D.C. police have cracked down big time on public drinking in the First District, which encompasses Capitol Hill. This time last year, they had made 74 arrests for public consumption of alcohol and disorderly conduct. As of Sept. 18 this year, they’d made 328.

Former First District Cmdr. Diane Groomes — promoted this week to assistant chief — said last week that the arrests are partly the result of three “All Hands on Deck” overtime surges this summer. By addressing the small crimes, she said, police deter the big ones — the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement.

Kristopher Baumann, head of the D.C. police union, says the increase in arrests may have less to do with specific efforts like All Hands on Deck than a general increase in responsiveness to constituent complaints.

“It’s a sign that the department’s becoming more responsive to community problems under Chief [Cathy] Lanier,” Bauman says. “This is sort of her thing.”

Neighbors post over a hundred messages a week on an e-mail listserv for the First District, inquiring about why they saw squad cars on their block, asking police to investigate particular problems and sometimes just ranting or whining. Groomes and her lieutenants have responded to almost every message.

On Sept. 19, a poster complained that the police didn’t respond to his 911 calls as he watched a thief steal stuff from his car. Groomes tried to explain to this person that officers were slow to respond to his calls that night because they were tied up with a robbery, an overturned vehicle with injured passengers and six arrests for auto theft. But the complainant would not be consoled.

“[T]he fact that there were THREE other incidents going on around the time that I was sitting in MY front door watching MY stuff get stolen from MY car should not mean that MY call goes ignored for half an hour,” he wrote.

According to Groomes, the aggressive small-time policing should give the listserv crowd less to complain about. She says that overall crime is down 9 percent this year in the First District.

Childhood never ends for adult kickball enthusiasts. The Kickball Kraze has taken the yuppie social scene by storm, with multiple leagues, divisions and teams giving anybody with free evenings an opportunity for good clean fun. On the Mall last Thursday, no fewer than five games in two different leagues were occurring at once. Teams with names like B—-h Be Cool and Sloppy Seconds booted a big red rubber ball into the sunset.

But there may be a bad moon rising. A shady group calling itself the Anti Yuppie Kickball Guerilla Front has set up an elaborate website encouraging a popular uprising against the kickball phenomenon.

“For too long we have sat idle while all the chumps, douche-bags, yuppies, and stripey-shirt imported a—holes of this town coalesced their power under this banner,” goes the manifesto. The chief complaint seems to be that kickball teams are irritating when they crowd bars after games. The Front urges direct action — snatching balls away from games and lobbing dog droppings at kickballers from afar.

A person identified as “Inquisitor K” tells Hillscape via e-mail that the Front’s membership rolls are classified, but that it has attracted “100 or so recent applicants who passed the initial test.” The final test is direct action against a game.

World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA — the largest of the kickball organizations) spokeswoman Tiffany Ficklin says that no games have been interrupted by guerilla attacks: “To our knowledge, no one has stolen any kickballs or disturbed division play in any manner.”

Confronted with this, Inquisitor K decline to confirm or deny any attacks. “I will say that results of our actions can be observed in the shifting, fearful eyes of many a kickball player when they step onto the field or into the bar.”

Perhaps Inquisitor K exaggerates the Front’s threat. But kickball-haters may be heartened that there is some chance kickball will simply destroy itself.

At one post-game event at a bar earlier this year, there was a rumor that the winning team had cheated. When Hillscape asked a member of this victorious team about the allegations, the person became upset and snatched Hillscape’s pen away. The next day, using reportorial sleuth, Hillscape obtained an e-mail sent to the winning team detailing the result of an official investigation:

“You had non-WAKA players playing last night, which itself is grounds for a forfeit. Also, without those players, your team did not have enough registered females to comply with Rule 7.04. This information was made available to Jiminy Kick-It post-game (by a member of your team) and they protested the fact that the game was played at all. Rule 7.05 allows such a protest to be made after the game.”

If this Legalese is surprising, consider that the grown-ups who founded WAKA actually filed a federal lawsuit against upstart league DCKickball over who has the rights to these precious bylaws, and that since that lawsuit WAKA’s founders have even filed suits against each other. It’s Lord of the Flies in the Twilight Zone.

The District government shut down six adult nightclubs to make way for a baseball stadium. Now the last place in the city where you can watch video porn in a viewing booth is under siege. A group of about 30 Mount Vernon Square neighbors staged an old-fashioned anti-porno protest outside the Fun Fair video store on 5th Street NW last week. They say the store is licensed for videos, not in-house porn-viewing. Neighbors made speeches and held signs with slogans such as “Fun Fair Blows,” “Prada Not Porno” and “Sick!”
Fun Fair employees watched and listened to the protest from inside the store’s lobby. One of them thought these activists were preposterous.

“These people think a video store is more important than a murder,” he said, pointing to a “Wanted” sign posted inside next to the front door. John Shaw, proprietor of the Subway Liquor Store across the street, was fatally shot by a late-night customer on Aug. 14. “He didn’t die because of the video store. This is not the reason why you have violence in this area.”

The protesters say otherwise, pointing to this very same murder in their rants against Fun Fair. Assistant police chief Diane Groomes, who attended the protest and applauded the neighborhood’s efforts, said that officers made a drug bust in the store the previous Friday, and that a porn store does help create a prostitution-friendly atmosphere on a city block. But she said that Fun Fair had nothing to do with the killing of John Shaw in August.

The protest is the latest in the store’s decade-long battle with the city, which has been wrangling with Fun Fair lawyers over permit violations since 1997. In recent years, with all the condos going up in this downtown area near the convention center, new neighbors and old have been pestering the District to do something about the store.

“Ask them how many of them live in this neighborhood,” said Rob Jennings, 39, who has lived in Mount Vernon for three years. He said he had moved here from Capitol Hill to get a better feel for city life — but not to have to be near a crime-ridden storefront. 

The men inside Fun Fair were similarly skeptical of their antagonists, asking Hillscape to find out how many of them have roots in the neighborhood. But their spokesman mostly stressed, like Groomes, that uprooting the store wouldn’t make crime go away. He put it this way: “Is there crime at Blockbuster?”