Crime

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Laken Riley’s murder and the long shadow of Willie Horton

The most effective ad ever made for a presidential election featured a violent, career-criminal, Willie Horton, walking out of a Massachusetts prison on a weekend pass. On one of those passes, he went on another vicious crime spree. George H. W. Bush used those crimes — and the lax policies that let Horton roam the country — to destroy his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. The past is prologue. Once again, voters are worried about their safety and angry about the open-border policies that have degraded it. Donald Trump knows that, so he will be using ads like the one Bush used against Dukakis. They will have the same devastating impact. A little background is helpful.

laken riley

Sunday

Spectator Editorial

What happened to America’s capital?

Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown. It involves converting empty office space into residential units and rebranding parts of the neighborhood. Soon, visitors to Washington will be able to watch homeless addicts shoot up in “Historic Green Triangle” and get their phones stolen by moped-riding teenagers in the “Penn West Equity, Innovation & University District.” Bowser has drafted these desperate measures in a belated response to the desperate times.

DC
Tim Rice

Why was last year DC’s most violent in decades?

As a rule, people don’t like to commit crimes when others are watching. That’s why most violent crime occurs at night, and why erecting street lights in high-crime areas causes murders, carjackings and robberies to plummet. Essentially, if you want to stop crime, you have to let wannabe criminals know you can see them. By that standard, Washington, DC should be crimeless. The eyes of the world are constantly trained on our nation’s capital. And thanks to the residents of a certain public housing project on Pennsylvania Avenue, Secret Service motorcades and Marine helicopters seem perpetually on patrol. You would think that, for all these reasons, it would be hard to commit crime inside the Beltway.

crime
Navy Yard
Matt McDonald

Navy Yard is a failing experiment in gentrification

I break up my working day by going on a three-mile jog around the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, DC, where I’ve lived for just over a year. I leave my building, one of many newish luxury developments which has recently found itself a prime target for vehicle thefts; I pass by the barber’s whose windows were shot out on Friday and the doggie day care where on the same day an employee hit a pet that later died. As I cross N Street I glance down the block where, in October 2022, a man my age was killed in a drive-by shooting. I head south beyond the baseball stadium, where the July 2021 shooting of three people outside caused a sixth-inning suspension of play. I turn onto the waterfront path where someone was spotted with an automatic weapon this weekend.

Dallas
Patrick Hauf

How Dallas curbed violent crime

"He’s smoking meth,” I heard on the police radio. Lieutenant Jordan Colunga promised to take me to the action, but maintained his leisurely pace. He chuckled as the undercover officers dictated their observations from a gas station. The pipe fiend, having wisely decided he had had his fill, unwisely began wandering the pumps to sell his surplus to passersby. Undercover cops don’t blow their cover for spontaneous drug dealers, so the observers passed along the information to a nearby squad car. The suspect was back in his vehicle by the time the beat cops arrived on scene. “He’s getting out of the car, he’s getting out of the car,” an officer said apprehensively on the radio before yelling, “He’s reaching, he’s reaching!” The laughter stopped. Colunga hit the gas.

gangster
Alexander Larman

The intriguing revival of the British gangster picture

Have you been watching Sexy Beast on the Paramount+ streaming service? No? Well, it’s hard to say whether you’ve missed out on much. Amid the current vogue for reviving decades-old films and turning them into television series, musicals or what-have-you, revisiting Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 debut, a blackly comic crime caper that owes equal debts to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Stephen Frears’s The Hit and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, was probably not on anyone’s bingo card for 2024.

