Capital-Gazette
February 22, 2007

Our Say:
Shooting shows why security measures can't wait

By THE CAPITAL EDITORIAL BOARD

We believe city, police and Housing Authority officials are serious about combating violence in the city's public housing communities.

Unfortunately, statements from these officials don't seem to have convinced the criminals with the guns. Not yet, anyway.

Tuesday night's drive-by shooting of three teenagers in Annapolis Gardens - coming not long after the shooting death of Terrance Powell on College Creek Terrace - demonstrated that laudable plans and good intentions haven't solved the problem yet.

The three teens - ages 18, 15 and 13 - told police they were walking along Croll Drive about 9:20 p.m. when a van drove by, its door opened, and someone opened fire. One teen was hit in the buttocks, one in the calf and one in the ankle.

Luck was with them (and city officials). All the shooting victims were able to take shelter in nearby houses. None of the three had a life-threatening injury; in fact, not one had to be kept at the hospital.

That's a miraculously good outcome for an incident in which someone sprayed a residential street with gunfire. The city could easily have had three more homicides Tuesday night.

It's worth noting - because it's typical of such crimes - that the three victims are not Annapolis Gardens residents. Police say they were not walking together; they were merely in the same vicinity.

As of this writing, we don't know why this happened. There's just one thing we can say with certainty: The van's occupants believed they wouldn't be caught. They didn't see any police. They didn't see any neighborhood watch patrols.

Perhaps they were also confident that any neighborhood witnesses would be too intimidated to talk to police, or tell the authorities everything they knew about the shooting. Given that some residents we talked to for the story didn't want their full names in the newspaper, that inference doesn't seem far-fetched.

In a guest column on Sunday, Trudy McFall, the chairman of the city Housing Authority's board of commissioners, described the authority's efforts to suppress crime - including picture IDs and car stickers for residents, stepped-up efforts to get banned and unauthorized people off authority property, and more security guards and lighting.

There's nothing wrong with this program, or with Ms. McFall's advocacy of something the city doesn't yet have - a separate, full-time city police detachment working exclusively on Housing Authority properties.

But the shooting shows that the security improvements can't wait. And if this program doesn't reduce the violence, officials should consider some of the things we talked about in last Sunday's editorial: more police foot patrols, extra-high penalties for drug offenses on public housing property, and perhaps even gates for these communities.

The unknown people in that van had a message for everyone: The thugs aren't going to politely wait for the city, the police and the Housing Authority to get their act together.