Attacks On Law Officers Surge In D.C. Crime Experts Baffled By Deadly Expressions Of Hate For Police, Feds
Eight times in little more than two years, well-armed gang members from the District of Columbia have ambushed men and women wearing badges, killing seven, even though the officers posed no immediate threat to their attackers.
It is the latest development in the continuing evolution of violence here and a type of attack that remains rare in the rest of the nation.
No other major city has had more than one such ambush killing this decade, and some, such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and Houston, have had none.
But since November 1994, seven police officers and federal agents in the Washington area have been killed, and four wounded, during ambushes. Nationwide, 31 police officers and federal agents have been killed in ambush attacks during the 1990s, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
All the local attacks have occurred since November 1994. Five of the ambush slayings were in D.C, and two were in neighboring Prince George’s County, Md., but all involved killers from the District.
The ambushes - the most recent of which occurred Feb. 5, when D.C. police Officer Brian T. Gibson was gunned down as he sat in his cruiser at a red light - have redefined the increasingly bloody lines of engagement between police and Washington’s violent criminals.
“It’s redefining the norm. The norm among most of the bad guys has always been that you don’t go out of your way to hurt cops,” said James Fyfe, a criminology professor at Temple University. “The last thing most criminals want to do is kill a cop - they generally want to survive to enjoy the fruits of their crime.”
In each of the local ambushes, the attacker either killed himself after being wounded by federal agents or police, or was arrested and is awaiting trial.
Police officials and crime experts aren’t sure what to make of the spate of attacks.
“The tremendous level of violence in the District in recent years has created a great level of disrespect for life and for the authorities. … This may be the most extreme end of it,” Fyfe said.
The attacks have made some police officers - already wary because of the high level of violence in the city - downright edgy. Some D.C. police officers have taken to patrolling in their cruisers with their guns in their laps.
“You don’t want citizens running up to you asking for help, especially if they’re young black or Hispanic males,” said D.C. police Officer Keith Raynor, 27, who is assigned to the violence-plagued 6th Police District.
Police officers and federal agents being slain in the line of duty is nothing new. Since 1797, 1,259 police officers and agents have been killed in attacks on the job, said Craig W. Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
But almost all of those killings involved criminals using what Fyfe called “instrumental violence” to avoid detection or capture.
What’s extraordinary about the Washington-area ambushes is their frequency, and the fact that they were pure expressions of hatred and rage against law enforcement.
That rage became deadly in November 1994, when Bennie Lee Lawson, a 25-year-old gang member, carried out a suicide attack: He walked into police headquarters, pulled out a semiautomatic assault weapon and opened fire. Lawson killed two FBI agents and a police sergeant. Wounded by an FBI agent, he shot himself in the head.
At the time, Lawson was a suspect in a previous triple homicide for which he had been questioned. Investigators believe that Lawson wanted to prove to his fellow gang members that he wasn’t a “snitch” and also desperately wanted to avoid going back to prison, where he had been raped while serving time on a weapons violation. Police found rap-like writings by Lawson in which he expressed hatred of, among others, police and “feds.”
Ralph McLean attacked four times in the first half of 1995, ambushing three police officers and one FBI agent, killing two of his victims. He had been jailed numerous times before for petty crimes.
Investigators have never established any links between the five men who carried out the eight separate ambushes, though they did have some things in common.
All were members or associates of violent gangs, or crews, which sold crack and other illegal drugs.