the Mayor to make non-binding recommendations for the heads of the nine major City Departments and Agencies which were placed under their direct control by the Act. The Mayor, true to form, did a great deal of foot-dragging and very few recommendations did he make. However, the Control Board confirmed four Acting Heads, who now take their orders directly from the Control Board, which has sole authority over these agencies now that the 30-day recommendation period has passed.

The DCFRA control Board, under the District Revitalization Act, has only three weeks to fill the remaining positions.

Unofficially, it seems that Richard Monteilh, formerly an official at the Atlanta Olympic Games, will be tapped to head the District's Department of Housing and Community Development. Mr. Monteilh was the Newark, New Jersey, chief administrator; the deputy commissioner of finance in Atlanta, Georgia; and assistant city manager for Savannah, Georgia. The official word of his selection has not yet been issued by the DCFRA Control Board. Mr. Montielh's credentials are impeccable; he holds a fellowship in public management from Yale and a senior executive fellowship from Harvard.

Citing the MPD's dismal closure rate (the precentage of cases closed, be they by arrest, dismissal or conviction) for murder in the City of Washington, police chief Larry Soulsby dismissed Captain Alan Dreher from the position of commander of the District's Homicide Unit, Monday 15 September.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Washington DC earned the dubious distinction of "the Nation's Murder Capital", a moniker that has, probably as much as anything else, contributed to the air of distate and occasional outright revulsion experienced by the vast majority of Americans who for a moment ponder the affairs of their Capital. At one time in the early 90s, the situation had deteriorated to the point where the Congressional Sergeant-at-Arms was slain literally on the steps of the Capitol Building, and insofar as I am aware, this is one of many cases that remain unsolved. No closure in this case, nor in, according to a report by homicide investigators drawn from across the nation, more than half the cases of murder in this city in the last decades.

People have not only been getting away with murder in Washington, but they're more likely to get away with murder than to get arrested. It is well known that if an arrest is not made within days of the crime, it is highly unlikely that an arrest will ever be made, and even in the early 1990s, less than half of all murder cases in Washington were closed. Again, closure does not imply that anyone was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced; it merely implies that the case is not up in the air, with the files abandoned to gather dust on the shelf marked "unsolved".

From the early 1990s on, however, closure rates have steadily declined from the abysmal 55-percent rate of 1992 to an astonishingly low 44-percent in 1996.

The Homicide Division's ranking oficers have consistently stated that one of the reasons for the abysmal closure rate has been the prevalence of witness-intimidation, a growing problem nationwide. Many of the killings in Washington have been essentially gang-related, though in the very early 90s, before the gangsters acquired marksmanship skills, an intolerably high percentage of killings were of innocent bystanders who simply happened to pick up stray rounds. At one time, fully-automatic weapons fire could be heard eching across town, and in 1993 you were statistically twice as safe in Beirut, Lebanon, as in SouthEast Washington.

The problem with witness intimidation was exemplified by the 1994 killings of FBI personnel right in the heart of downtown Washington, where a relative of one suspect entered the main police headquarters building bent on revenge and intimidation, and proceded to single-handedly wipe out most of the personnel involved in dealing with, specifically, unclosed cases. Since then, the homicide division has been distributed across the city.

An 8-member blue-ribbon advisory team composed of forensics experts and detectives from jurisdictions with high closure-rates advised Chief Soulsby on modern techniques, and analyzed deficiencies in the Metropolitan Police Department.

Among other problems, (as reported by the Washington Post) -

• Failure of detectives to attend autopsies of murder victims;
• Lost documents, such as fact-sheets, preliminary reports and depositions, and tracking sheets;
• Premature abandonment of investigations;
• Supervisor-sanctioned abuses of overtime-pay for court appearances, while at the same time overtime-pay was tightly regulated for actual investigation time;
• Extremely outmoded and occasionally antiquated investigative techniques and approaches;
• Failure to adhere to even the outdated procedures and techniques.

Chief Soulsby responded by, Monday, reassigning Captain Dreher, and on Wednesday, 17 September, by reassigning 17 homicide-detective supervisors. He's considering an outside-hire of homicide commander, which would reportedly be a first for the Metropolitan Police. "... I need someone with a degree in law-enforcement and years of experience and who is successful in closing cases," Chief Soulsby is reported as saying. He further remarked that this was "about professionalizing the police department".

It's certainly time for this - the FBI reports in their Uniform Crime Reports that the average closure rate for murder, nationally, is about 65 percent. So far this year, there have been 226 homicide cases, with arrests made in only 34 precent. That means that (presuming that each has only done one crime, and that this was their first) there are 149 murderers walking around downtown scott-free. That's something like one free murderer per every 3000 denizens of the District - and that is assuming that (and statistics do not support this presumption) that each of these persons has killed only once, and that one time was this year. However, with yearly murder-rates in the vicinity of 500-per-year for the last decade, and closure rates of less than fifty percent, that would mean that there are either 2500 successful murderers in Washington, or that a smaller number, emboldened by the fact that one is more likely to get away with it than to be caught, have gotten behind the learning curve and have become successful, even professional, in their deadly trade.

Add to this the former state of affairs, whereby persons awaiting trial in the District for violent felonies were released upon "personal recognizance bond" (basically they admit the charges are serious and promise to appear, no cash required), to quickly be re-arrested and again re-released, creating the infamous "Revolving Door" effect in the District judicial and correctional system, and you have a recipe for disaster. This provided not only ample opportunities and motivations for witness intimidation, but a clear and well-known perception that the entire legal and criminal-justice system in Washington had fallen through the cracks into an irremediable state of incompetence and uselessness. Washington's finest, once considered some of the Nation's Finest, had acquired a reputation as bumbling cloiseaus, and the criminal-courts legal system was referred to as "a joke".

Add to this the long-standing difficulties in the District Medical-Examiner's Office, which have included mismanagement, misplacing of files and results, antiquated equipment that in one case was alleged to have overlooked the fact that one victim had not only ingested three ounces of arsenic but also evidently gargled with plumber's pipe-cleaning lye solution, and even a refrigeration breakdown that left the City Morgue crawling with rats with the floors covered with stinking septic fluids from the rotting dead, and you have a murderer's paradise only waiting for the killers to notice the land of opportunity.

The Morgue has been brought up to speed, the police department has received increased funding and Federal assistance, and Chief Soulsby was the first to be cut free of Mayor Marion Barry's political and financial apron-strings, and fairly sweeping changes have been made in the Metropolitan Police Department, and there is all evidence that it may be possible to turn this city around, at least it may be possible to do something to punish those who have, for a decade, turned Washington into a killers'-playground and the Nation's Murder Capital. Chief Soulsby's willingness to listen to outside advice and consider outside hirings must be commended.

