They can’t keep a cop in each and every car that runs through the eight or nine Metro routes in DC. If you are lucky....there might be one cop on the entire train....for one of each three trains running through DC in the evening hours (that’s being real optimistic).
Having ridden the Metro...I can offer these observations. It’s a ‘playground’ for the punks. They avoid the morning rush-hour period entirely, and there’s never any trouble during the evening rush-hour. The more people in a car....the less likely they are to make a mob scene....they like to enter a car with less than ten people in it.
So far, no one has shown a gun in the three years that I’ve been in DC. I’m waiting for the day that someone draws a weapon and shoots one of the punks. Course, there are video cameras and with DC’s gun laws...you’d face a fairly big mess in saying you were defending yourself.
The Metro cops and DC cops are useless. If you want to see a worse situation...go out into southeast DC...into Anacosta and drive around after 9PM at night. No one....not even the people who live there....takes that risk. People will talk about community and how the area was back in the 1960s....but they will tell you to stay indoors after dark. It’s like some third-world zombie-land where your life is in peril.
And the best part....you are never more than 5 fives from the Capital building or the White House. One of the most dangerous places in America....all within a thirty-minute walk of the capital.
No, but they could allow each and every law-abiding rider the option to carry a licensed concealed weapon.
No more
D.C, across the Anacostia River is like a third world country. Wards 7 and 8 are the worst.
Good people and there are a lot of them over there are living in a war zone. They can't even sit on their front porch in summer for fear of a drive by shooting.
Home Rule in D.C. is a failure (as it has been every time it has been tried) and the Feds need to stopmessing around and re-instate the old city commissioner system.
Yup. I was stationed at Bolling AFB in the 80’s. Used to go to the Mac-Donalds on Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X avenues up by St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, sometimes at night.
Even the street names said you were in the wrong part of town.
I used to work part time at night out on 14th Street at the VA. Took Metro back and forth from the Pentagon, up to 11:00P PM.
Nothing ever happened to me. Guess I was lucky, or it was a different era back then.
I lived in S.E. in the mid 60s, it was a crap hole even then, I imagine it's worse now.
Unless it was a plainclothes federal law enforcement person who just happened to be riding.
Of course, if he was the wrong color, then his career would be over.
DC cops are good at writing parking tickets. Other than that, useless.
We only got mobbed once, and it fortunately happened in the morning while the playas were crashing. A group of women were angry that their neighbors were getting food baskets but they were not (there was a process to determine who got the baskets that the delivery crew was not involved in). The ride-alongs got it defused but not before the shouting attracted a sullen and shifty-looking crowd. We packed up and got ot of there fast.
Ironically, when Anacostia got a little gentrified in 2005 or so, and some condo development occurred and new stores and services were put in, the locals screamed bloody murder. I pity anyone who bought any of those condos-they are in the middle of a war zone.
We need more Benard Getz’s to ride the rails.
Interesting comments.
I rode the Metro from Manassas into DC several days when I visited on vacation.
It was an interesting blend of people, many very attractive women (not surprising given the wealth of the area) and then gangsta/ghetto types getting on as you got closer to town.
DC is truly a fairy tale place, my cousin lives there in a $800,000 home that would be about $40,000 here in Indiana.
Bear spray or hornet spray??