Over the years, H.R. Crawford has developed some serious sales skills. That’s no secret considering he’s been rightly credited with turning shitty sections of southeast into gold mines.

But sometimes Crawford isn’t so good with the sales pitch. Like here.

And, well, in yesterday’s Washington Post. That paper took Sunday to go into feature mode on the rather tenuous ties between the right-now-freaking-out Officer James Haskel, Haskel’s precious minibike, and Haskel’s 14-year-old victim DeOnté Rawlings. So what’s Crawford’s connection? Haskel lived in the real-estate mogul and Barry superfriend’s gated community known as the Walter E. Washington Estates.

The Post writes of Crawford’s tribute to D.C.’s first mayor under home rule: “Encouraging people to unite as one community, ignoring an economic divide, was what H.R. Crawford, a former D.C. Council member, had in mind when he developed the gated community.”

Crawford told the Post: “The whole point was to bring stability to the neighborhood by attracting police officers and schoolteachers.”

All of what Crawford says may be true. But c’mon, he built a gated community that has zero connection to the surrounding neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods where Rawlings lived. So what if schoolteachers and cops break bread and watch American Idol in Crawford’s compound. They lived inside a fortress.

If Crawford wanted to be a uniter, he wouldn’t have put up the gates.