Oh, I just noted I made a little mistake with my math up above - with a closure rate of only 34 percent this year, it seems that so far, in Washington, you're about twice as likely to get away with murder as you are likely to not get away with murder.

Sleep well, your Nation's Capital is in safe and competent hands.

Washington City Councilman, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jack Evans, summed it all up nicely: "You just don't know who was in on this. ... No one should be earning $101,000 [per year] in overtime".

Police Chief Larry Soulsby admits, "The bottom line is the officers were not supervised and the supervisors were apparently violating rules." He also admitted that "Apparently some people were" running a scam during the fiscal year that ended last September (30 September 1996 closed that fiscal year).

And what a scam! Six million, that's right, $6,000,000 dollars from a department-wide overtime budget of roughly $18 million, seems to have been paid out to nearly 90 detectives and investigators. It seems that twelve of them took home more pay than did the police chief. In one case, one detective took home triple his base pay, implying that he worked roughly 20 hours a day including weekdays and holidays.

Officers who work other than day-shift are required to attend court appearances on their own time, for which they are reimbused in the form of overtime pay. Judging from some of the take-home pay reported, some detectives must have practically lived in the courtroom. Either they're the heavy hitters and truly-dedicated, missing not a single court case for the thousands of arrests they must have made, or there's something a little askew here. Considering that less than half of the previous three-years-worth of murder-cases have been closed, those court cases must have dragged on and on and on. Six million dollars worth?

Chief Soulsby is reported by the Washington Post as saying "Officials are making as much money as the troops. If they're over there making the money along with them, who's supervising?"

It's a good question. "It's one of the reasons I replaced all of the supervisors. We need management and supervision and accountability in the homicide branch," Soulsby said. Chief Soulsby's position paid him, last year, $99,131.

The Washington Post quotes one Jamin Raskin of American Univeristy's College of Law as saying: "The big trade going on here is democracy for efficiency. ... Among the reason that people typically like democracy is that it's transparent. Without it, the workings of government become clouded and opaque." Indeed, there is a well-known polar dichotomy within the field of police work; the "crime-control" model tends to be extremely tough on crime, but is in the extreme as likely to imprison the innocent as to imprison the guilty. The other extreme, the "due-process" model of law-enforcement, gives prime consideration to the rights of those not yet convicted... yet in the extreme mode of the "due-process model", sufficiently clever criminal-defense attorneys can cause a near collapse of society through a hamstringing of the police.

When asked by Committee members how it was that MPD Homicide officers were able to rack up phenomenal overtime (amounting in some cases to twice their annual straight-time pay), Chief Soulsby reiterated his statement of earlier this week, noting that there was a huge problem with supervision in the unit, which led to the dismissal of the supervisors in question. It was also disclosed that many of the detectives and investigators in the Metro Homicide Unit had essentially been detailed to the US Attorney's Office, which was underfunded and unable to field enough investigators on its own. This unfunded detail caused District officers so-detailed to file for payment from the Metro Police Department's overtime fund. In effect (if I read this right) the US Attorney's Office was sponging resources from the District.

Direct funding for US Attorney's Office investigators is expected to be approved, if Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC's delegate to Congress) has anything to do with it. In a televised segment broadcast on last-night's Fox TV 10:00 News, she was absolutely furious.

It was not disclosed (or at least not broadcast) exactly what those officers had been doing for the US Attorney's Office. Delegate Norton was quite distinct in her statements that she'd really rather have those detectives out on the street solving crimes directly for her constituents of the District.

The Washington Post and other media, along with the general public, have increasingly been cut out of the decision-making loop. The DCFRA Control Board has been conducting its deliberations in private, and with Chief Soulsby's shake-up of the MPD and issuance of this secrecy order, one gets the feeling that this may be either the calm before a storm or perhaps the silence before a scream for help. One also gets the feeling that someone has, after a long sleep (as it were) awakened to find that their house has been ransacked and covered with filth, and has decided to pull the blinds while cleaning up. While it is known that a report by a special team of outside investigators was a prime cause of the shake-up in Homicide, it is not known who the investigators were, and with Chief Soulsby "playing his cards close to his vest", their identities are expected to remain a mystery. Chief Soulsby has refused to release to the media any copies nor even fragments of this report. Perhaps he's taking a clue from DCFRA Control Board Chairman Andrew F. Brimmer, who said, "We provide ample information when it is ripe for public release." Chairman Brimmer further stated, in another context, that "...[we] conduct much of our work in working sessions that are not open to the public, but we vote in public."

In other news, a proposed cut in the District Budget for Fiscal Year 1998 (a $300 million cut) has been dropped. However, there is an extreme problem with the measure as it stands.

The District's various agencies, particularly the management tracking systems and accountability systems, are mainframe-based and commonly use what is known in the computing trade as "weird iron", which as a rule refers to "legacy systems" or "white elephants". Just as the National Airport has recently suffered several shutdowns of RADAR service due to the antiquation of the controlling computers and related peripherals, the management-tracking and accountability functions of the District are in extreme disrepair because, among other things, parts for some of the mainframes are unavailable (many of the machines are practically sole-survivor relics of defunct contractors), the routines are far from industry standards (the traffic-ticket computer runs a language that nobody knows, and is certainly not Year 2000 compliant), and even archival format standards are widely divergent.

This entire $300 million in salvaged appropriations could easily be blown on building "newer" versions of these legacy systems. DCFRA Chairman Brimmer is adamantly opposed to senseless expenditures on "improving" the extant system. It would be throwing worse money after bad money, akin in preposterousness to the famous oxymoron (actually broadcast in 1995) "Disney Corporation announces that it is, at long last, going to modernize TomorrowLand (tm)". This was that giant corporation's response to their failure to keep that famous attraction, intended to be a walk-through vision of the future, up to even the dated standards of the mid-70s.

This insistence that outrageous sums be spent to repair crippled white-elephants reeks of "pork"; this can only be intended to prop up some former behemoth of the computer industry now fallen on sad times, which alone has sufficiently-antiquated standards and equipment as to be able to repair these defunct dinosaurs of "information systems".

The Post quotes Chairman Brimmer as saying, "[that] is roughly equivalent to telling IBM to take another look and see if you can upgrade electric typewriters to serve the function now served by the most sophisticated computers around... It is a throwback that would be a total waste of money." [emphasis mine.]

Earth Operations Central couldn't agree more. We could probably, with two or three Linux Boxes, replace the entire "tickets, wants-and-warrants" system, outside of the dumb-terminals, for roughly $8,000.00 to $12,000.00, with all of that money going into hardware - Linux is free and the most advanced operating system available for small computers (including the Intel-based PC). There's absolutely no reason why each of the City of Washington's nine major agencies shouldn't have a decent very-modern minicomputer such as a Sun UltraSPARC. For $300 million, every single agency in the District could probably get a state-of-the-art minicomputer.

