Listening for the Amplifier’s Echo

Blasting residents and businesses with unreasonably loud levels of amplified speech to make a point is a very confrontational approach—it’s disturbing, stressful and unsafe.

We witnessed in Georgetown Sunday what our neighborhood experiences every Saturday at H and 8th Streets NE.

Sunday’s Citywide Amplified Free Speech Day was part of the ongoing process to fix D.C.’s broken noise law. The residents, who live in and around the 700 block of 8th Street NE, continue to evaluate the effects of Sunday’s action, which provided the neighborhood around Wisconsin and N Streets NW an example of what happens weekly in northeast Washington: For two hours the northwest neighborhood was pummeled with 112 decibels of amplified, non-commercial speech.

The event did illustrate quite clearly how residents and businesses are negatively impacted by unlimited amplified speech. And we distributed fliers and spoke with several hundred people to help them understand the absurdity of the noise law.

This morning I left a phone message for Councilmember Jim Graham, who chairs the Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. I wait to hear back.