D.C.’s Overagressive Policing of Black Men
The D.C. City Council is proposing reforms that would make Washington safer and make its police department more accountable and transparent.
This article is adapted from written testimony I delivered to the District of Columbia City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary & Public Safety on October 15, 2020, regarding the “Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2020” and other topics related to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).
My name is Jonathan Blanks and I’m a criminal justice fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a nonpartisan think tank focused on how to provide economic opportunity to those who have least access to it. I am also a Ward 6 resident interested in making D.C. a safer and better place for all who live and visit here. I commend Chairman Allen and the rest of the Council for taking up these important matters.
My testimony reflects my interests and concerns with the laws and policies governing MPD actions and how they affect the communities its officers are sworn to protect and serve.
Background and expertise
In these fractious political and social times, the most polarizing voices often dominate the public debate. Of course, these voices often represent those individuals most directly affected by both the status quo and proposed changes to it, and it is thus important not to marginalize those individuals who may have the most direct stake in the political outcomes at issue just because some of their ideas seem radical. Nevertheless, when shaping policy, stakeholder buy-in is crucial to policy success and thus I provide these comments to the committee as ideas for how best to move forward for the benefit of both police officers and community members.
My father was a police officer in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana from 1957 to 1978, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant. He was among the first generation of Black police officers during a time of a cultural (rather than legal) Jim Crow discrimination in the state and worked through the social upheaval and change of the 1960s and 70s. My father imparted in me a respect for police, as he was proud of his time with the FWPD, but he was also a realist who did not make excuses for bad officers or bad policy. It is through this lens that I view the state of policing in America today.
I have spent more than a decade learning about policing as a think tank writer and researcher. Among other things, I’ve collected and read thousands of news articles chronicling local police misconduct as the managing editor of the (now-defunct) website PoliceMisconduct.net. Through that data collection and other observations, I came to believe that the MPD is among the most professional and least corrupt major city police departments in the United States. This view was confirmed by my experiences with MPD’s Community Engagement Academy and a number of subsequent ride-alongs with patrol officers in 2019. I maintain that opinion to this day.
However, the state of American policing is in terrible shape. The problems that have led to this situation are historic, structural, legal, social, cultural, political and too numerous to get into in this testimony. These problems manifest from causes both inside and outside of departments, which leads to wide variance between not only between jurisdictions but also within policing organizations.
That said, the vast majority of the American people still want police, and I count myself among them. But even granting that eliminating the need for police through community improvement is a goal worth working toward — like the goals of perfecting liberty and ending racism — leaders still must craft policy recognizing that police departments are and will remain public institutions for the foreseeable future. As such, finding solutions that work in the shared interests of the police and the community is the only workable path forward.
Beyond police-violence triage
The three bills before the council impose a number of prohibitions and policy remedies that, if enacted and implemented in good faith, will likely make the District of Columbia safer and make its police department more accountable and transparent. A recurring theme in these bills are means to address and presumably reduce incidents of MPD violence. However, it is important that policymakers take steps to reduce the opportunities for that violence to occur in the first place. Nonviolent police encounters can harm communities, and particularly African Americans, who bear the brunt of overpolicing in D.C. and across the nation. Unnecessary and antagonistic involuntary police contact has a cost to communities that is often ignored by police leadership in the name of proactive policing. This is hardly exclusive to MPD, but data show MPD deploys some version of these tactics without evidence of tangible benefit to community safety or security. In this respect, the proposed Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2020 is sadly inadequate.
Gun recovery myopia
All available data-driven evidence indicates MPD is not reducing serious crimes like homicide through aggressive policing. Not only are these policies ineffective, they make officers’ jobs more difficult by breeding resentment and mistrust from community members, and particularly Black residents. The most glaring way MPD officers are working against both the community and themselves is in their drive to recover illegal firearms.
In numerous media and public events over the years, Chief Peter Newsham has repeatedly emphasized that his officers — both patrol and specialized teams like the Gun Recovery Unit (GRU) — are focused on getting guns off the street. While MPD has undoubtedly been successful in that respect, with thousands of guns recovered during his tenure as chief, recorded homicides have reached at least 160 people the last two years, with 2019’s total of 163 the District’s highest number of homicides since 2008.