For $300 million, you could buy 100,000 brand new Texas Instruments laptop computers complete with a Ricochet Wireless Modem, which incidentally uses military-class RSA encryption. I'm not too sure, but I think that's one for every District citizen old enough to read.

Please write your Congressperson and demand a halt to this foolish and preposterous notion of wasting money on retention of legacy systems that will cost at least 100 times the cost of a modern system.

I must note here that I do have a personal interest in this particular issue - yours-truly has a neat little idea about using a few Linux Boxes running the PostGreSQL system as a database server for "want-and-warrants" inquiries, to be fielded directly to officers via Ricochet Wireless Modems to Newton Messagepad 2000 handheld computers, which are pen-based palmtops with built-in Netscape Navigator. Imagine that! Police officers with secure encrypted digital communications capable of rapidly downloading text or graphics, to wherever they need it the most, over a secure wireless intranet... for about $3000.00 per field unit, with the central server costing about $5000.00 in hardware for a dual-processor Pentium Pro mini-RAID system, all off-the-shelf technology running a free operating system that comes with all source-code included, written in very modern and extremely common C and C++ language.

Or you can spend $300 million repairing "weird iron".

But better yet, let a decent and established local firm with a good reputation do a package deal for one of the smaller DC agencies, and if that goes well and everyone's satisfied, spend the $300 million repeating this process.

Washington DC has long been plagued by violent crime. It has always been a very dangerous place, but with the arrival of the late 1980s and the explosion of freebase cocaine ("crack") nationwide, a combination of factors turned the streets of our Nation's Capital into an ongoing bloodbath which was, per-capita, twice as dangerous as Beirut during the height of the bloody conflict in Lebanon in the early 80s.

While in the early years of the crack explosion the streets were effectively lined with money for anyone who could get a product out to the street, towards the end of the 80s and particularly throughout the grim economic times of the early 1990s, there was a consolidation of lines of distributions, and vicious wars were fought over distribution territories or "turfs". The sound of automatic-weapons fire could be heard even on Capital Hill, and in some parts of town, mothers routinely bedded their children in the bathtubs in the occasionally-vain hope that some highpowered handgun slug would be stopped by the steel. At one point in time, as many people killed by gunfire in Washington were killed by stray rounds as were killed intentionally. This is no longer a problem. The "gangstas" have gotten to be pretty good shots by now.

The police proved remarkably-ineffectual in even responding to the scenes of the crime, and not surprisingly so. A slow response from all responsible parties had left the police department understaffed and underequipped with aging cruisers and nonsecure communications and old-style revolvers, while the criminal "posses"' outrageous tax-free incomes permitted them to roam the streets with state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment and fully-automatic weapons of war such as Tech-9 and Uzi machine-pistols. I personally watched someone walk a street one July 4th discharging a "streetsweeper" automatic shotgun, and it was four hours before a policeman showed up on a small motorcycle.

By the mid-1990s, however, it had become clear that open warfare, while eminently-useful in securing turf, tended to frighten away the customers. The guns are still out there, being held in reserve for the most part, rather than have the customers remain huddling terrified in their suburban homes.

That doesn't mean, however, that the guns aren't routinely used to settle old scores, or "beefs". Other weapons are becoming prevalent as well, ones which are considerably more silent and definitely more difficult to detect than are bullets. While a certain amount of deaths probably result from robberies, most commonly non-domestic murders can be reliably attributed to this or that final settlement of a drug-debt or a turf-dispute. Everyone on a particular block may well know that someone got shot, and know who did it, but too commonly, nobody will talk because they fully believe that the victim had it coming to them or are terrified of retribution from the perpetrators should they step forward and implicate the perpetrator and/or testify.

And well they should be terrified.

The NDIC/Justice report clearly notes that District homicide detectives routinely failed to follow up leads where suspects had been clearly identified and were in many cases already in custody. This is clearly insupportable and flies in the face of common-sense, or does it?

Perhaps the street's attitude of "they had it coming" had penetrated to many of the detectives in question. Or perhaps, noting that this was violence perpetrated exclusively amongst the most-lawless and vicious of the "gangstas", figured it was simply the common-enemy killing itself off. Or perhaps, one has to question some of the basics of Washington DC: The city's poorest and most crime-plagued neighborhoods are quite often very close-knit, and quite often interrelated. Washington is famous for its huge extended families. It's also famous for the fact that there are no secrets here and everyone knows everyone else's business. From these assumptions one can proceed to the difficult question: How many murder investigations have been dropped simply because the suspect was a part of the investigating detectives' extended families? There have been longstanding and repeated allegations that during an early-90s hiring spree the Metrpolitan Police Department was less-than-diligent in their checks of applicants' backgrounds and histories.

Tough questions such as this inevitably emerge after reading the NDIC report. It's inconcievable that an entire Homicide division of roughly 100 detectives could be as utterly incompetent as is shown by this Report, and therefor one can only assume corruption and culpability. Certainly this latter implication is shored up by the recent discoveries of an ongoing scam whereby a large group of homicide detectives and investigators were receiving overtime pay exceeding $100,000 per year. How far has the corruption gone?

That is the question that Captain Alan Dreher would have had to ask himself when he received his copy of the report back in January of 1996. What did he know that caused him to shelve this report without passing it on to his superiors? One can only hope that he did not pass a copy on to people to whom he must answer who were not only outside of the police chain-of-command, but clearly in opposition to law-enforcement. At any rate, the report never went where it was supposed to go.

Police Chief Larry Soulsby and other inquiring minds want to know. Some of the people who want to know doubtless include the majority of District taxpayers, and everyone involved with the whole mess. I also suspect that Congress wants to know. I further suspect that as details are brought to light even the executive Branch and possibly the military will want to know. (If the full details are ever brought to light, the entire city might have a nervous breakdown in the same way and for the same reasons as might a man who emerges from the ocean to look back and realize that all day long he's been swimming with sharks.)

That's why as of now there are new additions to the force, whose immediate job is to bring closure to those murders already solved in an 18-month-old report from the NDIC. These new additions include 10 FBI agents, 10 DEA agents, and two BATF agents. There are also a number of Narcotics Division officers to be detailed into Homicide.

It's clear that in the District, there is an extreme linkage between drugs, death, and corruption. It's thus extremely appropriate that the long-separated (why?) venues of homicide and narcotics are to be combined.

I predict that as investigations proceed, and arrests are made, that information will come to light that will expose a scandal of proportions unseen since the Prohibition, and of such depth and sinister implications as to be unconsidered even by most conspiracy-theorists. It's well-known that if you want to clean house in the manner mandated by Congress, you have to bring in outside blood. I suspect that this importation of Federal Agents will expose a web of payoffs and complicity that would make incest look admirable by comparison.

