Near the Flagpole + White Woman = National News

It's a hundred and thirteen to ninety-three, by the way. Homicides in 2019 so far, that is, in Washington DC and Indianapolis, respectively. Given that Naptown has 160k+ more people than the nation's capital, that's not good news for the District.

What's funnier is that it was hard to get those numbers, due to the actual topic of this post.

See, I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet a statistical majority of those 113 dead bodies have been young Aftican-American men in the sketchier portions of town. Looking at the murder map tends to bear out the geographic clustering of the murders, like in most cities. Wherever you live, you probably know where the "bad side of town is" where all the murder happens. (The area I refer to as "Thirty-Whatth and What?" here in Indy.) There is a serious and complicated crime problem in the 'hood.

But trying to get to that data was made difficult this morning because "murder Washington DC" kept turning up results to a story that even made local news here: A white woman was stabbed to death walking a dog in the Green Zone.

It's weird, the calculus that determines what's national news and what's not. I'm sure bodies were getting stacked as usual last night in bad neighborhoods across the country, but a white woman getting stabbed at random in a nice neighborhood near the national media's bifurcated NYC/DC flagpole cracks into my local news here in flyover country.
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