When Moses and Kitch play “bang! bang!" on their street corner, they force the audience to reckon with the regularity of police violence in contemporary America. For the two men, being harassed by the police is so inevitable that they might as well make a game of it. Unfortunately, Antoinette Nwandu’s world in Pass Over is not dissimilar to our reality where many Americans are made to feel unsafe by the very people who are supposed to guarantee their safety.
Acknowledging police brutality does not assume that police officers are bad or evil people. To the contrary, there are many police officers who serve and protect populations with integrity and kindness. However, the institution of policing has been used historically to systematically target Black and Brown bodies through “over-policing” that results in a disproportionate level of harassment and high rates of arrest for non-white people. For those of us that associate the police with safety, we must constantly interrogate these assumptions with an understanding that, for many, the police represent upheld systems of oppression both historically and in the present day.
Nationwide, data surrounding disproportionate use of force illustrates the violence endemic to law enforcement in present-day America. The research collaborative Mapping Police Violence reported that 1,164 people were killed by the police in 2018, with killings occurring on all but 23 days of the year. Of these police killings, Black citizens were three times more likely to be killed than their white counterparts and 30% of those killed were unarmed, compared to 21% of white victims. When pursuing accountability for these crimes, the data is shocking: in 90% of police shooting cases in 2015, the officers involved were not convicted of committing a crime.
Since 2009, DC police officers have been involved in 3 to 9 shooting deaths annually. Three police shooting deaths is three too many, but this number is relatively low when compared to other major American cities. However, while the Metropolitain Police Department (MPD) are responsible for comparatively few shooting deaths, there is ample evidence of systemic and violent harassment of DC residents of color. In 2017, the DC Police Complaints Board found that incidents where an officer used force increased by 36% from 2016 and Black subjects were on the receiving end of force in 89% of those cases, despite only 48% of the DC population identifying as Black.
DC police regularly engage in stop-and-frisk tactics, which they refer to as “protective pat-downs.” The MPD has not historically collected data on the number of stop and frisk incidents its officers are involved in, however the limited statistics show that 83% of all stop and frisk interactions were with Black residents. As the American Journal of Public Health reported in 2014, stop-and-frisk policies do not make cities safer, rather, they traumatize victims and fuel a further distrust of the police. Considering the lack of data available surrounding these policies, the MPD is allowing traumatic practices to continue without public accountability.
Transparency issues like these have long plagued the MPD and perpetuate the cycle of distrust between police officers and the citizens they are supposed to protect. In 2014, a body camera program was initiated within the MPD as “a way of increasing police accountability, transparency, and police-community relations.” However, after the DC government conducted the largest body camera study in the United States, researchers concluded that there was not a significant difference in how police equipped with body cameras used force or reacted to citizen complaints. Furthermore, DC non-profit UpTurn reported that of the 112 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to release police footage from body cameras between January 1, 2018 and June 30, 2018, zero requests were granted in full and only 25% were granted in part.
Despite all of this, there is reason to hope that the state of policing in DC is improving. In 2016 the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act was passed; it was fully funded by Mayor Muriel Bowser in 2018. The NEAR Act aims to reduce violence in the District through community-based public health approaches. The Stop Police Terror Project DC applauds the act for recognizing that safety will not be achieved by perpetuating mass incarceration and racial profiling. Among other provisions, the NEAR Act creates the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) and requires that the MPD broaden the data it collects around police violence. The NEAR Act tries to envision a justice system that is restorative, not punitive, and a first step to that is increased transparency from law enforcement. And it works—in June 2019, under the NEAR Act, a judge ruled that the MPD must begin to collect statistics on its stop-and-frisk policies.
The NEAR Act is the first step in the right direction of police reform and is hopefully an indication that the MPD is ready to move away from an environment of fear and surveillance. However, after centuries of institutional violence that targets the communities who often need the most protection, it is going to take more than the NEAR Act to create the much-needed systematic change within the District’s police force.
—Fiona Selmi