First off, the "cold case" squad, responsible for cases which could not be immediately closed, will be expanded and will have significant new allocations of personnel and equipment.

Secondly, the homicide training unit of the departmental academy will be re-opened, and will begin teaching the latest in procedures and protocols to homicide detectives.

Third, all detectives will immediately receive a "homicide kit" that will contain a voice-recorder, a Polaroid (tm) camera and also a cellular phone with a pager and voice-mail capabilities.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, new record-keeping procedures will be implimented. After the latest fiasco wherein a document which essentially solved over 100 murders languished unlogged and uncirculated for some 18 months, this has to be regarded as essential. Front-to-back logging and indexing of all documents will not only aid in the information process for the division, but the new records facility, which will be a secure central-files facility with card-key access and secure camera systems will assure that none of these mysterious records-suppressions and "de-filings" recur. It is well known within the law-enforcement community that as many arrests are made through so-called "data-surveillance" as through almost any other investigative technique, and if there is indeed corruption and evidence suppression within the division, the records-office is the place for any culprit to use an insider to clean up their "data trail". Cover-ups should be much more difficult (outside of chain-of-command complicity) with a secured central-files facility.

Chief Soulsby also announced a new policy, which I won't mention here since, in my humble opinion, he forwarns and thus forearms the more experienced and "professional" killers. Personally I liked the former air of secrecy; "keep 'em guessing" sometimes gets the best results.

One policy announced which I certainly applaud and will pass on is this: Chief Soulsby seems to be leaning well-towards a strong stance for community-based policing. The victim-assistance programs, often considered something of a joke, will be expanded, and also there will be increased communication with homicide-victim's families. This makes sense - quite often the leads which could resolve a case will be supplied by relatives of the deceased.

One note of caution. The homicide kits which have been proposed for issue to homicide detectives do not, in my opinion, go far enough in the field of security. I refer to those cellular phones with voice-mail and pagers. Recent incidents wherein Speaker-of-the-House Newt Gingrich had his cellular conversations intercepted by ordinary citizens, and the recent ABC News disclosure that hackers had cracked the Secret Service "messaging pagers" and had kept a running-transcription of data which placed Presidential security at extreme risk must be considered. Voice-mail is widely considered the "most hackable" of all distributed telecomm services and messaging-pager traffic is as easily "stolen" as are people's cellular numbers. Before Chief Soulsby commits to any particular brand of portable telecomm, he should consult with such groups as the infamous 2600 group, whose "Emmanuel Goldstein" went public with their compromise of the Secret Service's messaging pagers as a public service.

Giving regular cellular telephones to detectives would be, in many respects, just about like giving them megaphones to shout across town at each other - any data essential to the case so transmitted, if intercepted by an interested party, could be used to thwart investigations, or indeed to put officers at extreme risk. Even the spread-spectrum models are not immune to being "cloned", with similar risk-factors entailing - although one must consider that anyone in possession of the technology and the skills to do this, and using it, should possibly be considered a threat to national security as well as a mere danger to the local police - this is, after all, Washington DC. If such a person is a killer as well as a technically-competent eavesdropper... images of a James Bond super-villain spring readily to mind. (Particularly-so in light of recent statements made by FBI head Louis J. Freeh and other top administration officials pointing out that it seems that the Russian Mafia has at their disposal many former KGB officers and people with PhDs in abstruse technical fields. Selling access to police communications to local criminals might be just their style.) I recommend that all officers being issued such messaging equipment be strongly advised that while spread-spectrum phones are indeed more secure than are regular cellular-phones, still a great deal of caution must be urged, and non-secure-line protocols must be followed.

We still would like to see the development of, and force-wide deployment of something like a beltcom (tm, yours truly). Once again, a decent laptop with a Ricochet wireless modem running internet voice-conferencing software and PGP voice and data encryption would provide military-class voicecom, e-mail and data security to investigators, and an encrypted-secure intranet would ensure total accountability with redundant copies of searchable electronic-format data.

If the MPD would like me to stop giving them free technical advice on a public web-page, they're always free to send me PGP mail. If they don't know what that is, it's no wonder there's only a 34-percent closure rate so far this year.

Why all of the well-researched free technical advice? "Because We Care".

There are few areas of the United States which are more staunchly Democrat than in the Washington Metropolitan Region. During the first half of this century, Washington was a sleepy Southern town, and a fairly small one - but subsequent expansion from the War Effort in the 40s, the expansion of government in the 1960s, and in particular the immense expansion of the Welfare state throughout the period of roughly 1964 to 1996 created a voting population that continually propped up the party from which grew the Hand That Feeds. Yet in a classic failure to understand the "Tragedy of the Commons", none seemed to realize that by voting for the people who relied upon that failure to understand, they voted for their own destruction - when the Hand That Feeds' Food is itself only supported through the body-politic, voting for more Food is voting for one's own slow death through a leechly attrition. But like those who return again and again to sample the dubious pleasures of the vampire's kiss, the nation at large and the Washington Metropolitan Region in particular returned again and again to cast their votes to the Democrats, for their expansion of Big Momma Government, and in particular for the immensely bloated social "benefits" programs that very nearly, over the last thirty years, sucked this country to death.

And boy did the result suck. Everybody seems to realize it, too - and in 1994 and in 1996 again, just for confirmation, almost no politician was elected who did not have as a part of their platform, the elimination of Welfare as we know it.

One notable exception to this rule is the City of Washington's elections.

You couldn't get elected head of animal safety in this town, even in a plague of rabies-infested rats, if you speak against Welfare. The town is and has been for at least two generations dependent upon Welfare only slightly-less than it is still dependent upon the presence of the main force of the United States Federal Government.

One of the few saving graces of Welfare is that, where tiny babies are concerned, Welfare does pay the mother to stay home and take care of her children. That is, after all, what it was first designed to do.

However, the new laws which force an end to Welfare-as-we-knew-it require a search for work, and a mother with a babe-in-arms can hardly work properly. And the new laws have been remarkably successful, in general fair, and in general quite humane - and it is in this last humaneness that we find at last the fatal flaw in the process.

The law, in its humaneness, exempts those who cannot find adequate (which is to say, fit for human beings) child-care, from the process of work-search and eventual employment. What's a mother to do if she can't find a place to keep her kids?

All around this town there's a sudden new boom in the child-care industry. Personally, I suggested this some time ago - that I simply couldn't understand why perhaps ten women seeking to leave Welfare couldn't select two of their number to care for the children of the other eight while the eight sought work - and in rotation, eventually everyone would have work, with those with days off occasionally caring for the others' kids, or possibly even paying the two to go into a fulltime business caring for the children of their friends. Makes sense to me - but of course there's always the question of licensing and qualifications.

