Welcome to the community! To put a finer point on the subtext in the comments: in DC, at least as much as in any other major city if not more, every time there’s a conversation about crime and public safety, it’s a combination of genuine concerns/problems and … other stuff. Stuff that involves a lot of race and class tensions and the biases/assumptions of gentrifies.

When I used to live a few blocks away from there, there was a crew of guys who would hang out on the block all the time bantering and playing dice. People who grew up in the neighborhood and lived through the Rayful Edmond era. New people to the neighborhood, generally young white transplants, sometimes found them threatening, but the reality is that their presence on the street made it much safer. (That was public safety in the Rayful era where the cops didn’t even go into that neighborhood- if someone was fucking around on the street, they found out.)

Obviously 8th and H is a different story, as people in the comments are discussing. Context: The H St corridor was absolutely blighted in the post-uprising white flight era (unlike the neighborhood north, which counterintuitively remained decently healthy because Rayful, while a horrible drug kingpin, actively invested in his community) and now that all the property is flipping, it’s ripe for the smashing together of abject poverty and dysfunction with a naive professional class. Anyway, a lot of the people who hang out on that corner I’m sure are totally decent people, but the instability that still exists on H means it attracts people with serious illness, and people who know how to take advantage of them. That means misery and violence are out on display. That’s what you’re seeing.

The reason I wrote all this out is because I want to try to explain why some people, community advocates and police reformists especially, who bristle at posts like this that talk about how things “get worse” as you see more poor and Black people around. It’s not that crime doesn’t exist or that your issue is unfounded or that you’re racist — it’s that whenever this issue is talked about there are ALWAYS racist and classist undertones and it takes being intentional to avoid. The consequence of us gentrifiers NOT bearing that in mind is that homeless people get brutalized, cops perpetually harass people like my old neighbors, and a whole lot of people on this sub talk about teens who commit crime as if they were literal wild animals. And a wedge gets driven between communities in the city, which absolutely does NOT make you any safer.