Communication Is Key

As a commissioner, it will be my foremost duty to communicate with all residents and pass on those concerns to public officials, police, city planners, and commercial developers.

My opponent, incumbent commissioner Cleopatra Jones, recently posted the following message on the Eckington listserv:

Dear Constituents/ Neighbors: Smile you are on camera! Hard work has benefitted the community. Surveillance cameras to deter crime are up on the corner of Lincoln Road & R. Street, NE. The community will be getting more cameras installed, I will give you an up-date as cameras pop -up.

I have mixed feelings about the cameras and hope that they will deter crime rather than move it from R Street to my street. The problem is that Jones did not ask anyone in a public forum about whether we wanted these cameras in the neighborhood. One anonymous resident responded via another listserv:

Hey Cleopatra, instead of putting up surveillance cameras and calling it "hard work that has benefited the community", how about some real hard work by enabling our police officers to do their jobs? We have 100s that are off the street because of bogus allegations by criminals . . . Next time I'm getting mugged I'll be sure to look at the camera and smile.

That statement is a bit unfair, but that resident believes that the cameras are not the answer, and that community policing would be more helpful. (For that matter, police representatives claim that there are police officers walking the streets, but I don't ever see them.)

Incidentally, on her official website, Jones states: "Having been a commissioner the last two terms (four years) in SMD 5C03 . . ." Actually, she is a former commissioner of 5C-03, then she moved to our ANC (5C-02) in 2003 and won the race in 2004.

As for the ANC's News page, it has not been updated since the September 1, 2004 posting of a press release announcing "ANC 5C to Sponsor City-Wide Town Hall Meeting on Housing Affordability." Two years later, that issue is still a frequent topic of discussion. More on that later.