Forget that concern. The City of Washington Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), possibly the most understaffed and overworked of DC agencies, in an article from the Washington Post, stands revealed as being completely unable to regulate the inspection or licensing of child-care facilities.

Would a co-operative of ladies pooling their time and resources to take care of each-others' kids need a license to operate? Well, technically, they probably do - but most DC day-care centers have expired licenses - and with over 350 day-care centers and hundres of home-daycare operations in town, the DCRA has exactly five unsupervised inspectors to check on licensing or conditions of these facilities.

Welfare reform simply cannot work if a parent cannot be assured that her child is safe while she's at work. Thus, the City of Washington, by failing to beg, borrow, or steal the money to ensure that every mother knows her child is safe, effectively assures that welfare reform is not going to work in Washington. And then the Democrats of Washington can point out the failures as being the result of some essential flaw in the Republican plan to get everyone off to work. And having blamed the Republicans, they can get themselves elected. That's not going to work this time.

The working parents of Washington, and the parents of Washington who want to work, must either storm the offices of the DCRA and demand that the city close facilities that cannot provide adequate care for their children, or they must demand of the DCFRA Control Board and the School Authority that the City should provide centralized facilities, effectively licensed and overseen by the proper regulatory authorities with all due diligence, which can take their kids off of their hands while they go off to work.

I personally favor this latter idea.

A great many parents do look forward to the day that their child turns six, because they know that the child will be off in school, not only getting an education, but being out of the parent's hands for that time. I can't see why the schools shouldn't be able to extend the lower age-limit downwards, and serve not only kindergarten, but preschool and for that matter, toddler daycare.

Or perhaps the City should create some sort of new authority, similar in scope to the school system, but exclusively concerned with daycare for children too young to be in the regular school system. As it is, there is a two-agency system overseeing the District's child-care industry. And perhaps therein lies the problem. The Department of Human Services (DHS) is responsible for paying for daycare sought by Welfare parents, and do not seem to care nor to be aware of which facilities are operating without licenses. Also, they pay less than half of the average area-wide fee for daycare. Affluent parents can pick and choose to which facilities they'll remand their precious young, but the District's poorest residents are stuck with whichever facility is willing to take on "DHS kids". Facilities which take in only $21.50 per-child/per-day cannot be expected to be in the most attractive possible conditions, not in a city famous for high expenses. It's no wonder if those who know they can evade regulatory sanction, do.

But all of those children of all of those women being moved off of Welfare need to be somewhere, right? And so the City makes no effort to close down faclities which are essential to the future livelihoods of those whose Welfare is due to expire. And some of these facilities do indeed deserve to be closed down, if any of the Post's reported violations are true - in some of the facilities, children are being malnourished at the crucial ages where most of a persons' brain-growth occurs - lead paint chips off of walls, children use cockroaches for playthings, and dangerous playground equipment invites potentially-deadly accidents. Levying fines on the facilities has no effect; generally the conditions are so poor at these places because the facilities are so strapped for cash. Years after the levies, fines often remain unpaid, and despite expired licenses, the facilities remain open.

Welfare reform cannot possibly succeed if the parents are forced into the workplace to watch their children grow up stupid through inadequate school meals, or unhealthy because of exposure to filth or unsanitary conditions. Everybody loses in this situation. In particular, since the present situation is one where the parent has to pay personally for care in a venue that is de-facto unregulated, this is a completely unfair economic segregation which clearly discriminates against the poorest, and with potentially lifelong effects. At least under Welfare, children were generally well cared-for. So we must develop a system where conditions are the same in all facilities, and the regulations applied equally to all - and this can only happen under a system where everyone pays in something, and the wealth is redistributed, without creating dependencies such as were seen under Welfare.

The first move is to bolster the DCRA inspection teams, get them out there - not necssarily writing tickets and issuing fines, just simply finding out what is the biggest problem with each facility or operation. Find out which facilities have the greatest strengths. See if facilities can't be pursuaded to pool resources for economy of scale. Just get more people out there.

Please see this excellent Series of Articles from the Washington Post.

8 October 1997
Dope and guns sit in an unguarded toolshed. Forensic-medical evidence rots in sweltering heat, creating a biohazard. Police fuel is routinely stolen by civilians and off-duty officers. Nearly ten percent of the Metropolitan Police Department's vehicle fleet "cannot be located". Mid-level officers are detailed to do low-level clerical work.

A report from Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Inc (the international consulting firm retained by the DCFRA Control Board to overhaul the beleaguered Police Department), details these and many other failures. Primarily these are failures of disorganization - in any group as large and charged with such a variable task as is the MPD, a bit of disorganization is to be expected. But total Chaos? That's what was found.

The Washington Post reports DCFRA Control Board Vice-Chairman Stephen D. Harlan as saying: "The culture of city government has been allowed to disintegrate to a very, very low level .... the management of various [police] departments - technology, fleet, warehouse - is in a great state of disrepair. There is a sense of almost being overwhelmed .... When you don't have controls, you have an opportunity for severe mischief. If someone had appropriated drugs, cash and property, we honestly wouldn't know. [emphasis mine]

In another context, Harlan said: "We just have a huge task".

This is a statement probably less reflective specifically of the Police Department, than it is of the state of the City of Washington as a whole. It has been such observations, over at least a decade, by persons of all ranks both within and without the local government, which have paved the way for the receivership of the City and the appointment of the DCFRA Control Board. But until Mayor Marion Barry was officially stripped of most of his ability to enable obfuscation and "kleptocracy", the depth of deterioration was unknown. One of the things at which Mayor Barry has been most consistently capable has been misdirection and a shirking of responsibility. It has been rumored elsewhere with a degree of levity that Ronald Reagan might well have learned his infamous "Teflon" abilities at the feet of the Master, Marion Barry, but this is not a supportable statement... but it is a fact that outside of one small stint in lockup, nobody has ever been able to get anything to stick to the Mayor. Everything's too disorganized for any documentation to be assembled reliably... perhaps by design.

But one little bit of Ronald Reagan's political philosophy is demonstrated in the clerical processes of the Department: "over-regulation leads to inefficiency and eventual organizational collapse." A clear clerical trail and documentation of process are all admirable and indeed the essential traits of any functional (or more importantly, accountable) bureaucracy, but according to the Booz-Allen report, the internal procedures of the Department are grossly over-regulated with archaic requirements, many of which seem to at-best only tangentially-related to the actual process of policework. In one unit, unnecessary paperwork accounted for one-third of the workday.