Racially disparate NSID stops
Thanks to the reporting requirements of the NEAR Act, we now have data from MPD’s Narcotics and Special Investigations Division (NSID), the home of the GRU, and it confirms an overwhelming concentration of aggressive policing against Black men. In the report, which tracked NSID officers’ stops from August 2019 through January of this year, NSID officers stopped 3,226 Black individuals — almost 9o percent of the people they stopped. 1,672 of that number were searched or frisked, and from those, NSID officers recovered 210 firearms. That produces an NSID firearm hit rate per stop of a Black individual to 6.5 percent. But even throwing in drugs and other contraband, and reading these numbers in the most flattering way to NSID, more than 80 percent of the Black people they stop looking for drugs and guns have nothing on them.
Of course, NSID makes up a small fraction of MPD and accordingly patrol officers stop far more people. An MPD report that covered a similar but not identical timeframe to the National Police Foundation report showed that MPD as a whole recorded 62,842 stops. Although data is available on those stops as well, I focus on NSID because, according to the National Police Foundation report, “The overarching mission of NSID is to reduce violent crime in D.C. through countering the trafficking of humans, firearms, and substances; interdicting illegal firearms; and, identifying and apprehending large-scale sellers of illicit substances” and the NSID is “responsible for all long-term, complex, and multi-jurisdictional investigations of vice-related complaints (e.g. drugs and prostitution) and conspiracies.” In short, because their mission is to reduce violent crime and their actions would presumably be more targeted than an officer on patrol, NSID should have the greatest success identifying and finding the guns and drugs they search for. And yet, a majority of the people these special units stop aren’t carrying any contraband, and few of them are carrying the firearms that Chief Newsham says are a priority.
Bad stops, blown cases
But even when MPD officers recover guns, the cases are not the proverbial slam dunk. A 2018 investigative report by WAMU showed that as many as 40 percent of simple gun possession cases brought in the District are ultimately dismissed in court. Such a high dismissal rate on possession charges strongly suggests illegal searches or other misconduct by police. If the number is anywhere near that high in cases where guns are present, one must consider how many individuals are likely being subjected to illegal police searches but never see the inside of a courtroom. Perhaps the analytical scrutiny produced by the NEAR Act has lessened this problem in the years since, but the numbers produced confirm both ongoing racial disparities of MPD stops and that innocent Black people are overwhelmingly the target of these tactics.
Investigatory stops do more harm than good
I’ve previously written about how and why investigatory police stops of both motorists and pedestrians can erode police legitimacy, particularly among Black Americans. Individuals resent being investigated because a police officer is looking for evidence of a crime without the legal justification to suspect any crime has occurred. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whren v. United States (1996) — which originated here in D.C. — provided the legal blueprint for police officers around the country to subvert racial profiling prohibitions by allowing officers to cite any one of myriad traffic violations to stop a vehicle in order to investigate a crime they have no legal reason to suspect.
Book length studies such as Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship show that Black individuals are far more likely to be subject to dubious pretextual investigatory traffic stops and are more likely to mistrust and resent the police because of those stops. This resentment stems, in part, from Black drivers correctly believing they were targeted because of their race. Other studies show that resentment is reflected in the social and familial networks of those who have negative experiences with police, reflecting a high social cost to every day policing strategies. By contrast, Black drivers who were subject to traffic safety stops for unambiguous moving violations — such as speeding well beyond the posted limit — did not produce mistrust of police, even when those stops resulted in ticketing or arrest.
It is hardly a wonder that policing tactics that treat innocent Black people like criminals would have negative effects on police-community relations. But that mistrust can have a public-safety impact because individuals who don’t trust police officers are going to be less likely to cooperate with them, making serious crime-solving more difficult. This creates a situation in which police become adept at manufacturing low-level arrests in Black neighborhoods but struggle to close major cases like homicides in those same communities.
