Among the Emergency Amendment (covered more in part 2 of this article series) was also language on one particular reform that has often been talked about these past few years throughout the country: Body Worn Cameras (BWC’s). The act requires that police release BWC video within five business days at the request of the Chairperson of the Council or if it involves serious use of force and/or an officer-involved death. This should make it easier for BWC videos to be made public and hopefully also hold police accountable. The logic often applied to Body Worn Cameras when people call for this reform is that the threat of having misconduct recorded will prevent police from carrying out said misconduct. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. For years we have had videos of police brutality, yet the problem has not gotten better.
MPD has one of the largest BWC programs in the country, with over 3,200 cameras for their 3,800 members, yet they also know that the program alone does nothing. On their website, they highlight the randomized controlled trial with The Lab @ DC that they ran to find the effectiveness of BWCs. But they fail to show clearly what that study found, seemingly because they concluded that BWCs had no noticeable effect.
“Our experiment suggests that we should recalibrate our expectations of BWCs. Law enforcement agencies (particularly in contexts similar to Washington, DC) that are considering adopting BWCs should not expect dramatic reductions in use of force or complaints, or other large-scale shifts in police behavior, solely from the deployment of this technology.”
Quoted directly, from a study that MPD ran itself, where 6 out of 8 people running it worked directly for MPD. They also based their results on police officers’ reports of incidents written after the fact (under the assumption that they were telling the truth). Despite this, they had no choice but to report that BWCs are not enough to affect significant change. The BWC program at MPD has received nothing but more support and more funding. Instead of investing in programs proven to work like ONSE, they are throwing money at things that have proven to do nothing.
One more major change that happened last year was the appointment of a new chief of police, Robert Contee III. Some believe that Contee’s appointment will lead to the reforms that MPD needs. But is he committed to these changes? On the one hand, Contee talks about the need for change, on the other hand, he talks about how much great change has already happened within MPD over the past decade. Contee is also a big fan of a community policing model, which unfortunately means more police interactions in communities that are already over-policed. Both Contee and Mayor Bowser would like to expand the police force (even though, MPD is one of the biggest police departments in the country). One of his first measures as chief was to increase the police presence in “six historically crime-ridden neighborhoods” in an effort to deter crime. Although this is not something unique or new from Contee, it is not the policy change that many have been saying he represents.
All of these increases in policing are being justified by talking about high rates of crime. Contee claims that more officers are needed because there simply are not enough to effectively respond to all of the calls being made. Nationwide focus on gun violence and homicide is used to pressure people into giving police more power, even though evidence shows that police do not solve these problems. Nevertheless, the MPD budget has been steadily increasing. Many police supporters will point to the budget cut in 2020, from $591,313,726 to $559,526,918, as well as the supposedly rising crime rates. However, this one cut does not represent the overall trend in the rising MPD budget. The proposed 2021 operating budget of $578,069,493, is less than the budget in 2019, is still $8 million more than the budget in 2018 at $570,087,037. Looking at MPD’s crime data, we see that the overall crime rates in DC have been falling. The homicide rate this year is higher, going from 99 by July 14th in 2020, to 101 by the same date in 2021. But that represents only a 2% increase while the overall number of crimes, both violent and property, are down by 2%. All this is with the large budget cut. This is also after a huge decrease in crime from 2019 to 2020, where the total amount of crime decreased by 19%. Despite the trend of decreased crime each year, homicides have increased, from 116 in 2017 to 160 in 2018, and then from 166 in 2019 to 198 in 2020. Rhetoric that tries to tie a lack of funding to increased homicide rates is wrong – rates have been going up well before any cuts were made in MPD’s budget. Despite what Contee wants people to believe, more policing does not solve the issue of gun violence and homicide.
