The worst city government.

• Author: Shuger, Scott
• Position: Washington, D.C.

Just days after arriving in Washington to take up my new job as an editor with the Monthly, I got a bracing introduction to local municipal procedures.

It all started with an unusually violent traffic incident not far from my apartment-a man named Jerome Greene demolished much of a busy block of K street downtown with the rented truck he was barely at the wheel of. Before the apparently drunk Greene could be arrested by police, he crashed into a dozen vehicles, rammed five utility poles, collided with a city bus, and, worst of all, ran over a woman who was trying to get out of his way. Many witnesses thought he chased her down intentionally.

Although the D.C. cops confirmed that Greene was legally intoxicated and that within die past two years he'd been convicted of heroin and assault charges, they set him free two hours later, pending a court appearance. The D.C. police chief, Maurice Turner, defended his department's action as "proper procedure."

Then a few days later it was revealed that Greene had received a D.C. driver's license despite having had his New York license suspended three years earlier because of unresolved traffic violations there. The head of the D.C. motor vehicle office, Larry Greenberg, said that Greene got a license through the bureau so effortlessly because he stated that his driving privileges had never been suspended anywhere. "We had no reason but to believe it was his first driver's license," Greenberg told The Washington Post, even though Greene is 42 and the New York traffic violations computer-to which D.C. authorities have access-contains 72 suspensions against Greene-each one for a moving violation.

Compare all this to the experiences I bad my first week in town, A few days after the Greene disaster, I was walking to work when I passed the spot where I'd parked my car the night before. Only now there was too much spot and not enough car. I immediately called die police to report the theft. A half-hour later the cops called me back with great news-my car had not been stolen. Actually, not so great. It had been towed. "Why?" I asked. "Rush hour tow-away zone," said the voice in uniform.

I was pretty positive I hadn't parked in a forbidden spot, but I went back to check. Sure enough, there were no signs on the block where I'd last seen my car. I did now notice that there were some signpoles in the area, but they were just bare corrugated sticks rammed pointlessly into the ground.

Buoyed by this discovery, early...