Meet Stephanie!

A certain kind of scam artist has made a resurgence lately around the Hill. Her name is Stephanie. She comes up to people at places like Eastern Market or the Safeway on 14th Street SE, and she has an elaborate story for why she needs money.

“It is a scam that was an epidemic on Capitol Hill a few years back,” said longtime Hill resident and activist Jim Myers. “It was a woman who just went everywhere and called herself Stephanie. We began to refer to these people as ‘Stephanies.’ ”

Fay Singer, a computer consultant who has lived on the Hill for 40 years, says she was in the Safeway parking lot the day before Thanksgiving when a “very nicely dressed” woman approached and said she had locked her keys and purse in her car. The woman needed $60 in cab fare to get to and from her house.

Singer was wary of the woman and asked lots of questions. Why not get somebody to jimmy the door? The woman said the BMW people told her a mechanism in the door prevents jimmying. How about a locksmith? The woman said the door has a microchip in it. What about police? They will try to jimmy the door, the woman said. She said she was an attorney, and promised she would pay Singer back double the amount.

“She was very persistent and I finally just forked over $30,” Singer said. “She was very convincing. Every question I asked, she had an answer.”

When Singer did not hear from the woman that evening, she reported the scam on the Hill East listserv, the communications hub of east Capitol Hill. Within a day, nearly a dozen people responded with accounts of similar scams around the neighborhood.

About 10 years ago, Jim Myers worked with the authorities to combat this type of con artist.

“We got the U.S. attorney’s office to agree they would prosecute these people under theft-by-trick, and so police got on the bandwagon and they started arresting Stephanies,” Myers said. “The police captain would call me on the phone and say, ‘We got her, we got her! We got the Stephanie! She’s wanted in North Carolina for bank robbery!’ So they extradite her to North Carolina. And then they would find another one, and she would be wanted for armed robbery in Maryland.”

It is difficult to abate these kinds of con routines in the midst of east Capitol Hill’s gentrification.
“Sometimes you feel weary,” Myers said. “It’s very hard because you have lots of new residents, so scams are harder to deal with because you have to inform an entirely new audience.”

No foul language! 

Watch your mouth, Dick Cheney. It is illegal to use bad language in any public space in the District of Columbia. The maximum penalty for violations brings a $250 fine and 90 days in jail, according to the D.C. Code.

The law states: “[I]t shall not be lawful for any person or persons to curse, swear, or make use of any profane language or indecent or obscene words” in any public place in the District.

The statute also forbids D.C. residents from cursing, swearing, or using profanity in private if it can be heard from a public space. So if you are watching a football game in your own home, and the Washington Redskins are losing to the Buffalo Bills, say, and a poor coaching decision results in a disastrous 15-yard penalty at the end of a close game … Well, try to temper your fury so people can’t hear those swear words from outside. It’s the law!

Melissa Merz, spokeswoman for the D.C. Attorney General’s office, said nobody in that office remembered ever presenting the charge in court. The statute has been on the books since 1898.

Cars vs. bikes vs. pedestrians

Bikes get no respect. On Nov. 22, First District D.C. police Sgt. Richard Ehrlich spent his off day riding his bike to meet friends and run some errands around Capitol Hill. It turned out to be a bad day for biking.

First, in Northwest, a Metrobus driver cut him off by making a right turn from a left lane, then yelled an insult to him as he walked his bike in the crosswalk. After that, in a bike lane on East Capitol Street, a motorist tailed him, then drove in front of him and stopped abruptly, yelling obscenities.

Farther up the street, Ehrlich almost collided with a female pedestrian pushing a stroller and talking on her cell phone. She yelled “hateful insults” as he swerved to avoid hitting her. On H Street NE, Ehrlich said a motorist tried to run him off the road after nearly hitting another cyclist who blew through an intersection.

Ehrlich wrote a brief account of his bad bike day for the benefit of a handful of people who attended a road safety meeting at First District headquarters on Friday evening. Most folks were bike enthusiasts. Eric Gilliland, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, said his organization is shifting its efforts from educating bikers about their rights and responsibilities toward educating drivers about respecting bikes.

But pedestrians get no respect, either. Jim Sebastian, manager of the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT) bicycle and pedestrian programs, said the city had its 24th pedestrian fatality just that morning, already far surpassing last year’s total of 17. And one man at the meeting complained of “aggressive cyclists” around Stanton Park.

“I’m walking across the street with an eight-month-pregnant woman, and a cyclist comes up and clips her because she is not walking fast enough,” said James Wilderotter, who had this experience with his wife earlier this year. “That’s what I have problems with.”

Sgt. Ehrlich acknowledged that many casual cyclists do not realize they are supposed to obey the rules of the road, but he said lots of pedestrians are clueless, too.

In his quest for a “Livable, Walkable Community,” Ward 6 D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells, who bikes from the Hill to city hall, is seriously considering a push for the “Complete Street,” a redesign of street layout that protects cyclists by giving them their own lane between parked cars and the sidewalk. Sebastian said DDOT has long been studying ways to make roads more accommodating to cyclists and that Complete Streets are in the cards for the near future.