A 23-year-old Ukrainian woman refugee was brutally and shockingly murdered on a North Carolina train by a serial criminal. Incidentally, this brazen crime was either under-reported or not reported with vigour by the US ‘mainstream’ media. Yes, this was in North Carolina but is Washington DC any different? This may seem like a bizarre question - given that DC is the capital of the United States and Northern Carolina the ‘far off South’.
But let’s face it, this is the United States - a country defined by not one but multiple paradoxes - where the good, bad and the ugly jostle with each other in varying intensities, permutations and combinations. Given this, is the 47th president of the country, Donald Trump, ‘justified’ in ‘taking over’ the capital of the United States?
My reflexive answer would be ‘Absolutely’. The reasons for this are neither anecdotal nor an uncritical support for this aspect of the US president’s policy - but real and experiential. In and during my second visit to the US (2007-8), when I wanted to gain firmer, and real insights on the country (as an engaged self-defined citizen of the world), I chose to study it from various and multiple vantage points and perspectives.
This naturally included its streets and shelters. (Yes, I lived and slept in both!). In the main my experiential referent states and cities were Pennsylvania, New York, New York City, Washington DC. From this grid, the experiences and hopefully insights gleaned were revelatory. I will stick to Washington DC (for reasons of space and nature of this piece).
I stayed at a large shelter right in the heart of the city. As the shelter, spat out its inhabitants for the night every morning, DC took on a beautiful hue: the cafes that dot its streets enlivened these along with assorted pedestrians that included Federal employees, briskly walking to their office spaces, some of them carrying steaming take away coffee cups.
With the meandering of the day, assorted tourists - giggling girls, classy European women, smattering of half-dressed Australians, serious South Asians and so on - bedecked the city. The calmness of the city jostled with a nice(ish) reverie. The odd cavalcade of political leaders did (unlike South Asia) disturb the rhythms of the city.
I recall seeing Alan Greenspan with his retinue of security men walking to his car. Young and rather silly then, I was in awe of this brilliant man then. Excited, I walked over and said, ‘Hi Sir’. Greenspan was nice enough to respond and engage - albeit very briefly. I also recall lying on the sprawling garden near the White House, after having exhausted myself, when a white cop bicycled toward me and very politely asked me to leave the premises explaining even more politely the reasons for the same.
DC took on a totally different hue and complexion at dusk. One could feel a patina of insecurity melding into fear, as the city spat out its workers and assorted people. Menacing looking young men hovered around car parks. Small tents sprang up in the lawns of the city. And yes, one could hear the odd staccato bursts of gunfire too echoing through parts of the city.
Another incident worth narrating is the night when I lay huddled under the patios (of either a business establishment or a house-memory fuzzy here). The grumpy white owner of the place had reported me to cops. Pointing me to the black cop, the man gruffly said, “take him away”.
The cop looked at me angrily and said, ‘Come on.”
“Don’t worry Sir. I have him, right here. I'll handle him,” the black cop reassured the grumpy man, who drove away in his SUV, looking all the while in his side view mirror.
When the man was out of eyesight, the black cop who was mock menacing me and fiddling with his handcuffs, turned kind and said, “Go man. Stay safe and stay warm”.
I recall an afternoon in NYC, when again, after being tired and exhausted, I was lying on a park bench, a young white female cop walked up to me and said sternly, “You can’t lie here.”
She then looked intensely at me and said, “I am sorry. I would not have asked you to leave. You look tired. Lie down for a few more minutes and then please go. I'll pretend not to have noticed.”
But of import was an experience that had serious implications: I was at a park in the heart of DC, lugging my rucksack. A big black man walked over and said in a burly voice, “Hoi slim, what are doing here? This is my park. The man punched me. I fell flat. He rolled over me. As exhausted as I was, I put a semblance of a struggle.”
The man clambered off me, left and repeated, “Slim, this is my park.”
While I was making sense of what had happened, there were echoes of staccato bursts of gunfire that rattled the city.
“Oh, it’s a gunfight between the gangs, I heard a white woman scream. I went back to the shelter.”
A posse of young men hovered over the entrance; the smell of marijuana wafted across. Women on their way home almost ran when they passed the shelter. The sexually charged ogles of the men were unnerving. I heard a man, elderly and scraggy say, “Pussy. I want white pussy. That’s my death wish.”
The next day the same black man attacked me again. “Hoi Bud, I told Ya, it’s my park.”
Police actions in Capital City
The next morning as I was having breakfast at the shelter, a posse of police entered the premises, looked at me and took me away. The black man who had twice attacked me had complained of physical assault on him! I spent the night in prison. (In a ghetto - either in PA or DC - I was shot at, by teens for the heck of it - with a pellet gun!)
The night before around midnight a man shot dead a young man, who was pleading to be spared. A few bouquets and flowers lay strewn on the pavement where he was shot dead the next morning.
All this is not to implicate and indict race or exonerate it. But crime in America is a serious problem. Be it NYC, DC or PA (my referents), it may not be an exaggeration to posit that a woman will not be safe and secure after evening.
Given that DC is the capital city, one where world leaders pay homage and so on, it must be emblematic of a space or cityscape where everyone – men, women, bystanders, tourists, and so on - feel and are actually safe.
And given that nothing has really worked in the past, the ‘proverbial spanner into the works of things as usual’ may even be a necessity.
As this piece goes to press, statistically there has been a decrease in crime rates in the bellwether city of the United States. If this is not regression but a sure shot sign of reasonable peacefulness of the United States capital, what is there to whine about?
If the aim is to make the streets of DC safe, its various denizens secure, if there are no real rights violations, Donald Trump has every right and is in the right to make his countrymen and women take back control of the streets - DC in particular!
(PS: After I left the US in 2008, my visa was twice denied by the embassy in 2016. I travelled on my 10-year multiple entry visa – the one I had travelled on in 2007-8. When I exited the US, the immigration authorities had not stamped it as cancelled.)
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