Ending rather than amending consent searches
The Comprehensive Policing Bill, if passed in its current form, would require MPD officers to calmly explain to an individual that they have a right to refuse an officer-requested search that is based solely on their consent. This may mitigate some problems that arise when police agencies use consent searches to search for evidence of crimes they lack legal reason to suspect, including deception and coercion, but this is only a marginal improvement on the status quo. Indeed, the request to search is often adding insult to injury if the initial stop is perceived as illegitimately based on race or other bias:
“[A] deeper truth has been forgotten in the effort to legitimate inquisitive police stops by making the officer more polite. What makes inquisitive police stops so offensive to so many African Americans and Latinos is not that the officers are carrying them out are impolite or even frankly bigoted, but that these stops are common, repeated, routine, and even scripted.This scripted practice treats its targets not as individuals worthy of dignity but as numbers to be processed in search of the small percentage who are carrying contraband or have an outstanding warrant.” -Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, page 6
Consent searches are means to subvert the Fourth Amendment rights to be secure in one’s person and effects, and police have abused the discretion to ask for that consent for decades.
Left to their own devices, police tend to train and act to the bare minimum required by law. As police can use any vehicle-related violation to stop and question a motorist under Whren, so too have officers used the Supreme Court ruling in Terry v. Ohio (1968) to stop millions of pedestrians to question and frisk them for weapons. The most glaring example is New York City’s Stop and Frisk program that stopped approximately four million people — the majority of whom were young Black and Latino men — over its most active ten-year period.
But young Black men in D.C. are likewise familiar with that practice. In a dyspeptic concurrence written because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is bound by Supreme Court precedent, Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote about the tactics of the Gun Recovery Unit:
“[GRU actions comprise] a rolling roadblock that sweeps citizens up at random and subjects them to undesired police interactions culminating in the search of their persons and effects. If the Fourth Amendment is intended to offer meaningful protection in the context of Terry stops, the voluntary consent exemption cannot be used to engage with members of the public en masse and at random to fabricate articulable suspicions for virtually every citizen officers encounter on patrol.” US v. Gross, 2015 (Brown, J. concurring)
While requiring GRU and other MPD officers to inform a stopped person that they have the right to refuse a search is an improvement, the unsettling and unnecessary involuntary contact with police is an overlooked harm insufficiently addressed in the pending legislation.
Re-task NSID officers
Given the number of innocent people stopped and searched by NSID, it is fair to question whether their current constitution and modus operandi are serving the public interest. Certainly, NSID has taken many illegal guns off the street, but at the cost of the personal security of thousands of innocent District residents and primarily our Black neighbors. Removing illegal guns from the street is a noble idea in principle, but that does not excuse the tactics — both legal and illegal — that MPD has employed to follow through with that task.
Evidence-based policing research suggests that increasing visible police presence in certain “hot-spots” of criminal activity can reduce incidents of crime, often without “displacement” effects where criminal activity simply moves to other less-policed zones. Importantly, such strategic deployment of officers can often be implemented without resorting to the aggressive methods that result in stops, searches, and arrests. Indeed, it is impossible for police presence to deter crime if the officer is processing an arrest at the station house.
Moreover, MPD has not been immune to the officer turnover and attrition that is affecting many police departments nationwide. Different people will have divergent views as to why those shortfalls happen within and between police agencies, but this is a reality police departments have to manage. Perhaps NSID officers should be re-tasked to patrols near hot-spots rather than continue the practices that don’t seem to be reducing gun violence in the District.
Conclusion
The status quo of policing needs to change in D.C. and across the country.
D.C. residents want to be safer, and most MPD officers undoubtedly want the same for them. And while illegal guns are unquestionably bad, the aggressive methods MPD has used to recover them have not been effective in reducing violent crime. Evidence shows that the division most responsible for bringing those numbers down harassing innocent people while homicides creep upward.
Beyond being ineffective, such invasive policing by MPD disrupts the lives and personal security of innocent individuals going about their daily lives, and do so in a way that is justifiably perceived as racially biased against Black residents.
Suspicionless, pretextual investigatory stops ensnare far more innocent people than guilty and, though blessed by the Supreme Court, are noxious to the presumption of innocence enshrined in the Constitution.
While the procedural safeguards for consent searches included in the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2020 is an improvement compared to the status quo, the MPD should be strongly discouraged from making unnecessary stops in the first place. There is no way to build effective relationships with officers who stop you because they think you look like a criminal.
The NSID and its component units create arrests, but many of those officers could likely be better used in less antagonistic roles that support community well-being and public safety. Their current methods of operation are not in the public interest.
Thank you again for this opportunity to share my thoughts with you.
