Man arrested, accused of committing armed robbery of an Adams Morgan pharmacy

A pharmacy on Columbia Road, in broad view of one of DC's busier commercial strips, gets hit by an armed robber. That's not a statistic, that's a pharmacist or a clerk staring down a weapon over a shift's worth of register cash or a shelf of controlled substances. MPD made an arrest, which is more than can be said for a lot of cases in this city, and Jamari Brighthaupt is now facing charges. Good. That's how it's supposed to work.

But an arrest isn't the same as accountability, and DC residents have learned that distinction the hard way over the past few years. The city's revolving door on juvenile and repeat offenders, the plea deals that turn armed robbery into a lesser charge, the pretrial release decisions that let people with violent histories walk back onto the same blocks they just terrorized. None of that is mentioned in a two-line police blotter item, but it's the actual story that matters here. Will this case be prosecuted as what it is, an armed robbery of a business, or will it get negotiated down into something that barely shows up on paper?

Small businesses in neighborhoods like Adams Morgan don't have the luxury of waiting around for city hall to figure out its priorities. Every robbery that ends in a light sentence or a dropped charge is a signal to the next guy with a gun that the risk is manageable. We'd like to think this arrest actually leads somewhere, that the U.S. Attorney's Office follows through and a judge treats an armed robbery like the serious crime it is. DC's pharmacies, corner stores, and the people who staff them deserve at least that much.