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Berkowitz and a friend were unloading her luggage and momentarily left the house’s door unlocked. Suddenly a man rushed in, put a gun to her friend’s head, and told them to get on the floor or else he would kill them. He left with her friend’s phone, wallet and keys, and Berkowitz’s carry-on bag. The police never found a suspect. In the late ’60s and the ’70s, as Great Society liberalism’s majority dwindled, it was a truism that soaring urban crime was due to root causes, such as white flight and deindustrialization, and their consequences, like decaying schools. James Vorenberg, who set crime policy in the Johnson administration, epitomized the conventional wisdom when he said, “To a considerable degree, law enforcement cannot deal with criminal behavior. The most important way in which any mayor could be held responsible for crime is the extent to which he failed to fight for job-training programs, better schools and decent housing.” City governments, acting as if the police could only respond to crimes, not prevent them, began to emphasize reduced response times through the implementation of 911 and other technologies. As Vincent Cannato writes in The Ungovernable City, a 2001 book about New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, “The goals of the modern police department were better response time and faster arrest clearance rates. The police therefore became a more distant presence in a neighborhood, responding only after crimes had been committed.”

In the ’90s a new paradigm emerged, suited to the era’s post-nanny state zeitgeist: Led by the neoconservative Manhattan Institute and its disciple New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the “broken windows” approach focused on reducing crime on the front end by instilling a sense of law and order and preventing opportunities to commit crime. Proactive police tactics, such as arresting perpetrators of quality-of-life crimes like subway turnstile jumping, and targeting resources at strategic hot spots, yielded clear results.

And yet while crime has continued dropping in New York, it has begun to level off in many cities, including D.C., that have employed the same police tactics. In D.C. murders rose slightly in 2007 and 2008, and crime in general remains persistent at a level that, while infinitely better than the dark days of 1991, when the city had 482 murders (compared to 186 in 2008), is still surprisingly high for a city that has experienced a recent boom in residential demand and commercial activity.

D.C.’s experience demonstrates the limits of police-based approaches to crime prevention. Though there is room for improvement in execution, every expert interviewed for this story believes the high crime rate is due to social conditions, primarily the lack of economic and educational opportunities for the underclass. It turns out that the liberals were partially right after all: Police tactics may get the crime rate down from epidemic proportions, but they won’t fix the root problems. “We always talk about law enforcement, but they can’t solve this problem,” says Tom Blagburn, a retired director of community policing for D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). “We never address the conditions in the neighborhoods where most of the crime occurs.”

In 1960 D.C. had 200,000 more residents than it does today, and just 81 homicides. But D.C. suffered massive white flight in the years that followed, particularly after the 1968 riots. Over the next three decades the population went straight down and the number of crimes went straight up. Although crime has dropped considerably from the mid-’90s, D.C. still lacks many of the stabilizing forces that have continued to lower crime rates in cities such as New York and Boston. While those cities have a constant influx of immigrants, who, according to a Center for an Urban Future report, are 30 percent more likely to open businesses, D.C. has seen most of its foreign immigration happen in its suburbs. The height restriction on city buildings has pushed economic growth to the suburbs, while the poor state of D.C.’s public schools encourages professionals to raise their children outside city limits. D.C. suburbs, such as Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County and Fairfax County, ranked among the nation’s 10 wealthiest counties in 2004, while the District’s poverty rate, roughly one-fifth of the population, remained stagnant. In March, D.C. posted an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, while in Fairfax County it was a mere 4.7 percent.

When I was a rookie you had to walk a beat in a community that had 10,000 people and 60 percent lived below the poverty line… How could I police that community, reduce crime and maintain law and order by myself?”

While D.C. has more desperate ghettos than, say, San Francisco, much of the city has more in common with the Castro than it does with inner-city Detroit. Gays, hippies, activists and nonprofit workers have been gentrifying most of Northwest D.C. for decades, spreading north and east from revitalization’s ground zero, Dupont Circle. Lawyers, lobbyists and government workers follow them, helping to revive formerly depressed neighborhoods in Ward 1 such as Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, U Street and Columbia Heights. A city where whites once stayed west of Connecticut Avenue now features a string of neighborhoods with coffee bars adjacent to bodegas. But in these neighborhoods, where modest row houses now easily fetch $600,000 and million-dollar homes are commonplace, crimes still occur with alarming frequency.

A stroll down Euclid Street NW, one of the more blighted blocks in Ward 1, captures the conundrum well. Euclid runs through Adams Morgan — a nightlife Mecca where Latinos, African-Americans and yuppies live side by side — and Columbia Heights, a once-poor neighborhood that is gentrifying with shocking speed. New luxury condominium buildings with casino-worthy names (the Villagio, the Magdalina) sit adjacent to row houses, some decaying, some being renovated. In July 2008 political blogger Brian Beutler was shot in a botched mugging on Euclid, in Adams Morgan, only a few blocks from where Berkowitz was robbed. According to the MPD, there were 50 violent crimes within a 1,000- foot radius of that corner between April 2007 and April 2008, down from 79 in the previous year. There has been improvement, but 50 violent crimes is an awful lot to find within a couple blocks in one of D.C.’s more expensive, gentrified and bustling areas.

