WASHINGTON — Frustration over crime in the Shaw neighborhood led to an outburst Monday at a news conference with Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier.
“No one did anything until somebody got shot,” Martin Moulton exclaimed from the back of the room.
That happened as Lanier was detailing suspect information in the stray-gunfire death last Saturday of 23-year-old Matthew Shlonsky, a 2014 graduate of American University.
Moulton lives four blocks from where Shlonsky was killed at 7th and S streets Northwest, around the corner from the triple shooting a week ago at 7th and O streets that left a man critically wounded, and two and a half blocks from where 31-year-old Tamara Gliss was killed at 6th and N streets in late May.
“The community has been doing community policing — walking through our neighborhood, highlighting bad behavior, reporting it to police, and we haven’t been getting the response we’ve been asking for,” Moulton says.
Moulton says neighbors have made calls repeatedly about drug-dealing at the bus stop at 7th and P streets, and about gamblers shooting craps outside the local recreation center.
Chief Lanier responded to Moulton’s interruption, saying “I will tell you, we’ve made plenty of arrests for craps,” she said.
Still, Moulton said he believes more could be done.
“Nothing happens and weeks go by and you still see people handing things back and forth and cash back and forth — we don’t think police are doing their job,” Moulton said with a sigh.
As frustrated as he is, Moulton expresses respect for Lanier, who, he says, is “usually responsive,” and Metropolitan Police Department officers in general.
“We have great police officers in the District. We just want the bad behavior to be stopped,” Moulton says.
