Slayings in Washington Hit New High, 436, for 3rd Year

A 17-year-old student and two other people were killed in the District of Columbia on Friday, bringing the number of homicides in 1990 to 436--a record for the third consecutive year.

The spiral of violence that began in 1986 has now claimed 1,661 lives in the city. The killings have continued to increase despite evidence that drug use in the city--the prime reason for the wave of intensified violence--is declining.

The proportion of slayings classified by police as drug-related has fallen from 66% in 1988 to 52% last year to 39% this year, according to police statistics. The number of juveniles and adults testing positive for drug use after being arrested has dropped slightly in the last year.

All this makes the homicide record frustrating to police, especially Chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who has vowed to resign if the homicide rate doesn’t decline.

“The community is still not angry enough about death and violence on the streets of Washington, D.C.,” Fulwood said Friday at a news conference to announce a new holiday police detail. “We have to get a lot more angry about young people being killed.

“People in this city love drugs. There’s no other way to describe it.”

It is a theme Fulwood has sounded in the past, arguing that the police department alone cannot address what he calls society’s “skewed” sense of values.

The violence of the last few years, which seemed to spin out of control about 1987, when the wave of crack cocaine hit Washington’s streets, has had a profound and lasting effect on a generation here. More than 400 of those killed this year have been black, the great majority males.

As of Wednesday, 63 juveniles had been charged with homicide, just two fewer than in 1989, and a sign that the number of young killers continues to rise. It is a relatively recent phenomenon for police, who recorded 60 juvenile arrests for homicide between 1980 and 1987.

“At the rate we’re going, the next generation is going to be extinct,” said Lt. Reginald Smith, the department’s spokesman.

In this year alone, the department has added about 1,200 recruits. It has deployed more officers at night, when homicides occur, and recently formed a 100-member unit to combat street violence.

At the same time, a city sometimes referred to as the murder capital of the country saw Mayor Marion Barry convicted of cocaine possession, a wrenching spectacle that highlighted the destructive nature of drug addiction. There have been drug-related kidnapings and executions, a “mob-style” hit in which the victims’ faces were bound in duct tape, a killing over a leather jacket and the beating death of an elderly widow.