While the reforms in both the NEAR Act and the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Emergency Amendment Act are steps in the right direction. These have been undermined through a lack of funding or police just ignoring them. What we ultimately need is to decenter the police. The recommendations made by the Police Reform Commission speak about centering communities rather than the police to prevent crimes from happening in the first place. The first step towards a safer DC is to push back on Contee’s calls for an increased police force by making sure that the Council follows the recommendations made by the PRC. If we have learned anything from 2020, it is that public pressure campaigns do work. We need to hold the DC Council and Mayor Bowser accountable because it is not the police who will keep us safe. We keep us safe.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are looking for ways to help their communities or communities with less resources than their own come through the current crisis as undamaged as possible. As a result, community activists and organizers created the DC Mutual Aid Network. Although they take donations from anyone, Mutual Aid Network administrators and lead organizers are clear that they are not a charity. They are consensus-based rather than hierarchical. They build the leadership of the people most impacted by the problem. They also recognize that the current crisis is connected to wider issues of injustice and work to correct those injustices.
To further those goals, the DC Mutual Aid Network plans to present a set of demands to District Government regarding their response to COVID-19. Before they can do that, they must gather the thoughts, opinions and suggestions of those most impacted by the problem. To that end, they put together a People’s Demands Survey in both English and Spanish.
Information about the survey is posted below or can be found at the survey website http://thepeoplesdemandsdc.com/. If you’re reading this and you are a District of Colombia resident please consider filling out the survey, especially if you or someone you care about, is unable to socially isolate.
Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Black people throughout the United States snapped. Witnessing a man nationally considered a symbol of peace and hope brutally murdered became the trigger for what is known as the ‘King assassination riots’. In major cities, from Baltimore and Chicago, to smaller cities like Wilmington, Detroit, Black people across the nation unleashed their pent up rage regarding racism in the United States. In DC in particular, there was an estimated $25 million in property damages, and innumerable businesses were forced to close. Black residents made up 50% of the city’s population in 1960, that number sky-rocketed to over 70% in 1970, due in part to the flight of white residents following the 1968 rebellions. With certain sections of DC in a ruin-like state, millions of dollars in property damage, and the resultant injuries and deaths following the rebellions, the city was in desperate need of a strong Black leader. Enter Marion Barry, a man who would become as beloved as he became notorious, whose vision set in place many of the safety nets low-income residents in DC are able to use to their benefit now.
Before going into Barry’s history, I’d like to write my personal experiences with Barry; I’ve had the opportunity to cross paths Barry twice in my life. Once, when David Catania set out to enact laws that would potentially have parents arrested for the accumulative tardies and absences of their children from school, I, alongside a cadre of young people in a youth program I had been apart of during my teens, decided to testify against this law before the DC Council. While in support of the law initially, after hearing the testimony of four young Black men, Barry became vehement in his opposition to Catania’s law, changing his opinion immediately after our testimony. Then, as an eighteen year-old just stepping into the political sphere, having my voice acknowledged by, both, a politician and an elder was a foundational moment in such a strange, turbulent, and developmental time in my life. What may have been a year later, I attended a community gathering about the injustices the US government had committed against a group of men known as the Cuban Five. Held at St. Stephen’s church in Columbia Heights, the drawing point for this gathering was the opportunity to hear legendary activist Angela Davis speak. People of various backgrounds participated in that evening’s event, filling the church and enduring DC’s infamous humidity to get a chance to share
Photo of Barry with wife and child being honored at the gala of the Gertrude Stein Democratic club, a gay political organization*
space with Davis.
After Davis spoke, Barry revealed himself to the crowd; strutting to the podium area in a full suit in spite of the heat. At the sight of Barry, the event’s attendees exploded into hand claps, cheers, and camera flashes. Standing beside Davis, Barry seemed content and majestic.
Of course, me at eighteen had no knowledge of Barry outside of stories I had been told by my mother and other adults. Me at seventeen had no ability to comprehend the significance of the man before me.