Thursday

Matthew Foldi

Meet the vibrant rehabilitated crack dealer threatening to shut down the Washington Wizards

One of the leading opponents of the Washington Wizards leaving the District of Columbia is a colorful former crack cocaine dealer who has a history of being banned from working with the city government, until it turns to him in a time of desperation. And desperation is presently the name of the game, as the nation’s capital considers throwing at least half a billion dollars at the Wizards in an attempt to keep them in the city. One of the leading opponents of the move is a veteran activist whose checkered past is consistently ignored in local coverage. Ronald Moten is frequently cited by local news for his activism with Don’t Mute DC, his successful movement to keep “go-go music playing in Shaw, despite opposition from residents at a nearby luxury apartment building.

washington wizards

Wednesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Behind the Venezuelan migrant crime wave

Jose Antonio Ibarra, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant, was charged in connection with the gruesome murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia last week. Another Venezuelan, thirty-two-year-old Renzo Mendoza, was arrested last week on two felony charges for sexually assaulting an underage child in Virginia.  These cases, along with a series of others connected to Venezuelan migrants, have become central to the debate on immigration policy. Tuesday morning, for instance, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for more information about Ibarra.

tren de aragua venezuela

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

The perils of Prague: Parasol Against the Axe, by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed

From our UK edition

An informal survey of friends, family, acquaintances and previous reviews suggests that the word most usually associated with Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction is ‘weird’. The author of eight novels has hardly shied away from unconventional storytelling, with books about everything from Brexit-through-biscuits (Gingerbread, 2019) to magical trains and a pet mongoose (Peaces, 2021). Her style is one of high and low: song lyrics jumbled up with references to medieval literature; nods to Shakespeare next to 1980s films. The result is either lauded – Oyeyemi was on the 2013 Granta list of best young novelists and her short story collection won a PEN award – or hated. In a TLS review, the novelist Claire Lowdon likened reading Peaces to ‘babysitting an over-indulged child’.

Tuesday

Amber Duke

How Ray Tierney brought law and order back to Suffolk County

On the day I arrive at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, DA Ray Tierney is off meeting with an unnamed witness in the Gilgo Beach serial killer case. In February 2022, more than a decade after police first recovered the remains of eleven victims, then-Suffolk County police commissioner Rodney Harrison announced the creation of a joint task force dedicated to solving the case. The task force, which included investigators from the DA’s office, quickly zeroed in on a suspect as they chased down a tip from a witness that hadn’t been properly investigated the first time around. Fifty-nine-year-old Rex Heuermann was arrested in July on murder charges and police have linked his DNA to several of the bodies.

Tierney

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Sports: the latest victim of DC’s crimewave

The announcement this morning by owner Ted Leonsis that Washington, DC is losing the Washington Capitals and Wizards franchises to Virginia is the ultimate indictment of incompetent Mayor Muriel Bowser and corrupt Democrats on the city council who let crime take over the nation’s capital. To say DC has a rampant crime problem is an understatement. You may already have heard about the incredible rise in carjacking, which more than doubled year over year – with juvenile offenders accounting for the vast majority of arrests. All crime is up by almost a third, violent crime is up almost 40 percent and total homicides passed 200 in September, earlier in the year than it has since 1997.

sports dc

Thursday

Juan P. Villasmil

George Santos spent campaign money on OnlyFans, Botox, makeup and Hermès

The House Ethics Committee released its long-awaited investigative report into New York representative George Santos on Thursday. The document puts forward "substantial evidence,” showing that the congressman engaged in a “complex web” of criminal activity, knowingly breaking campaign finance laws. The committee, under the leadership of Chairman Michael Guest, has voted unanimously to adopt the report. In effect, the “substantial evidence of potential violations of federal criminal law” had been sent to the Department of Justice, which will determine what the next steps in the Santos case look like.

george santos

Wednesday

Francesca Peacock

Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed

From our UK edition

‘It was a nice way of living,’ huffs Grace, the fiftysomething anti-heroine of Celia Dale’s devilishly dark 1988 novel Sheep’s Clothing, republished by Daunt Books. Recently released from Holloway prison, and using a demure headscarf and twin-set as cover, Grace teams up with Janice, a former fellow inmate, to rob elderly women. Disguised as social workers, and armed with an illicit supply of sleeping pills, they are after pension money stashed under mattresses, trinkets in shoeboxes and polished candlesticks on mantelpieces. The victims, invariably women (‘even an old man could be surprisingly strong’) often welcome the thieves, happy to have someone to ‘talk at’ and a cup of tea made for them.

Tuesday

Katy Balls

What did King Charles say?

