This past Friday, from about 4:00 pm until well into the evening, television news coverage was fixated on a sniper style shooting of multiple victims near Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness Street, NW, in Washington, DC. I am very familiar with that corner. For five years, my law office was located in the building that was in the backdrop of much of the tv news coverage, the office building at 4200 Connecticut Avenue. The 2900 block of Van Ness Street leads to the campus of the Howard University School of Law which is home to the beautiful chapel where I got married and where I have attended a number of ceremonial events over the years. As it turned out, a young man in his low 20s set up a sniper’s nest in an apartment building in that block and, with multiple high-powered firearms, started shooting at random passers-by, people he didn’t know and had no particular beef with. Shot were a 54-year-old retired policeman, a woman in her 30s, another woman in her mid-60s and a 12-year-old girl who was believed to be a student at a nearby school. Thankfully, none of them were killed or sustained life-threatening injuries. When the police forced their way into the apartment where the suspected shooter was located, they found the young man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. One of the most disturbing aspects of the story is that the alleged shooter was wearing a body camera on which he broadcasted his sniping episode on a video live stream.
The police response to the shooting was massive. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen so many police cruisers, armored vehicles, emergency medical vehicles and police Officers in S.W.A.T. gear on the scene at one time. And given the fact that just over 20 years ago, not only within my lifetime and memory but also within the lifetime and memory of my children, we experienced the tragedy of multiple shooting deaths at the hands of the so-called beltway snipers, I understood and appreciated that massive police response. But then it struck me that shootings, in many cases fatal shootings, take place every week in the many underserved neighborhoods of our city and they wind up as little more than a footnote in the press. I wondered if the same level of response would have occurred if the sound of multiple gunshots had come from Alabama Avenue and Naylor Road, SE, as opposed the Connecticut and Van Ness. Have we come to expect, and even accept, a level of violence in some neighborhoods that shocks the conscience when it occurs in others? In the last story I read on the Van Ness shooting, police were still looking for the shooter’s motive. No doubt, that young man’s mental and emotional stability is going to be carefully scrutinized, as well it should be. But we seem to overlook the mental health component in the violence occurring every week in our less affluent neighborhoods. Now before anybody starts labeling me a soft-on-crime-bleeding-heart liberal, I’m not making excuses for criminals. And I recognize that continuing criminal enterprise, i.e. drug trafficking, drives much of our street violence. I’m just saying that drugs are not the only factor. Incidents of domestic violence, road rage and violence arising out of hair trigger sensibilities where one person feels he was disrespected by another account for a significant amount of shooting violence in the District of Columbia. That kind of violence is directly related to the mental health of the perpetrators.
For years, I have been preaching that the only way to address public safety, long term, is to push for equity in education, employment and housing. I have said, over and over again, that people who are well educated, gainfully employed and decently and affordably housed are far less likely to be committing violent street crime. When the full picture of the Van Ness shooter comes into focus, I suspect that it will become abundantly clear that an inescapable fourth factor impacting public safety is mental health. And mental health, in turn, is all too often linked to environmental justice. I say that because I understand that one aspect of environmental justice is the injustice of so many of our people in certain neighborhoods of this city having little or no access to healthcare, and specifically, mental healthcare services. Those same neighborhoods are often also food deserts when people are hard pressed to have access to healthy food options. All of us can relate to the fact that when we’re hungry, we don’t function at our best. We’re less patient, more irritable, less able to concentrate on task or more likely to snap at others for affronts we might otherwise overlook. Now imagine a child, teenager or young adult, who goes about his or her life chronically hungry, especially with respect to good nutrition, on a day to day basis. While that individual most likely won’t have access to a cache of sophisticated weapons like the one discovered in the apartment of the Van Ness shooter, it only takes one firearm in the hands of a person suffering from permanent or temporary mental illness or sever emotional distress, to create the deadly cocktail that results in another tragic loss of life. Smarter people that I may have to figure out the how but we need to collectively commit ourselves to walk and chew gum at the same time here. We have to find a way to limit access to weapons of war and illegal handguns, Second Amendment arguments notwithstanding, and, at the same time, make mental health services more accessible to people across all demographics of our DC community. Otherwise, the next shooting incident, whether on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest or Alabama Avenue in Southeast, may end tragically with a much higher death toll.