Born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Barry was raised by his mother and step-father alongside nine other children. Demonstrating an aptitude for political organizing and resistance early on, Barry, in his memoir, recalls rallying his fellow Black paper boys to hold their employer accountable to taking them on a trip for meeting a sales quota. Not only did Barry possess a knack for political action and leadership, Barry also harbored a deep hunger for education. Graduating from LeMoyne-Owen College in 1958, Barry acquired a Master of Science degree from Fisk University and went on to pursue a Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. A dissertation away from receiving his doctoral degree, Barry, experiencing discrimination as the only Black person in his program and sensing the political urgency of the times,
gave up pursuing his studies to take on more responsibilities with SNCC and other civil rights organizations. SNCC, also known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is regarded as one of the most influential political organizations active during the Civil Rights era. Birthed from student-sit in protest and a meeting organized by activist Ella Baker, SNCC had been involved in nearly every historical political action against injustice in the South during its time. From 1960 to 1961, Barry operated as chairman of SNCC, in fact, Barry was the organization’s first chairman. Familiar with positions of leadership, Barry had also been appointed the president of his college’s chapter of the NAACP. It is likely that Barry’s tenure as president of the LeMoyne Owen’s chapter of the NAACP allowed him to develop the skills necessary to work as chairman of SNCC.
Following his eventual departure from his Ph.D program, Barry held leaderships positions within numerous organizations in the field of racial justice, his work eventually taking him up North. At the request of Civil RIghts leader James Forman, Barry moved to DC to begin, and manage, the city’s chapter of SNCC.
While often considered Washington, DC’s first Black mayor, Barry doesn’t actually hold that official title. Before Barry’s term as mayor of the District, Walter Washington, holding a law degree from Howard University, became DC’s first Black mayor in 1971. Before his mayoral campaign in 1978, Barry co-founded an organization known as Pride Inc. Pride Inc. gave jobs to people of all ages work opportunities in the field of public sanitation. Some sources report that Pride Inc. employees were being paid the equivalent of more than $700 per week for their labor. Pride Inc. was, essentially, the prototype for Barry’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), often cited as the first job experience for many DC youth. Not only did Barry create groundwork for DC youth to acquire opportunities to work during, and before, his tenure as mayor, Barry also enacted legislation that would benefit poor and working-class DC resid
A photo of Barry bearing his autograph*
ents as well. Barry signed into law the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA laws), which, after a change made by the DC Council last year, only gives the tenants of multi-family apartment units the right to purchase a property once the owner decides to sell the unit.
Often overlooked is Barry’s enthusiastic support of the LGBT community during the early years of his political career in Washington. Amidst cultural myths of heterosexual Black men being the ‘most homophobic’ members of our society, I believe it important to place Barry in league with Dr. Huey P. Newton and other heterosexual Black men who have spoken out against homophobia.
None of this is to say Barry deserves a pass for some of the more disturbing allegations against him, such as stalking and, even, multiple accounts of sexual assault dating back to his time at SNCC. What I am attempting to do is create space of all of Barry’s personas to be held and considered; Barry the ‘rapist’’, Barry the ‘good samaritan’, Barry the ‘mayor for life’, Barry the ‘civil rights activist’, and Barry the ‘substance abuser’. Before we apply any values judgement upon Barry’s character, may we first ask ‘Who was Marion Barry?’
*I am grateful for the Special Collections Office at George Washington University’s Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library for allowing me the opportunity to look through their archive of Marion Barry’s 1978 mayoral campaign
We often think of the District of Columbia as a liberal enclave but have the liberal positions of the city’s council members led to the justice and equality sought by the residents they represent? This Saturday’s candidate forum and a political scorecard provided by Jews United for Justice might shed some light on those council members whose positions lean left of center.
It’s An Election Year! Candidate Forum On Education 3/17 & Political Scorecard
Cross-Posted from Education DC written by Valerie Jablow
Tomorrow, Saturday March 17, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) is holding a candidate forum starting at 10:30 am in room 150 at McKinley Tech high school (151 T St. NE). Sign up is here, with an information sheet here. Candidates are expected to speak about issues surrounding public education in DC.
Council candidates from wards 1, 5, and 6 are slated to speak between 10:30 and 11:30 am. Then, at 11:30-12:30 pm, candidates for the two at large council seats will speak.
From 12:30-1:30 pm, candidates for the council chair will speak, followed at 1:30-2:30 pm by candidates for mayor.
[Confidential to DC voters: Our mayor has challengers! Now, maybe we will see whether politically “credible” = something other than a few million $$ in the bank.]
And just in time for primaries, the Jews United for Justice Campaign Fund has created a handy political scorecard for the DC city council, wherein the votes of council members on a variety of social justice issues (affordable housing, economic justice, etc.) are tallied.
Comments are closed 
