Green Line (WMATA) - Crime On The Green Line

Crime On The Green Line

Since the 1980s, Southeast D.C. has been synonymous with crime and violence, and has one of the highest crime rates in the District of Columbia (albeit not in all crimes). Concern about crime at the Anacostia, Congress Heights, and Southern Avenue stations has existed for many years, although statistics only partially support these concerns. Fear of crime was one of the reasons why, in 1991, Prince George's County residents fought bus route changes that would have forced riders to disembark at Anacostia Station.

In its first year of operation, Anacostia tied with the Capitol Heights station for the most auto thefts (17) at any Metro station, and accounted for 11.3 percent of all auto thefts at Metrorail stations. By 2005, large crowds of middle and high school students began congregating at the Anacostia Station, brawling and robbing Metro riders and creating a public safety issue. Metro Transit Police officers, some accompanied by dogs, began patrolling Anacostia, Gallery Place–Chinatown, L'Enfant Plaza, and three other Metro stations to increase awareness of police presence in the stations and deter crime.

The police presence did not appear to help: between 2002 and 2006, arrests of juveniles on Metro increased to 295 from 156, and warnings increased 40 percent. Nearly half the arrests occurred at just five stations: Anacostia, Fort Totten, Gallery Place–Chinatown, L'Enfant Plaza, and Minnesota Avenue—four of them on the Green Line. Metro created a special unit to focus on juvenile crime on Metro, and established liaisons at all D.C. public schools to feed intelligence and information about pending problems to Metro's police division.

Crime continued to be a problem at the Anacostia Station late into the first decade of the 21st century. Assaults and shootings were more frequent at the station than at any other station in the transit system. There were 32 robberies at the station in 2007. Although Anacostia was one of the 10 Metro stations with the highest crime rate in 2007 (and the only such station on the list inside the District of Columbia), no auto thefts or auto break-ins were reported at the station that year. To help deter crime, Metro installed outdoor security cameras at all 10 high-crime Metrorail stations in July 2008. In September 2008, Metro Transit Police stepped up their visibility and presence at all stations with high student ridership, including Anacostia.

Although historically Metro has had a significantly lower crime rate than any comparable transit system in the United States, crime on Metro as a whole was rising in the late 2000s. Crime on the transit system began spiking in 2008 and 2009. Robbery rose by 30 percent to 581 incidents in 2008, and in the first four months of 2009 rose another 28.3 percent to 240 robberies. Crime on the Green Line continued to be high: Gallery Place–Chinatown had the most robberies of any station throughout the Metro system, followed by Anacostia (25 percent fewer than Gallery Place) and L'Enfant Plaza (20 percent fewer than Anacostia). Crime by juveniles (generally robbery, or assault) also continued to be a serious issue for Metro, with more than 260 juvenile arrests in the first nine months of 2009, and Metro Transit Police continued to engage in large numbers of high-visibility patrols. Anacostia, Fort Totten, Gallery Place–Chinatown, L'Enfant Plaza, and Minnesota Avenue continued to be trouble spots, and Metro added Metro Center to the list in 2009.