NEWS
Change the Stationed Police reform efforts in D.C. have frustrated police, protesters, and the families of Black people killed by cops.
As the country continues to reckon with police violence and the disproportionate impact it has on Black people, the D.C. Police Union is seeking to paint Metropolitan Police Department officers as the real victims. In the past two weeks, the union representing 3,600 sworn MPD members has filed two lawsuits challenging pieces of sweeping police reform legislation that the D.C. Council passed on an emergency and temporary basis in July. The bill, which Mayor Muriel Bowser signed on July 22, was crafted in direct response to uprisings over the deaths of George Floyd, a Black man killed when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by officers in Louisville, Kentucky, while they were executing a no-knock warrant. The union disagrees with two provisions in the legislation. The first bars the union from negotiating the terms of officer discipline during collective bargaining. The second requires the mayor to identify officers involved in serious and fatal uses of force and to release the body camera footage of those incidents dating back to the inception of the body camera footage program in October 2014. The bill gives the mayor an August 15 deadline for old cases and requires the release of footage from new incidents within five days. The union is challenging those pieces of the bill in two separate lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and D.C. Superior Court, respectively. “The Act lacks a rational basis, but was instead offered as a punishment of sworn law enforcement officers in the District of Columbia to quell rising tensions and protests in the District coming as a result of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota,” the union claims in its federal court filing, which challenges the law’s restrictions on collective bargaining. “No studies or surveys were conducted, no research was performed or basis was proffered for the passage of the Act other than the protests arising out of an incident that occurred over one thousand milies from the District of Columbia, and that was unrelated to any District resident, agency, or officer.” Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, the
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By Amanda Michelle Gomez and Mitch Ryals
bill’s primary author, does not seem bothered in the slightest by the union’s pushback. “Having the police union criticize a policing reform bill is usually a metric of whether you actually made an impact or not,” says Allen, who spoke with City Paper before the union filed its second lawsuit. “I don’t have a regret around the legislation. I think that it was timely. I think it was necessary. I think it’s important.” While the police union criticizes the Council’s bill as reactionary for its reference to an incident that occurred in another city, it ignores MPD’s role in multiple fatal incidents between 2016 and the present, about which the department has, for years, refused to release full details. Protesters in D.C. connected the deaths of Floyd and Taylor to three Black men killed by MPD officers in the span of two months in 2018, and chanted their names—Marqueese Alston, Jeffrey Price, and D’Quan Young—as they took to the streets. The Council passed the reforms on an emergency and temporary basis, which allowed lawmakers to sidestep the otherwise required public debates. As Allen prepares for a hearing on a permanent bill this fall, some provisions in the temporary version are taking effect. For some families who’ve sought answers from police and the District for years, the law is not working as they expected it to. Victims of police violence thought the release of body camera footage would bring them justice, but many were retraumatized and the government’s edited videos, along with its unwillingness to release all the available footage, left them with more questions than answers. The strong reactions to the legislation mere weeks into implementation underscore how difficult police
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reform actually is. Kenithia Alston says she was notified that the mayor was releasing body camera footage of a cop fatally shooting her son, Marqueese, 90 minutes before it was published on MPD’s website on the morning of July 31. Denise Price received a voicemail from an MPD lieutenant at 9 a.m. that same morning, saying they had information regarding her son, Jeffrey, who was killed in a dirt bike collision with an officer. The message came 90 minutes before city officials briefed the media about the release of police video of the fatal incident. “I’m so pissed,” Denise’s brother, Jay Brown, said in a phone call with City Paper immediately after the mayor’s 11:30 a.m. press conference. He was unable to articulate how he was feeling beyond rage. In follow-up conversations, Brown says the family learned of the release from acquaintances and members of the media who were watching the press conference and called or texted them. Price’s family wanted the mayor to publicly release the video, but only when they were ready and had sought counseling. Their lawyer, David Shurtz, is aware of 51 videos related to Price’s death and filed a motion in court to prevent the release of any footage until he and the family secured and reviewed all the footage associated with the case. He was negotiating the terms of the footage’s release on the morning Bowser made a small portion of the footage public. At the July 31 media briefing, an MPD official said the Office of the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked them to not release all of the footage because it could hamper the OAG’s ability to defend lawsuits. Generally, the OAG is
responsible for representing nonindependent city agencies in court. Shurtz believes it was wrong for the government to decline to release all of the video and to not give his clients notice of when footage was being released. But he says the hourlong body camera footage that MPD eventually published is critical, as it shows the officer running a stop sign and fatally striking Price, and supports claims and witness testimony in the family’s lawsuit against the District. In the hourlong video, unlike in the edited version, the officer who struck Price says he saw Price coming in his direction. “I personally want to give the Council credit for releasing the video,” says Shurtz. “It was very helpful.” The Council’s emergency police reform bill says the mayor cannot release body camera footage if the “decedent’s next of kin” objects to the release. The bill directs MPD to consult with an organization with experience in trauma and grief to understand best practices of how to show the footage to families, notify the next of kin of its impending release, and offer them an opportunity for a private showing. Up to two weeks before the footage was released, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Kevin Donahue tells City Paper that workers with the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants and the Department of Behavioral Health began reaching out to families whose relatives were killed by police. He says these workers went over the requirements of the law, and the next of kin for four people killed by police between 2017 and 2020—Timothy Williams, Isabelle Duval, Eric Carter, and
