In December 2018, three children were stopped-and-frisked, then detained, by seven Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers for hours outside of Frager’s hardware store at 13th and E Streets SE. When an ANC 6B commissioner requested access to the officers’ body camera footage, the MPD sent her a bill for more than $5,000. The incident was brought to public attention by a neighborhood resident who recorded the police on her phone. Without her diligence, the community may never have known what happened to these children, but the trauma from this encounter may live with them forever.

What happened to these children is not an exception but rather is part of a pattern across D.C., where MPD engages in unethical and unconstitutional behavior, and then demands exorbitant fees from community leaders or residents who ask for the officers’ body camera footage. A recent example includes the incident on Sheriff Road in Ward 7’s Deanwood community in June 2018, where MPD sent an invoice for $49,000 to give the people involved and an ANC commissioner access to the body camera footage.

According to WUSA 9, 8 out of 10 people stopped and frisked by MPD are black, compared to roughly 47 percent of D.C.’s overall population. In Capitol Hill and Lincoln Park, more than 88 percent of the 781 stop-and-frisks recorded from 2010 to 2017 were of Black residents. This sort of racial profiling has no place in our city or in our neighborhood. This is not community safety.

This petition is being organized by concerned ANC 6B residents, but all D.C. residents should feel free to sign. You can look up what ANC you live in here.