Trinidad homeowner Willie Dorn said the District’s new police strategy to set up checkpoints has been tried before — and it didn’t work then, either.

About a dozen years ago during the height of D.C.’s crack epidemic, Dorn returned to his Northeast Washington home to find a police roadblock just outside his town house.

Instead of driving though, Dorn parked his car and began to walk the short distance to his home. An angry police officer brandished a weapon and demanded to know why Dorn refused to go through the checkpoint.

Dorn, a Maryland corrections supervisor, was detained for several minutes, until the police learned that he was longtime friends of the fifth police district commander.

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“I was lucky,” Dorn said. “What’s going to happen this time?”

Police are setting up the city’s first checkpoint Saturday on the 1400 block of Montello Avenue just down the block from Dorn’s newly renovated town house. Police said the initiative will stop crime before it happens.

But if the officers would use the laws at their disposal and order the young men loitering on the street corners to move, police wouldn’t need to take such “crazy” measures, Dorn said.

Danielle Bays, 38, of Morse Street NE, said police need to do something to combat the violence, but she had questions about the practicality of the checkpoint.

“If my friends come to visit, what happens?”

During the rollout of the plan, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said 100 percent of the residents were in favor of the plan. But none of the neighbors interviewed by The Examiner had heard of the chief’s measure.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Wilhelmina Lawson said she supported the measure but wished that the police department had talked to community activists and residents before launching the crackdowns.

“Why are we always the last to know?” she asked.

Dorn said he believes the plan is doomed to failure.

Several other entrances lead into the neighborhood and three Metro routes run through the planned checkpoint, he said. “I don’t know what kind of thought went into this but you can tell it wasn’t a lot.”

smccabe@dcexaminer.com