‘Plowing Snow in Petworth’
courtesy of ‘Wayan Vota’

At the end of this WTOP article about the District using inmates on work release to clear snow there’s a rather disturbing fact mentioned:

The District spent $4 million of its $6.2 million snow removal budget cleaning up after the storm.

That’s some serious scratch and 60% of the budget – gone on a storm that happened before the official start of winter. With the Capital Weather Gang thinking we’re going to see more snowfall than average this year where will that leave the District financially?

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courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie’

You can win a $25 SmarTrip card from Metro by guessing their New Year’s Day ridership number as closely as possible without going over. Enter online, providing a valid email address (so they can contact you if you win). The deadline to enter is “midnight New Year’s Day,” which I’m guessing in this case actually means 12:00 AM January 2nd, but maybe you want to enter early just in case. The winner will be notified by January 8th.

‘Self-portrait #214’
courtesy of ‘andertho’

Here at We Love DC, we post about 100 photos per week on our site. Some are press-kit images, some are taken by the authors specifically for their articles, but the vast majority of them are contributed by local photographers. We’ve been asked a few times by our readers how one might go about getting their photos on We Love DC. One word: Bribery. (Kidding!) It seems to me that explaining a bit about how our photos get chosen helps everyone, so here are some tips. Continue reading →

‘Ukin puukko’
courtesy of ‘hagge’

D.C.’s homicide numbers, in a trend that mirrors the rest of the nation, are on track to hit a 45 year low, the Washington Times reports. It’s certainly a surprising thing to hear after a year of news about small children shot through a door, but we’ve only logged 132 homicides compared to last year’s 184. So even if an ugly few days pushes it even farther from 1964’s 132 it still represents a notable improvement.

As the article mentions ever so briefly, this is a nationwide trend of decreasing violent crime that, despite what you hear in the media, has been going on a long time. I heard an interesting interview on the Kojo show the other day with Paul Butler, a professor of law at George Washington University. Butler was hawking his book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, but he made an interesting assertion near the end of the interview – that the decline in violent crime was tied directly to decreases of lead in our environment.

Given the difficulty DC’s water authority has had over the years with lead in the water this is a particularly relevant assertion for us.