Last weekend, Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander's column excoriating the reporting side of the newspaper because the suburbs, where a lot of Post subscribers live, don't get covered as much as they should. I found this odd because D.C. has also seen a series of shootings in the Petworth section of Washington, D.C., that are clearly the result of beef between rival crews, but neither the Post nor any other local newspaper had written anything that might explain the outburst of violence to local residents. Of course, if you wanted to hear about the death outside a hipster club off of U Street NW last week, you would have been in luck.
Petworth is what you might euphemistically call an "up-and-coming neighborhood," meaning that white people are starting to move in and provide an income base for more upscale businesses while black people are starting to be priced out of their homes. But it's still enough in transition that local outlets aren't directing too many of their resources there yet.
Or at least that's what I thought. I'm happy to see The City Paper's Rend Smith prove me wrong and explain that the Metropolitan Police Department has been deliberately trying to obscure the details:
The real mystery, though, is why the media complied with Lanier's blackout. Washington City Paper wasn't in attendance. But sources say two of the crews MPD is concerned about in the recent Petworth shootings are called CRT and Taylor Street.
A TV news crew from Fox5, though, did attend. And reporter John Henrehan filed this report from the St. Gabriel’s meeting: “[The chief asked reporters who were present to refrain from writing about specifics involving the gangs, and Fox Five agreed to that request.] We can tell you that D.C. police know the gangs, know their territories, and know which crimes gang members are involved in.”
[...]
Knowing the names of the crews shooting up the neighborhood might not help Petworth residents stay safe; after all, a stray bullet can hit a bystander no matter which crew the shooter might belong to. But keeping the situation quiet definitely has ancillary benefits for the police: It makes it harder to talk about the problem.
This is fantastic reporting on Smith's part, and it seems to me far more pressing than whether or not residents of Fairfax get enough 700-word write-ups about who's running for dog catcher. But of course, that's who's paying the bills -- so ultimately there's little economic incentive for any local publication, to commit what few reporters they have to a story involving a few corpses in the neighborhoods hugging Georgia Avenue. At least, not until more of the folks from Fairfax start buying houses there. Obviously, the fact that the police are trying to hide the details -- either to block scrutiny of their performance or prevent the perpetrators from getting the satisfaction of seeing their crews' name in the paper -- makes things even harder. "Hyper-local" is the new buzzword, but we're really still talking about serving a very particular audience.
