Harnessing the Power of Community to Transform Public Safety
Recently, dialogue regarding violence in DC has escalated to national and even international platforms, exposing an underlying mistrust towards its 700,000 majority Black and Brown residents. Headlines either imply a need to flee or serve as a call for reinforcements.
But as Phillip Atiba Goff wrote in the New York Times last year, “if people are talking about how tough they are and how scared you should be, they care more about keeping you scared than keeping you safe.” Because this narrative does not acknowledge that DC residents are more than capable of governing themselves, the question of what will keep us safe is rarely posed to the people who are most directly impacted by violence.
Ask the community, and they will tell you.
Following years of work by a diverse group of experts, recommendations designed to enhance the efficacy of DC’s criminal code were unanimously passed by the DC Council and then famously nullified by Congress earlier this year. There have also been recommendations made by the interdisciplinary District Task Force on Jails & Justice, the DC Police Reform Commission, and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. Clearly, we are not lacking for alternative approaches to safety.
Patrice Sulton, a long-time community organizer and criminal justice reform advocate who served on the commission to modernize DC’s criminal code, founded the DC Justice Lab in 2020 after years of representing clients in civil and criminal cases as a trial attorney. She is now Executive Director of the organization, which has grown into a team of law and policy experts researching, organizing, and advocating for large-scale changes to the DC criminal legal system. She believes sustainable change cannot happen without the expertise of the community that is most impacted.
During her time as an attorney, Sulton saw firsthand the disproportionality of penalties. “On a single day in court, I would go to one courtroom where someone was accused of sexually touching a child and they were facing 180 days in jail. And then I walked down to the traffic courtroom where someone was accused of driving a car without a license, and they were facing a year.”
To further undermine what many of us define as justice, there is both significant waste within DC’s criminal legal system and significant overreach by its various enforcement agencies. DC has the highest number of police per capita of any major city, even without accounting for federal agencies like the National Park Police. Over five months in 2019, the Metropolitan Police Department conducted 62,000 proactive stops with people on the street or in their cars — all outside of calls for service.
“I had a robbery case where someone was charged with a 15 year-offense for not paying for a pizza that was delivered late… They went back and rounded up everyone who ate the pizza, and charged them with receiving stolen property,” Sulton explained. “What happened over and over again in DC was that people were being prosecuted, and sometimes convicted, under laws that were unfair. That made me want to change the laws.”
At a teach-in DC Justice Lab co-hosted with other likeminded organizations like Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, HIPS, and Black Swan Academy, local organizers deconstructed the framework of crime and how the law often proscribes not harm, but conduct. For example, many harmless actions like protesting, engaging in sex work, or driving while Black are often criminalized. Meanwhile, many harmful actions like stealing wages, evicting people, or polluting the environment are not typically criminalized, investigated, or charged.
Forty percent of gun violence in DC happens within one square mile in Southeast, which is one of the city’s most overpoliced and neglected places. Wards 7 and 8 have only four full-service grocery stores, and also account for 70% of pregnancy-related deaths in a city that already has one of the highest maternal mortality rates nationwide. Across the city, 13.3% of people live in poverty and 35% are food insecure, of whom 42% have children in the household. Meanwhile, even though DC schools have thrice as many security guards as psychologists, the Council will no longer be reducing the number of armed police officers in schools.
Addressing our challenges to safety requires that we invite impacted individuals into the conversation and listen to them.
This fall, the DC Justice Lab hosted a week-long advocacy training bringing together impacted individuals, activists, nonprofit groups, and grassroots organizations to develop their solutions and learn the skills that can turn those solutions into sustainable policy proposals. Throughout the week, more than a dozen of these community leaders brought their diverse perspectives, experiences, and expertise to DC Justice Lab’s advocacy training. This culminated in a Community Safety Fair that took place on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where participants presented their ideas to policymakers, community stakeholders, and supporters.
One of the central themes that emerged through these presentations was about the importance of providing culturally competent mental health and rehabilitation support. Mental health services need to be accessible and approached in a culturally sensitive way that considers every individual’s unique background and experiences. Another theme was assisting formerly incarcerated individuals as they reintegrate into society, many of whom face challenges navigating this transition. Part of helping them rebuild their lives is providing more job training, mentorship programs, and social support networks. Fostering and maintaining strong family relationships during and after incarceration, too, is crucial for the rehabilitation process.
“We’re teaching community members where the levers of power are, and how they can change and effectuate the world they want to see and as they envision it,” said Sulton. “Many people don’t actually want people of color deciding what the words on the page are… I was surprised to learn, when I started DC Justice Lab, how resistant people in certain positions of authority are to hearing from people who are directly impacted.”
It isn’t just that policymaking is designed to disincentivize people who are impacted from directly engaging. Instead of centering their voices, what we lose by excluding them is the ability for many of us to imagine how we can create a safe, free, and just DC together.
“We have white communities in this city that are never policed, that are never prosecuted, that are never imprisoned. They are given the resources they need to avoid being in a position to cause or endure harm, and they are given the resources they need after they cause harm,” said Sulton. “That’s really the vision — moving the city away from this false dichotomy of having safety or freedom, when white people have a whole lot more of both. It’s fundamentally racist to suggest we can’t have both, too.”
DC Justice Lab aims to make its Policy Training Academy and Community Safety Fair an annual event with a new cohort of dedicated residents each year. Read the proposals from this year’s inaugural cohort of participants and visit the DC Justice Lab’s website to learn more about how they transform the District’s approach to public safety. You can also sign onto #SafeAndFreeDC, a Black-led legislative agenda for community safety in DC.
This piece was written by Amanda Liaw, who is the Communications Manager at Spur Local (formerly the Catalogue for Philanthropy), a local nonprofit that strengthens and resources 470+ small, community-based organizations doing critical work here in the DMV. DC Justice Lab is one of its nonprofit partners, along with Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Black Swan Academy, and HIPS — likeminded organizations mentioned earlier. Visit Spur Local’s website to discover and connect with local nonprofits in the issues you care about.
Patrice Sulton is recognized as a 2023 Changemaker for her work with DC Justice Lab. Honor her work and hear more at Spur Local’s 2023 Community Changemakers event on November 8.
