D.C. Mayor Wants National Guard to Help Fight Crime

Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly on Friday asked for National Guard troops to help combat crime in the nation’s capital, and President Clinton said that the request “should be reviewed.”

“I’ve asked our legal counsel to get with the Justice Department and look into the legality of it and what the legal hurdles and also what the practical problems are,” Clinton said. “I think it should be reviewed.”

Kelly said that she does not want a guardsman on every street corner but that “we want to take advantage of that resource to battle crime.”

“The National Guard would be used to . . . set up roadblocks for drugs and guns and supplement our own metropolitan police force,” Kelly said at a news conference. She asked that as many as 3,000 guard troops be temporarily deployed in the District of Columbia.

Under her request, the soldiers would be used for up to four months to free police for anti-drug work by helping with traffic control, car patrol and crowd control.

Police have listed 378 homicides in the city since the beginning of the year--up from 365 for the same period in 1992. Many of the slayings are believed to be related to gangs and the drug trade.

At the White House, Clinton cautioned that guard members are not full-time military personnel. “If you call out the guard . . . in any substantial numbers, you can be disrupting the normal work lives of a lot of people,” he said.

“But I’m very sympathetic with the problems that the mayor has and that Washington has here--1,500 shootings here a year now,” he said.

Clinton added that the mayor’s request “is not a precedent that can easily be confined just to Washington, D.C., so there are lots of questions that have to be thought through here.”

Violent crime began a relentless spiral in the District of Columbia during the 1980s, with the rise in popularity of crack cocaine. Most homicides have been concentrated in poor, black neighborhoods, but they are increasingly spilling over into areas that once seemed free of such violence.

Several highly publicized shootings involving children and bystanders have heightened demands for action. On Sept. 25, a 26-year-old man was shot to death at a schoolyard in southeast Washington, where a crowd was watching a football game. A 4-year-old, who was wounded by a stray bullet fired during the attack, died four days later.

The city’s Asian merchants, who run a disproportionately large number of convenience stores and other small retail businesses here, have increasingly found themselves under siege. The killing of a Korean-American woman in her dry cleaning store on Sept. 25 was the seventh killing of an Asian-American merchant during a robbery this year. On Sept. 27, an attack on a Vietnamese family’s jewelry store was videotaped by a security camera. Both incidents sparked outrage in the city.

Chief Fred Thomas and other police officials said that they have tried everything to fight the violence, from making mass arrests to increasing street patrols and establishing citizen watch groups. The department recently has instituted a 100-member task force of local police and FBI agents to increase investigations in high-crime neighborhoods.

The mayor said she hopes to emulate Operation Crackdown, an effort in Sumter, S.C., last Dec. 4 to 6 that teamed up police with 120 guardsmen to crack down on drug-related violence. The operation is credited with 83 drug-related arrests in one weekend.

In the District, some guard members working as volunteers already have helped police with aerial surveillance, equipment and personnel management, crowd and traffic control and operation of a drug hot line.

Some city officials and civil rights activists are wary of the proposal to use the guard here, even in an auxiliary capacity.

“My concern and my opposition to the National Guard coming into the streets of Washington has to do with control,” said District Councilman Kevin Chavous. “I fear that unless there’s some clearly delineated plan, once the military gets involved it’s easy for them to take over and its hard to get rid of them.”

Patrick V. Murphy, director of police issues for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and a former top-ranking police official in Washington, New York and Detroit, warned that the guard’s responsibilities should be carefully defined.

“Once you put them on the street, unanticipated things could happen,” he said.

“There are real concerns with having the National Guard if they are not trained as police officers,” said Mary Jane De Frank, head of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Some city officials have suggested that there would be no need for guardsmen in the first place if police resources were used more efficiently and vacancies on the force were filled.