The report also notes that in the Fleet division (where some 87 of the Department's supposed 1243 vehicles "can't be located") there are few certified mechanics, and over-regulation by the City has made it almost impossible to fire even those workers known to have caused catastrophic failures of Department fleet vehicles. Also, Booz-Allen consultants were unable to find out who, if anyone, was actually "in charge" at the fleet garages. As with the Homicide division, there appears to be an extreme problem with overtime and supervision, or lack thereof. As it is, police vehicles spend almost 60 hours "in the shop" for every hour they are actually in service. This tends to imply that the police vehicular presence is somewhat lower than it might be at optimum. I admit that I am slightly curious as to how Booz-Allen arrived at these particular figures on vehicular downtime - elsewhere they remark that there is "no ability to account for usage" of police vehicles and fuel. But one can assume that the police cruisers are, by and large, spending a lot of time in the shop - police vehicles are very commonly the victims of a great deal of wear-and-tear, especially on such horribly-maintained streets as are the norm in the District - and the average age of a District Police Fleet vehicle is five years.

Police Chief Larry Soulsby said, and most will agree, "These are things that have been wrong for 20 years. They didn't occur overnight."

In the following section, a variety of solutions are proposed - some of which are those from the report, some of which are my own.

Solutions proposed by Booz-Allen:

• Spend approximately $75 million to reform the department to be geared towards efficiency.
• Reform the prisoner transport process - as is, 26 fulltime officers spend some 52,000 labor-hours annually. This time should be reduced by 60 percent.
• Replace 58 sworn officers now monitoring prisoners with civilian guards, and redeploy the officers to the streets.
• Acquisition of new buildings or leases - presently the departmnet pays far higher than market rates, and many of the buildings have been found to be positive health-risks to officers, as well as occasionally violating fire-code regulations.
• Cash seized and held as evidence should be, once properly documented, stored in interest-bearing accounts.
• Much more property seized should be auctioned, with a great reduction in paperwork accompanying this procedure.
• Cut staff and streamline procedure at warehouse operations.
• Halve the number of canine units.
• Eliminate a few squads entirely (redeploying these officers to the streets), including a community-activities squad.
• Completely revamp the present system of handling citizens' complaints against police officers. The present system is conducted entirely internally to the police department and is fraught with perils of "potential conflict of interest". A high probablility of compromise of confidentiality was found, along with a substantial likelihood of potential for officer retaliation against complainants. An independent civilian agency or firm should be developed for handling and investigating these complaints.
• Requirement for college degrees for ranking officers in chain-of-command. It must be noted that alone among the Metropolitan Region, Washington DC has no requirements that all police officers have a minimum of a BS in a social science with at least a major concentration in law-enforcement. It must be noted that in neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland, for at least ten years all officers have been required to have college degrees, and a very high percentage have Masters degrees in law-enforcement specializations. Montgomery County is almost murder-free and all crimes have a very high closure rate. (This comparison may be unfair - Montgomery has an unusually high percentage of degreed citizens, and an unusually-high average income.)

My own suggestions:

• Immediate beefing-up of security at the contraband storage facility, complete with full-time video surveillance, with a secret local standby detail ready to respond to the inevitable attempt (now that this report is out) by criminals to either regain their seized contraband, destroy evidence, or to acquire the contraband seized from other criminals. (As I recall there was some years ago a huge problem with sloppy storage and continuous thefts resulting in dismissal of a fairly high percent of contraband cases.) It's probably of particular importance to assure safe storage of seized weapons.
• Assurance of proper storage of forensic-medical evidence. I don't know what would be the health risks of breathing the fumes of, for instance, decomposing HIV-infected semen samples drawn from rape victims, but it can't be good for you. It would probably also be an essential to the legal closure case, and rendered forensically useless by decomposition. Also, increasingly arcane technologies, both biological and technomedical, are being used in facilitation of crimes. Proper storage of forensic-medical evidence is essential in early detection of such trends and identification of the victims of such, and most importantly, arrests and questioning of persons deploying such technologies, and the interdiction of such technologies. For instance, rohypnol or "burundanga", if detected in medical samples, might give a better path to long-term imprisonment than would a reliance upon the testimony of a person raped under the influence of chemicals known to impair memory.
• Interlockings of civilian and Police Department personnel, under separate chains of command with specific points of liason, subject to review and oversight by at least one other independent agency. There have long been allegations of bribery, cover-up, nepotism and cronyism within the police department as well as within the larger District bureaucracy. Multipartite command and control structures might provide a series of checks-and-balances trending towards efficiency and trustworthiness.
• Emergency fallback plans in case of any increase in chaos prior to a successful restructuring of the Police Department.

The Metropolitan Police Department is far from "utterly hopeless" as some have suggested. However, any agency of this size, and possessed of such an huge inertia as has been left as legacy of 20 years of slothful management under the Barry Administration, will take some time to turn around and get back on track. Booz-Allen, among all of their fault-finding, also found room for hope. They cited the department positively for having "embraced reform".

9 October 1997
I've been saying this for years, but being known as the local lunatic and village idiot, anything I've said on the matter has of course been utterly discounted, and indeed probably taken as proof positive that conditions were opposite whatever I said. But let the same exact statements come from Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Inc., (the powerhouse international consulting firm retained by the DCFRA Control Board to investigate the Metropolitan Police Department and suggest management reforms) - and the city leaders take heed.

But this is about far more than the sleepy southern town of the City of Washington. The City of Washington has very little importance in the grand scheme of things, with one exception. It is not a major port, there is no manufacturing, and any purpose that it serves, save one, is better served by other cities in the region. To what does Washington owe its continued existence?

Washington is the seat of the United States Federal Government.

Washington is the Nation's Capitol, and one would hope that it should be the "bellwhether" of the Nation. Instead, despite the gleaming marble of the Monumental Core, and the stately dome of the Capitol rising above the hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington has become, on the city scale as well as the National scale, symbolic of corruption, mismanagement, decay, and an approaching reign (if that term can be used) of Anarchy.

In recent years, with a continuing process of reforms, including reforms of Welfare, an amazing belt-tightening and elimination of "pork" within the Federal budget which has included a fairly massive downsizing and re-invention of government, which combined with the resulting robust economy is reducing the staggering deficits and national debts that have accumulated over the years. There's hope for the Federal government, and hope for the Nation, and everyone knows it and everyone's happy about it. Everyone had known for years, all across the Nation, that "those idiots in Washington" were up to no good with their shady backroom deals and strange political bedfellows, and a few years ago, the Nation simply got fed up with it, and exercised their right to vote before the nation could at last sink into the quagmire of history. A clean sweep took out the old rubbish and at least people can again see the bedrock upon which the country was founded - hard work, self-reliance, and mutual respect. But as in any cleaning job, part of the process is getting a lot of dust in the air, and it's only when the dust settles that one can really see what was under all of that dirt.

