D.C.’s signature criminal justice reform law of the past decade has made some important changes in reducing some types of discriminatory arrests and pushing police to collect more data, but it has still failed to realize its full potential, according to a new report from D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson.
In a review released Thursday, Patterson argues that the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act, passed in 2016 and commonly known as the NEAR Act, has not yet forced a needed reckoning among police and policymakers about how to reimagine the city’s public safety apparatus. She credits the law with forcing the Metropolitan Police Department to (eventually) collect and release data on stop-and-frisk searches, but she found that efforts to use that information to actually reform the department’s operations have persistently come up short.
“Data collection requirements and the establishment of expert advisory groups, by themselves, have not demonstrably informed policy debates and decisions,” Patterson’s report notes. “The challenge is to use the data to increase understanding of whether stops are achieving public safety objectives and are being implemented fairly in D.C., and to build community trust through improved transparency and dialogue about police practices.”
Broadly, Patterson’s review (her second report on the NEAR Act in as many years) points to the sort of the problems criminal justice reformers have experienced across the country over the past decade. While well-intentioned politicians have fought for transparency measures ranging from this sort of data-sharing to the use of body-worn cameras by police, it’s another matter entirely to actually change entrenched systems based on this evidence. The political establishment’s recent pivot to the law-and-order rhetoric of the past as a response to rising violence has helped to cut off enthusiasm for all manner of reforms.
“It is disappointing that the Council’s comprehensive approach to violence reduction has succeeded only in part, with many of the police-oriented reforms either incomplete or not yet undertaken,” Patterson wrote in a statement. She said she completed this review in consultation with D.C. government officials and Council staff, including At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, the NEAR Act’s main legislative champion.
The auditor recommended that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration take tangible steps toward analyzing the stop data required by the NEAR Act and respond accordingly, and, to their credit, the mayor’s deputies say they plan to do so. In a response to the audit on Aug. 15, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah wrote that “MPD is currently working on a Memorandum of Understanding with two accredited universities on a study of police stops” to better understand whether police are indeed making discriminatory decisions.
But Patterson herself notes that there is already ample evidence pointing to that conclusion based on the data that’s been released over the last few years. The ACLU’s D.C. chapter found that “Black people represented almost 75 percent of those stopped in 2020 despite comprising roughly 47 percent of the D.C. population,” she noted. Similarly, the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council found that, between 2019 and 2022, 91 percent of all young people stopped by police but not ticketed were Black. About 56 percent of all D.C. youth are Black.
The auditor mentions that MPD has persistently claimed that “there are other factors—such as neighborhood crime rates and calls for service—that affect officer behavior,” which necessitates more study. But the report also expresses some skepticism that such a “sharp disparity” will vanish even when considering that additional context, raising the question what sort of data will be required to convince MPD to confront this issue.
Patterson’s report also highlights that MPD has still expressed some hesitancy about the collection and release of this data, despite the years of legal action required to force the department to comply with the NEAR Act in the first place. She notes that the department has still failed to publish stop-and-frisk data twice annually in some years (and the Council passed legislation tightening that requirement just last year). Appiah argued in her response that staffing issues and technical difficulties are among the factors leading to such delays.
“Data production is, at times, in competition with other public safety priorities,” she wrote. Loose Lips might argue that this sort of response does not exactly inspire confidence in the administration’s dedication to the NEAR Act’s mandates, nor do Patterson’s findings that Bowser’s team gave only half-hearted attention to NEAR Act-inspired task forces aimed at improving community policing and developing a comprehensive strategy to drive down murders.
But Patterson did credit the legislation with several meaningful changes. For instance, the law tightened MPD’s ability to arrest people for assaulting a police officer—the previous code allowed officers to claim all manner of behavior constituted assault, meaning it became a sort of catch-all charge without much legal basis, and this overwhelmingly affected Black people. Patterson found that the law’s changes helped reduce the number of arrests on these charges by more than 50 percent between 2015 and 2021.
Similarly, the NEAR Act barred police from stopping drivers simply for “driving with an obstructed windshield,” a common tactic used by police to stop someone they suspected of being involved in other, unrelated criminal activity. Patterson found that the law eliminated this type of pretextual stop entirely by 2018.
Patterson suspects the legislation’s reforms proved to be effective if they “reflect areas of consensus (or at least, the absence of major disagreement)” among Bowser, MPD, the Council, and criminal justice advocates. Legislating more serious changes in police behavior over the objections of MPD and their political allies is considerably more difficult, as the Council’s own Police Reform Commission learned the hard way.
“The goal of developing an evidence-based research and policy agenda on stops is laudable because the data serve little purpose if they are not analyzed and used to assess police policies and practices,” the auditor wrote. “Nevertheless, there has been limited progress in moving the agenda beyond the stakeholder discussions and the review of research methods.”