Terry Lynch: District needs to replace its aged, dilapidated police facilities

If you visit the Metropolitan Police Department’s various district headquarters around town or the Henry J. Daly Building on Indiana Avenue NW in Judiciary Square, you’ll find aged facilities with leaky roofs and outdated heating, cooling, electrical and computer systems. Even when they were new, though, most of these buildings were inefficient and austere; their poor design makes them look like bulwarks against the very neighborhoods served by the police officers who work in these facilities. The architecture gives every appearance that the No. 1 priority is to provide parking rather than to help to engage the community.

Overhauling these aged and dilapidated public safety facilities is an issue the city government can tackle right now — just as it continues to do with its libraries and schools through modernization initiatives. Replacing crumbling and outdated police facilities won’t turn around the troubling, tragic increase in homicides this year, but it would improve working conditions and morale for our first responders. New buildings designed with the community in mind could also help the police department forge a better relationship with the communities its officers serve.

The 3rd District headquarters at 17th and V streets NW, for example, is located in one of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods, yet much of the land is devoted to a two-story parking garage. A modern mixed-use development at that location could provide a smart, green and more efficient police station as well as a library or some other civic facility; the site could probably also accommodate new affordable housing or retail providing jobs and services to the neighborhood.

Much the same can be said for other district headquarters. The 4th District site along the fast-changing Georgia Avenue NW corridor offers more than enough space for retail, housing or other uses along with a new state-of-the-art police station. At the very minimum, grossly deficient facilities must be brought up to acceptable operational standards. In that regard, the DC Jail overseen by the DC Department of Corrections has a history of systems that fail to perform as they should, leaving workers and inmates to deal with situations such as unbearable heat in the summer.

Really, the overhaul of these facilities should have been started a decade or more ago, but officials need to act now — better late than never. The first step in getting this overdue process going is community engagement, so neighbors can weigh in on the type of police facilities they want. We can and should provide officers with smarter, more efficient and environmentally friendly facilities — and our neighborhoods, where feasible, with complementary uses that can provide meaningful jobs and new tax revenues.

Will the overhaul of police facilities help reduce the homicide rate? It certainly can’t hurt. It can, in fact, materially help to connect neighborhoods with the law enforcement and emergency professionals that serve them — and those positive connections can only aid in the larger effort to reduce crime.

The city has the funds and should be doing all it can to both provide our police officers with first-class resources and our neighborhoods with facilities that engage with them rather than stand as fortresses in their midst.

Terry Lynch is executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations.