By Greg Montross, on May 18th, 2018 Metro Police Department’s Violence, Recklessness, and Lack of Accountability Requires Immediate, Substantive Action from Elected Officials
 On Wednesday, May 9th, an off-duty officer with the Metropolitan Police Department opened fire in northeast D.C., killing 24-year-old D’Quan Young. Witnesses report that the officer “shot wildly, as children ran for their lives,” and that the officer reloaded his weapon and continued shooting after D’Quan Young was on the ground. This follows the May 4th killing of Jeffrey Price – in which MPD’s narrative of innocence directly contradicts witness accounts – and the recent lawsuit filed against the DC government for its failure to collect stop and frisk data required by the NEAR Act. April Goggans, a Core Organizer of Black Lives Matter DC, and Eugene Puryear, co-founder and core organizer of Stop Police Terror Project-DC released the following statement in response:
“From top to bottom, our city is failing to protect its Black residents and permitting its reckless police department to terrorize Black communities without consequence,” said Natacia Knapper of Stop Police Terror Project-DC. “This permissive attitude is what emboldens officers like the one that murdered D’Quan Young to behave with impunity. This permissive attitude is what emboldens Chief Newsham to immediately discredit and dismiss witness testimony, withhold information from the public, and decline to condemn the officer’s actions. The Metropolitan Police Department has been sent a message by our elected officials that they can operate as they please, flagrantly and recklessly violating their own stated policies, without any fear of serious reprisal from those in a position to hold them accountable.”
“The killings of D’Quan Young and Jeffrey Price have to be understood in the context of a police department and city government with a legacy of inaction when it comes to police harassment and brutalization of Black people,” added April Goggans. “When officers like Brian Trainer, who brutally murdered Terrence Sterling in 2016, continue to receive paychecks for nearly two years, it sends a message that officers need not consider the consequences of their actions – especially when interacting with DC’s Black residents.”
“Time and time again the voice of the community is dismissed – both by the police themselves, and the elected officials charged with overseeing the police,” said Eugene Puryear. “When Jeffrey Price was killed in an incident involving a police cruiser, the department immediately contradicted witness accounts, defended the actions of their officers and completely dismissing community testimony, and even assigned an investigator to the case who himself has been previously investigated for fatally ramming a dirt bike rider. When 54 community organizations called on city council to hold a hearing on racism and violence within the MPD, they were met with months of silence, and only received acknowledgement of their demand after applying intense pressure on councilmembers via social media. When Mayor Bowser amended the city’s budget to provide funding for MPD’s two-year-late stop-and-frisk data collection, she did so by cutting funding from an eviction prevention program, essentially forcing DC’s low-income residents to pay the price for the police department’s mistakes.”
“Let’s be perfectly clear,” added Goggans, “Muriel Bowser and the City Council have allowed this crisis to unfold and escalate as they refused to take substantive action to reign in the Metropolitan Police Department. The blood of D’Quan Young and Jeffrey Price is on their hands.”
Black Lives Matter DC is a radical collective organizing to dismantle white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism and the role the state plays in supporting them.
Stop Police Terror Project-DC is an organization committed to changing the system of racist, militarized policing. SPTP DC works to oppose police abuses and also to build community-led peacekeeping efforts to empower oppressed communities to deal with their own security concerns.
Both groups, along with seven other organizations, are co-sponsoring the D.C. Council Candidate Forum on Criminal Justice. Come find out how this year’s candidates would respond to the violence, recklessness and lack of accountability within the Metropolitan Police Department.
By April Goggans, on April 3rd, 2018 Tired of endless community meetings about violence in our community that do not end in solutions? Come learn about the NEAR Act, something that’s new to some folks but has already proven to be effective in other regions. You can help make it a reality in the District of Columbia!
There are very real concerns about the violence occurring in our community. Thankfully, the District has a very promising opportunity to reduce this violence significantly with the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act).
The success of this effort depends on the involvement of the community. Only WE can save us.
We will be joined by:
Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie who championed the NEAR Act as former Chair of the DC Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety
Del McFadden, Executive Director, Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement
Marcus Ellis, Chief of Staff, Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement
This will be an interactive space, we don’t plan to talk AT you all night. We learn best as a community when we learn together.
The NEAR Act is one of the most innovative violence reduction efforts in the country. It is an evidence-based approach that embraces a pioneering program in Richmond California and builds on violence interruption models from cities as diverse as Chicago, Baltimore and New York. It addresses issues of community violence without resulting in the criminalization and mass incarceration we have seen since the 1980s.
Take Back Our Streets: NEAR Act 101
Thursday, April 5, 2019
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ
3845 S Capitol St SW
Washington, District of Columbia 20032
By Grassroots DC, on March 19th, 2018 In the weeks following the mass shooting in Parkland, FL, communities called on their legislators and school administrators to effectively address gun violence. In addition to conversations about gun violence, the Parkland shooting sparked dialogue about mental health, safety, police in schools, and the alarming move to arm school faculty. To the detriment of Black and Brown students, the national conversation fails to acknowledge that an increase in police and guns in our schools harshly impacts young people of color. Many youth also wondered where was this support when they were protesting for their lives against police gun violence and for solutions to intra-community violence. While thousands will flock to the District for the March for Our Lives, Black Lives Matter DC wants to uplift the concerns of DC youth. So lets come together and discuss the real solutions for DC.
By Grassroots DC, on February 12th, 2018
By Max Rameau, on January 30th, 2018 Cross-posted from The Next System Project
Introduction
While it might be fair to say that the police enjoy support among the majority of the white population, the police enjoy no such support among the majority of Black people, who endure more frequent and harsher interactions with cops than whites.
To be sure, white support for the police decreases proportionately with income. That is to say, poorer whites tend to support the police less because the police interact with them differently than with their wealthier white counterparts. By the same token, support for the police among Blacks tends to increase proportionately with increases in income, wealth and other privileges. Overall and within each economic stratum, however, white support for police is higher than Black support.
Similarly, largely as a consequence of physical or sexual assaults by men against them, many women find themselves in need of protection against assaults and most often turn to the police because there are few other legal or viable options. At the same time, low-income Black, Latina and Native American women can find themselves in need of protection from assault and, simultaneously, fear being dismissed, belittled or even assaulted by the very police they turn to for protection from assault. In instances of familial or intimate partner violence, women often fear that instead of acting as a third party mediator, police will brutalize the person that they want protection from and—simultaneously—want to protect.
This tension between needing an institution for protection and living in fear of that same institution is compounded among gay, lesbian, and transgender people, who experience scorn and sexual assault at the hands of police at even higher rates than cis-gendered women. While these tensions are disproportionately visited upon under- and working-class people, they exist across class lines based on identity or perceived identity.
One’s relationship with the police, then, is not merely a function of personal preference, but is deeply rooted in realities of class, race, sex and gender, or perceived gender, identity. One’s disposition towards the police, then, is not merely an individual choice, or a trend fueled by social media, but rather a consequence of lived class and group identity experiences. The pandemic of police brutality, therefore, cannot be addressed on the individual level, but only on the structural level.
For the majority of American history, the evolution of the structures and institutions of policing occurred not just outside of the participation of Black people, but in a manner and direction that is fundamentally antagonistic to the development of the Black community. The institution of policing in what would become the United States began as private patrols of white men tasked with capturing runaway slaves. Not incidentally, those patrols were often rewarded with the bodies of Black women. After the Civil War, slave patrols morphed into an organized government structure tasking white men with enforcing the Black Codes, a series of laws crafted to criminalize and control the population of former slaves, including any imagined infringement upon the sanctity of white women.
One’s disposition towards the police is not merely an individual choice, or a trend fueled by social media, but rather a consequence of lived class and group identity experiences.
The police are not simply here to stop crime and make our neighborhoods safe. The police as an institution with a defined role in society cannot be properly understood outside of the context of class, race, and gender.
Continue reading Community Control Over Police: A Proposition
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