Pirate's Cove

This is our nation’s capital. The seat of our federal government. The place schoolkids and others go to visit to see the history. To see the museums and monuments. Where foreign dignitaries come to meet with elected officials. And now a place where you have a 1 in 24 chance of being the victim of a property crime

Restaurants are still struggling, and crime isn’t helping

Cedric Maupillier was in the kitchen during a busy Saturday night at Convivial on Oct. 21. The chef didn’t hear the shots when several men exited a vehicle and opened fire at the Giant supermarket across the street in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

But his guests did.

They immediately sought cover inside the restaurant at the corner of Eighth and O streets NW, with its picture-window views of the neighborhood. Diners and employees, Maupillier said, feared an active shooter was nearby. Customers hid under tables; one group turned over theirs to create a shield, sending plates, food and glasses crashing to the floor.

No one was hurt inside the restaurant, though one man was injured in the gunfire outside the supermarket, according to a Washington, D.C. police report. This wasn’t a random act of violence, like the mass shooting on Oct. 25 at a bar and grill in Lewiston, Maine. This was part of a chronic neighborhood problem: It was the fourth time in the past few months someone had fired a gun within earshot of his restaurant, said Maupillier, who opened Convivial eight years ago in Shaw, which was then experiencing a revitalization.

It’s just normal in the Democratic Party run city of D.C. That’s a word mentioned nowhere in the article: Democrat. There’s no mention of who created the policies that allows crime to run rampant and fester

Maupillier is not alone in his anger about crime in America’s cities and its effect on business. Crime, chefs and proprietors say, has hit their sector particularly hard, arguably at the worst time, as many restaurants are still trying to emerge from a global pandemic.

Margins are already parchment-paper thin, and restaurants have struggled to remain profitable amid a crush of issues: the rising price of ingredients, changing dining habits, debt obligations and increased labor costs as some jurisdictions begin to phase out the tipped minimum wage or owners shell out more money to attract and maintain a stable crew.

Why would anyone go to a restaurant in an area with lots of crime? The WP article also mention issues in San Francisco, Chicago, and NYC. Who runs those cities?

You can also drill down and review local crime stats. Some cities, such as Washington, D.C., Chicago and Oakland, have online portals in which you can see the number of reported crimes around a selected address. You can, for instance, type in the address for Bella Notte in Chicago and see dozens of crimes committed on the streets around the closed restaurant. (As in many cities, Chicago’s crime rates vary: Some, such as robberies and aggravated assaults, have spiked in the past year; others have fallen, including homicides.)

Neighborhood Scout ranks D.C., the nation’s capital, as a 2. Only cities ranked a 1 are worse. For violent crime, there’s a 1 in 102 chance of being a victim. Is this where you want to take your kids these days? Interestingly, most of the cities around D.C. are not that bad. Arlington is a 28 (100 is the safest). It has zero murders. Why is it so different?

Yet if you talk to restaurateurs and chefs, they’ll tell you that many of the crimes they deal with are never reported. They’ll tell you that graffiti, burglaries and the problems associated with homelessness – such as destruction of property – can cause thousands of dollars in damages. The money to repair the damages, they say, often comes out of their own pocket – for one simple reason.

“If you report too many crimes or burglaries, then the insurance company may drop you or even increase your rates,” says Nigel Jones, chef and owner of Calabash in Oakland, where violent crime this year is up by 22 percent over the same period in 2022, according to recent police statistics.

And if they report them, at best all that’ll happen is the police eventually show up to take a report, but, they do not have the time to investigate.

I have to wonder, how many of these restaurant owners and employees voted for Democrats in D.C., Oakland, San Fran, Chicago, etc? People have the right to vote for whoever they want, but they also have to accept responsibility for the society that results from their decisions. Those complaining about poor prosecution and a shortage of police to deal with the crime and homelessness so often vote for the policies that result in these conditions. D.C. resident overwhelmingly voted for extreme Democrats who support soft on crime policies and went all in on BLM and their scam, meaning the police have to leave black people alone, who are responsible for a goodly chunk of the D.C. crime.