THOMAS HEDGES: Cities across the country are still reeling from a summer of violence, with
homicide rates that increase 70, 80, even 100 percent in some places. City officials
and police unions are proposing harsher legislation in an effort to fight what they call the main
culprits: drugs, guns, and gangs.
But here in Washington, DC where homicide rates are up more than 50 percent compared
to last year, the Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser has introduced one of the most controversial
bills in the country. The Public Safety and Criminal Code Act of 2015 would make it legal
for law enforcement officials to conduct warrantless searches on some newly released prisoners
on parole or probation.
AARON GOGGANS: Muriel Bowser's bill is very scary.
HEDGES: Goggans, a writer and Black Lives Matter DMV activist says Mayor Bowser's bill
strengthens control and surveillance, but not safety.
GOGGANS: We think that this is kind of the mayor laying out the groundwork to do a predictive
policing model in DC. In 2013, the city got a contract with a group out of Colorado Springs
to do predictive policing, and to bring a predictive policing platform to DC. This is
as scary as it sounds. Predictive policing is actually their name, but the idea that
you try and reach out to offenders before they've actually offended. It's a very Big
Brother, 1984 kind of way to do policing. It's very terrifying. But also is a model
trying to be followed by a lot of states.
HEDGES: When Mayor Bowser introduced the law back in August, she defended her bill amid
the shouts and yelling of protesters.
MURIEL BOWSER: There have been erroneous reports in the media that we want to give the police
unfettered authority to basically search anyone, anytime, anywhere. That is blatantly false.
MONICA HOPKINS-MAXWELL: I think that people should be watching what's going on here, that
this change in rhetoric, and especially in a place that deems itself as progressive as
the District of Columbia.
HEDGES: Monica Hopkins-Maxwell is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the
nation's capital. She's been fighting the crime bill as well as parallel legislation
on the issue of body cameras, which were introduced last year in Washington, and what she fears
may become a tool for surveillance rather than accountability.
HOPKINS-MAXWELL: General Provision 3900.4 borders on using body-worn cameras for surveillance
by allowing recording of First Amendment assemblies. The ACLU finds this highly problematic.
The racial disparities that you see are infinite in the District of Colombia, where you have
91 percent of the people that we incarcerate are black. So the damage to black communities
from this so-called public safety bill is really, really scary.
HEDGES: Goggans says that unfortunately the mayor's efforts are, in fact, precise and
intentional.
GOGGANS: The police have a union that is very political and outspoken in trying to get its
own PAC and trying to have political muscle to push this. There are private prisons and
private corporations that profit off of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration
that are lobbying for this bill. There are also a lot of provisions in the bill that
would, that came from a--that came from cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce to get security
cameras at local businesses, right.
And so there's a lot of business improvement district money tied into all of this. And
then there's a lot of folks who really just make money off of traumatizing the black community,
right, as black people get more desperate. And a lot of aspects in our lives, it makes
communities more likely to take low-paying jobs because they don't have better options.
It feeds into this entire system that oppresses black people, which unfortunately is a big
business in America.
HEDGES: But others say there's another incentive still for the city of DC to enact draconian
measures, and that's the city's campaign to redevelop poor neighborhoods, and to transform
them into areas that attract more wealth. The crime bill, for example, would disproportionately
target black residents who live in places like H Street, Petworth, and Anacostia, neighborhoods
the city desperately wants to develop.
EUGENE PURYEAR: DC's class polarization, which is in the top five in the country in income
inequality, some measures the top three, is also almost explicitly racially based.
HEDGES: Eugene Puryear is a DC activist and politician who ran for council in 2014 on
the Green Party ticket.
BOWSER: Mr. Puryear, you may not stand there, sir.
HEDGES: He says that a tradition of apparent and persistent racism in the nation's capital
is punctuated by the gentrification of traditionally poor neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and
H Street, among others. For example, last year at an unrecorded community meeting between
residents and the police that took place close to H Street, a number of older black community
members said their grandchildren were getting harassed by the police, sometimes getting
stopped up to once every week.
"Newcomers to the area are misinterpreting everyday scenarios as crimes," Chief of Police
Cathy Lanier finally explained in the meeting, "like reporting drug deals when they see young
black men standing on a corner [...] You have a lot of people here who haven't lived in
an urban neighborhood who are calling police for a lot of new things," she said.
PURYEAR: People who are new to the area, read, white, more wealthier people, who don't have
any experience living in urban environments, read, living around black people, are seeing
everyday behaviors and thinking that they're criminal. So the pressures of gentrification
are getting higher and higher on average everyday people, particularly poor black people, and
the police are responding more and more to the biased misconceptions of businesses and
new residents about what to do about crime, which frequently involves tougher penalties,
and more occupation-style policing and more harassment, essentially to get people off
the street.
HEDGES: One of the more frustrating misconceptions for Puryear is that DC is relaxed when it
comes to criminal pursuit and prosecution, due in part to the fact that it votes overwhelmingly
Democrat.
PURYEAR: What we have to recognize is that on the national level you have the DNC and
endorsing Black Lives Matter, Elizabeth Warren giving speeches, Bernie Sanders talking about
it, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley. But on the local level, whether it's Muriel Bowser
here in DC, whether it's Rahm Emanuel, whether it's Jean Quan in Oakland, whether it's even
backsliding by Bill de Blasio in New York, it's in these major municipalities that are
run by Democrats--certainly St. Louis, Ferguson, governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, run by Democrats,
implementing these mass incarceration, militarized policing policies.
And I think it's important that we recognize that it's not, you know, just some right-wing
bogeyman or the quote-unquote Republicans. But that really front line, a lot of times
it's Democrats who are doing the most harmful policies to these communities, and it's not
based on any sort of scientific reality. A lot of it is just based on the same racially
based hysteric politics that got us to mass incarceration in 1994. And I think it's key
to recognize that when you get new populations moving into cities who feel a certain amount
of fear about the old, young, poor black population, their response is always going to be more
police, because it makes them feel safer. But it's not based on anything, and certainly
it only is going to lead to more of the problems we've seen from militarized policing and mass
incarceration so far.
HEDGES: On December 1, the DC Council voted to roll back Muriel Bowser's proposal for
limiting access to body camera footage from the public. A small victory for activists
and residents who hope for a similar outcome when the looming crime bill comes for a vote
in the coming weeks.
For the Real News, Thomas Hedges, Washington.