A police camera still hangs at the corner of Euclid and 17th Street, half a block from where Beutler was held up, though it has not led to an arrest. City officials are quick to defend the $6 million camera system as a preventive measure rather than a crime-solving tool. “You can’t measure what has been prevented,” says John DeTaeye, a policy aide to Councilmember Jim Graham. MPD commander George Kucik, whose district includes 17th and Euclid, argues that the drop in crime over the last year on that corner is partly attributable to the cameras. He adds that revitalization in central D.C. can actually lead to more crimes, because it reflects an influx of potential victims, whether they are going to nightclubs in Adams Morgan or to the Convention Center

Although the police department and politicians say the cameras help, they all concede that the best preventive police work is an engaged foot patrolman. “When I was a rookie you had to walk a beat in a community that had 10,000 people and 60 percent lived below the poverty line,” recalls Lowell Ducket, a retired commander of an MPD antigang unit. “How could I police that community, reduce crime and maintain law and order by myself? It was cooperation. You knew people and their problems. When I caught kids messing up, I slapped them in the back of their head and took them home to their mom. When the drug pushers showed up, the armed robber, [the community] told you what was up. If you have an ‘us vs. them’ mentality, it won’t work.” But in D.C., as elsewhere, the emphasis shifted to reducing response times. “In the ’70s, to judge whether we were effective we went to measuring the speed with which we answered calls,” explains Ducket. “So we put everybody in the car. It took us out of direct contact with the public.” That shift came at the worst possible time, as white flight left a predominantly black urban population feeling under siege by a (then) mostly white police force.

The city claims that it is reasserting the primacy of beat cops, but their absence on the side streets where muggings typically take place remains noticeable. “There are not enough [beat cops],” D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty admits. “That obviously is a focus of the administration. We started on it on day one and have made a lot of progress. There’s more to do. We have to not only put the manpower out there but we have got to change the philosophy.

The philosophy when I took over wasn’t a beat officer philosophy.”

The main crime-prevention program that DeTaeye trumpets is the city’s Youth Summer Employment Program, which Graham supports. This summer the program will pay $6.55 an hour to enrolled residents ages 14 to 21 to work part-time jobs in everything from the arts to manual labor. Graham has also championed programs that sit at the nexus of policing and social work. In 2001 the nonprofit Columbia Height/Shaw Collaborative began to work on gang prevention after a spate of Latino gang-related homicides in the late ’90s. Partnering with the local police who knew the neighborhood kids, the social workers would inform the police of issues like increasing tensions so the cops could patrol relevant corners or even mediate to squash a beef. Between 2002 and 2005 there was only one Latino gang homicide in the area. Graham noticed the success and helped introduce the program citywide. The Citywide Coordinating Council on Youth Violence Prevention is now bringing the model to more blighted areas on the east side of D.C.

But another effort of Graham’s, a bill he introduced to create “no loitering” zones, ran into a common obstacle: D.C.’s idiosyncratic politics. This is the city, after all, that reelected former Mayor Marion Barry after he was convicted of drug possession. While New York and Philadelphia still have a residual blue-collar contingent (the coalition that put Giuliani in office) favoring stiff crime control, D.C., with its nonindustrial past, has no such constituency. And while the recent gentrification has altered the city’s politics, many of the newcomers are professional liberal activists who frown upon the infringement of civil liberties. Under public criticism, Graham withdrew the bill.

Fenty was elected in part on a promise to improve D.C.’s much-maligned public schools. Doing so would unquestionably reduce crime: A teenager in a classroom is not on the street, and degrees lead to employment. When asked about crime, Fenty unsurprisingly pivots to his signature issue. “I think we’re doing a great job from police standpoint and other agencies, but crime will never take a huge jump down until you get a real control on the education system, which is why we’ve been so focused on it,” he says.

Although the D.C. Department of Education claims some modest gains in graduation and attendance, educational experts question the soundness of their numbers. “Education data is terrible and the dropout rate is certainly higher for black males [than for other groups],” says Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Education Sector, a national educational research nonprofit based in D.C. Rotherham also notes that just because someone earns a degree does not mean they necessarily received an education sufficient to prepare them for college. (The D.C. Department of Education refused requests for an interview for this article.)

In the meantime, the city is making minor inroads through other good old-fashioned liberal interventions. The Department of Youth Prevention Services is now working with juvenile offenders in what its director, Vincent Schiraldi, describes as a “more rehabilitative, less punitive,” approach. The strategy has two main components: multisystemic therapy for children who live with their families and multidimensional treatment foster care. “You go into family homes and help the mom learn how to pay rent and budget, help figure out how to get the kid into a different school,” Schiraldi says. “It’s hands-on problem solving for families in crises.” With multidimensional treatment foster care, he explains, “you train foster parents to deal with delinquent youth, pay them more, expect more out of them.” Schiraldi claims that recidivism has dropped from 31 percent to 25 percent under the new paradigm.

“It’s not a home run,” says Schiraldi, “maybe a single or double.” But after years of neglect, you have to start somewhere.