Defund the the police talk is some sort of apologetic cultural appropriation. Please stop.

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10/10/2020 10:33

Subject: Defund the the police talk is some sort of apologetic cultural appropriation. Please stop.

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Anonymous

Dear DC 'Do Gooders' please stop advocating for defunding the police. I know that it is easy to do this from wherever you are perched in DC, but those of us in the SE actually want increased law enforcement, MPD or Federal. Most of my parent’s neighbors would love to see the National Guard deployed to the street for a summer or how about right now. I will explain.

I was born and raised in DC. I grew up in Anacostia. I lived adjacent to Ketcham rec, graduated from Anacostia High and went to UVA. Yes, there was a little culture shock. Even though UVA was close, my parents only had the kids visit for major holidays. Christmas and one Thanksgiving. They were always encouraging us to visit friends for Thanksgiving and Spring Break. Summer's in DC were out of the question while in school, but I had a busy ROTC schedule and summers were spent around the country. I graduated UVA and joined the Navy and spent a career bouncing between New Port, Coronado, Little Creek, San Diego, lots of deployments and a tour at the Pentagon.

When I got my orders to the Pentagon my mother asked if I were going to get a nice country house in Woodbridge and I explained that with the reverse commute I would be better off in DC. Initially she was horrified. But we found a nice rental in Glover Park (nothing easier than shooting across Memorial Bridge and being in the North Parking lot for those of you familiar with JO parking at the Pentagon and even running there was super easy once the PAC was leaned up)

It was great to be back in DC. It was not the DC I was intimately familiar with, but we loved it. My parents loved visiting us and suddenly, we were hosting Thanksgiving and Easter, though Mom was still ok with hosting Christmas.

After the Pentagon, I did a last tour on the West Coast and we as a family decided to return to DC for a retirement job. We got back to the city in 2016 after 20 years of bouncing around the world.

My parents are still alive and when we returned said that Anacostia was not an option. Trust me we looked as money would go much further there. We still had a grade school aged child and a High Schooler, so we also needed to look at school zones. Then there was the unpredictable violence. It was simply not enough to mind your own business. Violence would seek you out and find you. Did you know that 'leaving' the neighborhood is not considered accomplishing anything where I grew up? More of a liability in most cases. You were now an outsider, a threat to some sort of perceived balance established long ago. My oldest did not say anything, but you could tell he thought that the adjustment from Coronado HS to Anacostia would be 'real'. We knew that we would play several school lotteries but at the end of the day, Wilson looked like our best bet. Therefor with the help of our great realtor from years before, we ended up in what my wife refers to as an AU starter house. It was WAY too expensive, but it was quiet, and our son could walk to school we thought (He ended up going elsewhere).

So, after all of this you must ask yourself. Why was the common theme from my family, my friends not to return home for 20 years? Anacostia was OK for Christmas but leave after dinner. What kind of a message is that? But when drinking a beer, watching a football game on a Sunday with my dad, he would ask, "Why couldn’t the National Guard patrol the old neighborhood? They could in Iraq and Afghanistan?" His larger point is that we want more local policing. Lots more. Sure, he wants social workers and grocery stores and urgent care clinics. But he reminds me that we had those, and they left. He thinks that it will be easier to get a big box Safeway once there are more police.

I did not vote for Trayon White, but here is an example of a born and raised in the neighborhood person on the City Council telling us that the people most in need want MORE police.

It is easy for us to hypothesize urban utopias with no police and lots of social services, but to get to that point we need to create the conditions. How is that UVA educated social worker going to work safely in DC daily today? My dad also thinks that you could give 100% scholarships to deserving DC kids in the fields of counseling and social work etc., but then my mom asks, why they would want to come back. Maybe it could be a contractual thing similar to the military where the city pays for a four year undergrad at GW, UVA, UMD , W&M, with a four year obligation to work for the city HHS with a salary and housing etc. At the completion of those four years the option to return to school for a paid two-year master’s with another four years owed at the end of it. At the end of the day we get eight years of service to the city for the cost of a degree or two. Now we just need to work on their moms to allow them to return home from Williamsburg. To convince the moms, we are going to need more police. Let us please stop with the defund talk until there is more than a solution. The city deserves results driven hypotheses rather than pie in the sky and more wishful thinking.