The dust is starting to settle in the City of Washington, and it appears that for the last twenty years, someone has been stealing the very flooring-stone, and the more you clean around here, the more you're convinced that there really is nothing solid beneath all of the muck. Inside the gleaming alabaster walls, there seem to be nothing but dirt floors built of unstable ground... in fact, that floor is pockmarked with a maze of rat-holes, and the more you dig, the more complex it gets - and worse, the deeper you dig, the more obvious it gets that you had at best stood on a thin crust of seemingly-solid earth above a veritable sinkhole of a rat-hive.

This is Washington today, and it's as if it's waking from a dream of sleepwalking in a fog, to look back and wonder how it is that you managed to negotiate that fearsome precipice in your sleep, which you'd never in a million years essay while awake.

DC Council member Jack Evans is quoted by the Washington Post as saying, "I had no idea that the police department was as bad as it was .... it's astounding in the depth of chaos and disorganization that we found. The bad news is, it couldn't be worse .... The good news is that we discovered it and are fixing it."

For years, the City of Washington has been plagued by out-of-control crime, most notably murder. Certainly there has been a great deal of other crime as well, but it's the body count that has drawn national attention.

It's a stunning tribute to the peace-loving and cooperative nature of the American People that the body-count wasn't higher. The Booz-Allen reports indicate that there has been, for close to a decade (with the problems first becoming noticable, had anyone botherd to look, more than 20 years ago), no effective means of control of the city - the Metropolitan Police Department was simply dysfunctional to the point where for the most part they relied on people's tendency to be nice, rather than any actual abilities to keep a situation under control. For some many years, as best anyone can tell, the unstated policy of the police department has been best exemplified by the phrase "as long as you leave them alone, they'll be happy, and if they're happy, they won't be doing crime". The body count states otherwise, but then again, there's always going to be some soreheads at any party, who just aren't getting with the program.

It appears, that for the last twenty years, the City of Washington DC has been a shining example of a genuine working Anarchy (where not a prime example of a genuine working "kleptocracy"). This is even more absurd when one considers that it is, after all, the center of National Government. Anarchies are, after all, considered by some to be the ideal human state, with no external imposition of will upon the individual, but anarchies are totally dependent upon the good-will of everyone. The risk one runs in an anarchy is that any small seed of violence can result in total chaos. While Washington, as a City, could certainly have dealt with a full-scale riot, by calling in the military if necessary, it is the duty of the police department to deal with "quiet riots", or for that matter "low-intensity conflict in urban terrain". The fact of the matter is that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department stands revealed as not only incompetent to police the city and provide adequate protective services, but is, in fact, probably incapable of defending itself as an organization were it to come under even an obvious and organized attack. The organization is not. It's not organized, I mean. This disorganization might in fact be the Department's sole remaining strength. Anarchic societies as a rule resent the imposition of any sort of organized force, and individuals tend to harass the organization at whatever is perceived to be the weakest point.

The Metro PD doesn't seem to have a weakest point.

The status of Anarchy does not, of course, preclude self-defense. And even within a technical Anarchy, defenders will band together, and they can indeed do a creditable job of defense - as an unorganized militia. But it's a commonplace of government theory that a disorganized militia cannot long survive when presented with a foe that is organized - and Washington DC is sitting smack-dab in the sights of an increasingly organized and appallingly well-equipped group of criminals who would love nothing better than to see the PD disintegrate. As it is, the Metro PD is essentially a city-sponsored disorganized militia. They're armed, but not with the sort of firepower that gangsters have. They've got communications equipment, but it's not even as state of the art as what the average corner hooligan has in terms of technical sophistication, and they have a vehicle fleet - that's on average been running hard and ill-maintained over Washington Streets for five years. The average gangster, or at least the ones that the Department most needs to apprehend to ensure public safety, is probably driving a brand-new sports/utility vehicle. They're simply unprepared and are asking for a five-percent raise?

Congress is having none of it.

The Post quotes Congressman James P. Moran, a Virginia Democrat, as saying of the police department, "We on the Hill agreed today to team up with the control board and make their life miserable until they clean up this department." This was right after he said, "You can't just keep pouring money down a rathole".

And what a rathole it would be! The Booz-Allen report indicates that over the next three years, close to $75-millions would have to be spent on equipment upgrades and training, some $50-millions to bring district stations and holding facilities up to a minimally-acceptable standard, and a mere million for a new command center (ideally a highly-mobile one) and $7-millions on new educational programs for officers. That's a lot of money.

There's really no choice in the matter. Washington needs to make these changes if it's committed to being the Nation's Capitol. The American people simply won't stand for the idea the local mismanagement has allowed the former Pride of the Nation to deteriorate into, essentially, a theme-park overrun with hooligans, with a security force that's essentially not much good except for collecting admission tickets.

Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee for the District, Congressman Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican, was reported as stating that the police department must overhaul itself quickly and thoroughly, and finance improvements entirely from within the existing budget, if at all possible.

Left unstated were the alternatives, should the department prove unable to speedily and effectively reinvent itself.

Presently-unsubstantiated allegations have surfaced wherein it is stated that in 1995 an informant came forward with supposedly-quite-credible statments linking an unnamed Barry Administration aide to a murder which remains to this date unclosed. The allegations by a sworn witness state that when this informant came forward to the Homicide Division (which has recently undergone a shake-up of epic proportions, complete with allegations of total incompetence (outside of successfully scamming one sixth of the District's entire overtime budget) and cover-ups including willful suppression of Justice Department information which could have led to arrests in over 130 unsolved murders - this informant's statements were not only ignored, but the informant's present conduits have hinted that information was leaked from inside the department to the alleged murderer - purportedly a close personal aide of Mayor Marion Barry - one with strong insider ties to the Homicide Division, or at least to sufficiently-substantial segments thereof. The informant reportedly is in hiding in fear of his life - in fear of the Homicide Division.

Enquiring minds still want to know - why was that Justice Department report suppressed? Who among the lot indicated by the Report simply couldn't be arrested without maybe heads rolling in the higher echelons of the District Government? What is the possibility that many of the recent murders in the District may have been more related to local politics than to other causes? Sure - it's a long-shot. But stranger things have happened - and after all, this is Washington - Ground Zero, the focus of more long-range plans "than you could shake a stick at". At what levels was there complicity? Who, ultimately, was responsible for the suppression of an investigation of Murder Most Foul?

As of this writing, the hearings continue, even at this outrageously late hour. At stake - the helm of the Metropolitan Police Department, which has increasingly come under fire as being dangerously without direction. An overused simile is that of the man who has come back to the beach to realize that he's been swimming with sharks - the average District Denizen should be shaking in their boots knowing that, effectively, they have been relying on no force of law but entirely upon the good-will of the criminal segments. It has been said that the ultimate origin of all police or "king's-guardsmen" was at base a protection racket - wherein the citizen is disarmed and must trust for their security to those who come to collect the taxes or protection money... and that the health of the society can best be determined by how willing the guardsmen are to bring their own superiors to justice - in effect, one asks the question, do they actually provide protection, from all quarters both high and low - and if indeed the Homicide division has to any degree protected their promotions with suppression of a case involving someone tied to their ultimate superior (not the taxpayers, the mayor, dummy) the citizens need to stop depending upon the protection racket and take themselves TO ARMS.

