Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser walks near Lafayette Square after city workers, artists, and activists painted the “Black Lives Matter” mural on 16th Street, June 5, 2020.
Two weeks ago, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser stood up to President Trump, playing a key role in aborting the military cataclysm he sought to unleash on her city. She then memorialized the street where peaceful demonstrators were teargassed to make way for Trump’s Bible brandishing. All it took was a “Black Lives Matter” sign applied to the asphalt with gallons of yellow paint. Activists later added the words “Defund the Police.”
The national defunding movement has special meaning for District residents long frustrated by federal interference in their affairs and decades of local police abuses and brutality. But Bowser’s tepid response to the groundswell of demands for police reform at home has opened up a huge credibility gap for the city’s chief executive—one with potentially damning political consequences.
On Monday, the city council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety held a virtual oversight hearing on the mayor’s budget request for the next fiscal year—which increases funding for policing. In 2019, about two dozen people signed up to comment on the budget. This year, more than 16,000 residents signed up to make their views known, though only a fraction of those wishing to testify made the cut for the online slots.
The Metropolitan Police Department, the largest police force per capita in the country’s major cities, has had deadly-force issues for decades. The names of some of the people who have been killed in recent encounters—Marqueese Alston, Ralphael Briscoe, Miriam Carey, Jeffrey Price, Terrence Sterling, and D’Quan Young—have been regularly invoked by residents and activists as a reminder of the policing crisis in this gentrifying city of 706,000, where African Americans constitute about half the population, and where the majority of police officers are black.
Bowser requested an increase in the department’s 2021 budget to nearly $600 million, a 3.3 percent hike. If approved, the number of officers would increase to about 4,000 from more than 3,800. But during the public hearing, District residents black and white were largely united on one theme: no funding increases. Three specific issues dominated testimony: removing police from all public schools, redirecting budget savings to school social workers and mental-health professionals, and instituting community initiatives like violence interruption programs. There were also calls for the MPD to end its participation in the Defense Department’s 1033 program, which “recycles” surplus military weaponry, vehicles, and gear to civilian police forces.
A DC Fiscal Policy Institute-DC Action for Children poll released this week found that 38 percent of those surveyed “strongly support” while another 27 percent “somewhat support” removing police-contracted personnel from traditional and charter schools and reinvesting the money in “school-based mental health and support programs.”
How Bowser navigates the police defunding movement and the accompanying fallout from what some activists called “performative activism” at Lafayette Square will define the rest of her tenure and her political future—there are no term limits for D.C. mayors.
The tale of the two Washingtons is a familiar one. The most heavily policed neighborhoods are black and low-income areas across the Anacostia River from the city center. But the problems transcend class. A new ACLU-DC analysis of the police department’s stop-and-frisk policies found that African Americans made up more than 70 percent of citywide stops despite constituting 46 percent of the population. The overwhelming number of innocent people stopped by police (those not arrested or issued any tickets, warnings, or fines) were black, as were the people who were searched. Black youths were searched at ten times the rate of whites.
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And not surprisingly, African Americans were more likely to be stopped in white neighborhoods, despite constituting a small percentage of the neighborhood population. (And while the department contends that stops aid in controlling weapons on the streets, fewer than 1 percent of all stops actually produced a weapon.)
The data that the ACLU-DC analyzed emerged only after a court battle pitting the organization and its allies (Black Lives Matter DC and the Stop Police Terror Project DC) against the city. For three years, the MPD had refused to provide the stops data required by the city’s Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act of 2016.
ACLU-DC won its lawsuit last year. Mayor Bowser, Deputy Mayor Kevin Donahue, and Chief of Police Peter Newsham were the defendants in the case.
Generous with her expressions of support for the police force, Bowser is now out of step with the local zeitgeist in the wake of the George Floyd protests and a host of incidents like pepper-spraying people outside a barbershop. In early June, the city council voted unanimously on a slate of reforms to mandate disclosures of the names of police officers involved in a serious use of force as well as their body camera video. The short-term, emergency legislation includes a ban on rubber bullets and tear gas and other irritants; removes the police union from disciplinary procedures; expands MPD disciplinary authority on issues like the use of serious force; and restricts 1033 purchases. (The legislation can be extended, but for it to become permanent law, the council must conduct another public session and vote.)
Bowser, a moderate Democrat who cruised to re-election for a second term in 2018, still supports building a new jail and continues to draw criticism for stances that include opposition to releasing all body camera videos and the names of individual officers involved in certain cases.
And her political difficulties extend beyond policing.
As gentrification has intensified in the District, her positions on the affordable-housing crisis have come under close scrutiny as black residents try to resist displacement by wealthier whites. Her support for the city council’s rollback of a voter-approved initiative that raised the minimum wage for tipped workers did little to quell fears that she too often sides with business interests—most of her campaign contributors have been business leaders and lobbyists. And an unsuccessful attempt to carve out a deeper power base by unseating a city council opponent who opposed her on issues like tipped wages with a restauranteur-ally raised eyebrows.
How Bowser navigates the police defunding movement and the accompanying fallout from what some activists called “performative activism” at Lafayette Square will define the rest of her tenure and her political future—there are no term limits for D.C. mayors. With the furor over troops and protesters simmering down and the national media back to the Trump-being-Trump beat, last week Bowser politely declined to reassess her position on police funding, and several days after that comment, protesters showed up at her home.
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Near the end of the police budget hearing, Dessiah Ali, a Northwest Washington resident, described his injuries after being fired on by law enforcement during the protests and offered a few ideas for redirecting savings from police defunding. He invoked the late Mayor Marion Barry, the legendary advocate for D.C.’s poor neighborhoods: “The ball is in your court, listen to us or prepare to be replaced in the next election,” he said. “Mayor Bowser, you disgraced D.C. and all that Marion Barry stood for. Drink mambo sauce and choke.”
Painting protest art and renaming a street near the White House is a fitting way to pay tribute to the victims of police brutality. But by resisting reform in the neighborhoods where Washingtonians live, the mayor has painted herself into a corner on whether black lives matter in the District of Columbia.
Gabrielle Gurley
Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed 16th Street near the White House Black Lives Matter Plaza.
