US: After a wave of murders, a sharp rise in robberies and the official declaration this week of a crime emergency in Washington, there are fears the city could be returning to the violent days of the 1990s, when it was known as the murder capital of the United States. There have been 14 murders since the start of July, prompting police chief Charles Ramsey to declare an emergency on Tuesday, allowing him to reassign police officers more quickly to high-crime areas.
Within hours of the declaration, two groups of tourists were robbed at gunpoint on the National Mall, both by masked men.
The most high-profile murder was last Sunday's killing in Georgetown, the city's smartest district, of Alan Senitt, a 27-year-old British Labour Party activist who had moved to Washington to work on the presidential campaign of former Virginia governor Mark Warner.
Senitt was walking a female friend home at 2am after dinner and a film when three men approached them, carrying a gun and a knife. One man dragged the friend down a driveway and tried to rape her, while the others stabbed Senitt and slit his throat.
Senitt's friend escaped and police arrested four people, including a 15-year-old boy and a woman whom police say drove the getaway car. The brutality of Senitt's killing was shocking, but city officials seemed almost as alarmed by the fact it took place in an exclusive neighbourhood like Georgetown.
Ramsey said that the pattern of crime in the city was changing, with criminals no longer staying within a mile of their homes when they went out for a night of robbing and mugging.
At a community meeting in Georgetown on Monday, police inspector Andy Stolberg urged residents to be more vigilant, noting that the group suspected of Senitt's murder was in the area before the crime but nobody called the police.
"I would think that at two o'clock in the morning on the streets of Georgetown, a group of three people - one of whom is 15-years-old; one of whom is a bald, chunky, fat guy - are gonna stand out. They were black. This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life," he said.
Amid outrage at the suggestion that being black in the wrong part of town is a reasonable cause for suspicion, Stolberg was assigned to other duties and apologised for his insensitivity.
In fact, it is true that black faces are unusual in Georgetown and in other expensive parts of Washington, despite the fact that 70 per cent of the city's population is African-American. The northwest of the city is overwhelmingly white and comfortable while the three other quadrants are predominantly black.
Apart from Senitt, the other 13 murder victims in Washington this month were black and their deaths received a lot less publicity. They included Maurice Darnaby (38), who was shot in an apparent robbery as he closed the corner shop he opened two years ago, where he worked 12 hours a day and gave credit to customers who could not afford to pay in cash. Community worker Chris Crowder (44) was shot dead in a park as he sat in the motorised wheelchair he used since he was paralysed 16 years ago.
Davion Holt (20) and Michael Lucas (16) were gunned down together in southwest Washington on July 2nd.
Yvetta Hamilton, who raised Holt because his mother was unable to care for him, expressed despair at the spiral of violent crime in the area. "It's babies killing babies. They get guns, and they talk about feeling disrespected. Half of them don't know how to spell disrespected," she said.
Despite the recent spate of killings, the 95 murders in Washington so far this year amount to just one more than for the same period last year.
Robberies have increased by 14 per cent and, as Ramsey points out: "robbery is a very dangerous crime - you are literally one movement away from it being a homicide".
The most important change, however, may be that violent crime is following the money into the city's swankier districts and to the historical sights favoured by tourists.
And this has been enough to unite politicians, officials and business leaders in calls for urgent action to tackle the kind of crime that has been blighting the lives of Washington's poorer citizens for years.