Now for the bad news - a stunning Washington Post article of Sunday, 12 October 1997 reveals that the recently-publicized failings of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department had been known-of for years, and despite repeated warnings, assorted reports, and internal warnings, almost nothing has ever been done to repair the situation, and indeed, in many cases there seems to have been active efforts to allow certain departments to deteriorate.

For instance, for many years before Mayor Marion Barry was filmed in an undercover sting operation smoking crack cocaine in the Vista Hotel, for which he was convicted of a misdemeanor and served a short jail sentence, it was widespread common knowledge in and around the District that the Mayor was a bit too excessive in being a "party-animal". In fact, in the words of one Gary Hankins, founder of the local Police Union (as reported by the Post): "It was common knowledge that the Mayor was out of control .... and that was our boss."

As an aside, I must note that at the time of his arrest, there had for months been as joke circulating around Washington - "Q: Hey, was that you smoking crack with Marion Barry? A: No! Q: Well, why not! Everyone else does!" A bad joke and in poor taste - but evidently all too close to the truth for outraged Feds to stomach for long. They set up their sting and set up Marion Barry.

However the question remains: to what degree did the Mayor's easy acceptance of (and indeed immersion within) a ballooning "gangsta" lifestyle that eventually brought our town the moniker of Murder Capital - enable a "torpedoing" of effective law-enforcement? As for the consistent failures of the Department to secure convictions of certain parties, primarily due to lost evidence, Barry says this when speaking of his failure to get the dysfunctional evidence warehouse into passable shape: "some things just don't get done."

The Post article also documents something that I have long suspected - during the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a hiring spree within the Metropolitan PD, mandated by Congress and heavily funded. The police force almost doubled in size, and during the time-window mandated by Congress, there was evidently insufficient time to perform adequate backgrounding checks on new recruits. Almost half of the 201 officers arrested from 1991 to 1994, for crimes ranging from shoplifting to murder, were recruited during this time, a clear indication that the background and character-checking processes were badly broken. One can only wonder how many of those whose backgrounds weren't sufficently checked have managed to commit crimes for which they've not been brought to justice, and have also made it into management. At any rate, in 1985 the Department stopped reviewing officer performance, and increasingly all promotions became a matter of nepotism, cronyism, and whether or not you'd ever crossed the Mayor or any of his associates an increasing number of whom have over the years come to stand revealed as less-than-wholesome in their business or personal dealings.

It has also been noted that this huge increase in the number of officers left the MPD almost incapable of proper management within the Department. Reports have consistently decried the ease of overtime abuses and the paucity of internal regulatory mechanisms, particularly as regarded personal accountability for expenditures control. However, despite the reported inability to provide management to such a large number of officers as are now on the force, management is characterized as "bloated".

A prime example of abuses recently came to light. At the time of Chief of Police Larry Soulsby's appointment to his present post, there was an extreme problem with the Homicide Division. They had, due to the near-meltdown of District finances, been restricted to almost zero overtime, and cases simply could not be solved without this overtime. Chief Soulsby promptly did the sensible thing, once emergency funding had been pipelined to him by Congress - he authorized nearly-unlimited overtime to the Homicide Division, in the expectation that officers would do the right thing, and get out there and solve some murders. It is indicative of the institutional sloth and the culture of hopeless depression fostered by the Barry Cronies (tm) Regime that instead of getting out and solving crimes, a group of Homicide detectives, investigators and their supervisors took this as an opportunity to conspire to scam millions of dollars out of the treasury and into their pockets. It's indicative of the degree of managerial incompetence that multiple layers of "oversight" didn't seem to feel that this was interesting enough to pass upwards to the Chief, who was the victim of finger-pointing by one Captain William Corboy, who reportedly faulted Soulsby for having authorized the overtime, which was, again, an emergency response to an emergency situation. Should Soulsby have expected that the Homicide division would promptly take advantage by scamming one-sixth of the City's overtime allocations, while allowing the closure rate on murder to fall to an abominable 35 percent? That would not be a reasonable expectation in any other city, but this is, after all, Washington DC, after two decades of Barry Cronies administration. Future administrators in this city are advised to expect scamming, take-offs, skimming, and managerial collusion in all of the above, unless very firmly suppressed.

15 October 1997
"It's going to affect every drug case in town," said DC Superior Court Judge Ellen S. Huville, as reported by the Washington Post. She, and every other judge trying cases involving the scandalous Washington Metropolitan Police Evidence Storage Facility, will probably be required to consider the high likelihood that due to conditions at the facility, there is no clear and demonstrable "evidence trail" or reliable "chain of custodianship" for contraband, weapons or bodily-substances evidence.

Defense lawyers are reportedly jubilant, as are, undoubtedly, their clients.

Today the Post went all out, and demanded to know why Police Chief Larry Soulsby is still on his job. The editorial in today's Post pulls no punches and they do seem to be out for blood.

It must be noted, in all fairness, that despite the abysmal murder-case closure-rate of just 35 percent, overall, murders are down dramatically in the District this year, and crime on average is down by 18 percent. It must also be noted, in all fairness, that Chief Soulsby has presided over this downturn in crime, while at the same time assisting in a major restructuring, evaluation and critique of the Metropolitan Police, and is so far as anyone can tell, doing his level best to clean house and return the Department to a level equal to or surpassing the levels which once had the District police rated as one of the best in the Nation. The Post would be one of the first to point out that, after all, the problems have been "festering for decades" - surely it must be expected that any approach to diverting the runaway behemoth of a police force gone bad must be an approach involving a slow but continuous application of corrective thrusts. To make too many changes too rapidy would in effect be similar to dynamiting a tunnel to stop a runaway freight train. Sure, it'll stop the train - and any subsequent ones as well. It's better to simply pray that you've got a brakeman who'll actually stay on the train and keep leaning on the brakes. That takes a lot of bravery - personally, if I were the Chief, or that brakeman, I would have jumped off long ago.

I think that the Chief could make one decisive move and do it right now and this would quiet many of his more-vocal critics. He should, in my opinion, immediately go bother the shipping industry. There are these little handheld devices used by such shipping giants as FedEx, which can read (and some can generate) little barcode labels. I suggest that, silly as it may sound, that the chief FedEx the entire contents of the Evidence Storage facility across town. That way, he'll not only know what he's got, but how much it weigh