From our UK edition

12 min listen

It was the King’s speech today. King Charles announced that the government would introduce new laws to, among other things, force criminals to attend their sentencing hearings, scrap most jail sentences of less than a year, and sell all new houses as freehold properties. Is it enough for the Tories to turn around their deficit in the polls? Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Isabel Hardman.

Thursday

Matt McDonald

Maryland police officer charged for storming Capitol on January 6

An officer from the Montgomery County Police Department was arrested Thursday after being indicted for his actions at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which include assaulting police officers, according to an indictment. Twenty-five-year-old Justin Lee of Rockville, Maryland is the subject of a seven-count indictment, according to a press release from the Department of Justice, which include "felony offenses of civil disorder and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers.

january 6 cult multiracial whiteness

Thursday

Nick Russo

Mocking murdered leftists is not based

At 1:30 a.m. on Monday, Philadelphia freelance journalist Josh Kruger was shot seven times at the base of his stairs by an intruder. He stumbled, bleeding, into the street and collapsed on the sidewalk before being transported to the hospital, where he soon died. Come 10:00 a.m., news of his death was reported by local outlets, and Philadelphia’s media ecosystem was in a full-fledged state of lamentation. Friends, professional acquaintances and public leaders poured their hearts out for Kruger. But the moving display of mourning didn’t last long.  Before Kruger’s body went cold, prominent figures on the dissident right caught wind of the murder and discovered to their delight that he was a vocal defender of Philly’s progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner.

josh kruger murdered

Tuesday

Peter Wood

The Sycamore Gap tragedy is one of a long list of tree killings

My ancestors presumably had something to do with trees — and true to my heritage, I enjoy some amateur forestry on my land in Vermont. The crack, the whoosh and the thunder of a tree coming down exactly where you aimed it thrills the Upper West Side me, chainsaw in hand.  But it grieves me when a good tree is blown down or uprooted. I cut only those that have to be removed because they are dying or might crush house or head if not tended to.  The Spectator reports on the murder of the Sycamore Gap, a 300-year-old tree along Hadrian’s Wall, chainsawed by a vandal when no one was looking. The culprit apparently is a sixteen year-old boy. It was an act of gratuitous violence. But not a singular act.

sycamore gap tree
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) speaks on southern border security and illegal immigration, during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Cockburn

Democratic congressman suffers the consequences of his actions

It's time to move the seat of federal power to a Republican-run city until we can figure out what is going on. Monday night, Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked at gunpoint in Navy Yard, a Washington, DC neighborhood just blocks away from the Capitol building. Cuellar's chief of staff Jacob Hochberg said that three men held up the congressman. Police recovered the vehicle, a white Honda, but are still tracking down the suspects. Cuellar is the second member of Congress to be the victim of random violent crime this year. In February, Democratic representative Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her Capitol Hill apartment building by a homeless man who demanded to be let into her home to use the restroom.

Wednesday

Taki

How to train like Taki

From our UK edition

Gstaad Here’s a tip for you young whippersnappers: don’t get old, but if you do, you can fool Father Time by training the smart way. By this I don’t mean you should follow all that bull that floats around online. I don’t use social media, but I’m told that a system exists, which reaches millions across multiple platforms, that spreads misinformation about health, and then some. The wellness industry means big moolah, and is as phoney as Hollywood morality. Take it from Taki: all you need in order to feel good and be able to enjoy yourself is a little exercise before breakfast, and some semi-hard training in the afternoon. C’est tout, mes amis, as they say in gay Paree.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

It shouldn’t be a crime to sniff a goshawk

From our UK edition

I notice that the naturalist Chris Packham has been reported to the police for the ‘crime’ of sniffing a goshawk. I had not known that this was an offence – if I had known, I would not do it quite so often, or at worst, made sure nobody was watching me as I approached the birds, tumescent, in my anorak. Goshawks are diurnal, so night-time does offer the opportunity for a good sniff when they are asleep in their nests. The problem is they are also quite rare, largely due to persecution from gamekeepers and, no matter how you dress it up, snorting the scent of a more widespread raptor, such as a kestrel, does not provide quite the same thrill. Packham sniffed his goshawk live on television, and someone who hates him for his politics reported him to the filth.