Local activists recently celebrated the passage of two emergency bills that mandate the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) inclusion of federal officers’ names in arrest reports and affidavits, and release of local officer body camera footage from the scene of federal officer-involved shootings and use-of-force incidents.
However, in the days following that victory, young people, once again, found themselves in the cross hairs of National Guard personnel and federal law enforcement officials accompanying local officers that were enforcing juvenile curfew zones.
For Corey R. McSwain, such situations raise questions of whether community members could ever be safe.
“There’s definitely been a shift in the atmosphere,” said Corey, a 17-year-old Southeast resident who attends Friendship Technology Preparatory High School Academy in Congress Heights. “It’s changed the overall tone of our community. Even when the change isn’t directly personal, the psychological effect is real. It changes the sense of freedom and normalcy that people should feel in their own city.”
Since Corey, known to many as Thee Kid President, first weighed in on public safety matters last summer, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained more than 12,000 people across the D.C. metropolitan area, while federal agents have fired shots on at least three occasions, killing one person.
National Guard personnel also suffered losses around the Thanksgiving holiday after an Afghan CIA operative shot two of them, killing 20-year-old Guardsman Sarah Beckstrom.
The situation had gotten so out of hand that, before voting in approval of the Body-Worn Camera Transparency for Use of Force Emergency Amendment Act and the Full Accountability in Arrest Reporting Emergency Amendment Act on March 3, D.C. Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8), acknowledged that he led constituents into a “burning house” nearly three years prior when he called for the deployment of National Guard troops in communities overcome with violence.
As Corey recounted, he leaned on the Ward 8 council member, Ward 8 D.C. State Board of Education Representative Dr. LaJoy Johnson Law, and Jawanna Hardy of Guns Down Friday last summer after President Donald J. Trump started the federal surge. Months later, in the lead up to the council’s passage of federal officer accountability measures, Corey is continuing his call for elected officials to keep District residents first.
“Leadership should stand firm, and we should be able to set boundaries where necessary to ensure that federal involvement does not override local authority without accountability,” Corey told The Informer. “The community deserves representation that stands on business, speaks clearly, and protects its people without hesitation. We have youth that…don’t even want to come to school. This is causing a huge, huge, huge problem when it comes to attendance.”
Looking Back: The Performance Oversight Hearing Watched across the District
The council’s passage of the Body-Worn Camera Transparency for Use of Force Emergency Amendment Act and the Full Accountability in Arrest Reporting Emergency Amendment Act came amid District families’ ongoing demands for an effective response to the federal occupation.
Days before the council’s legislative meeting, Nee Nee Taylor spoke before the council’s Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety in support of the Full Accountability in Arrest Reporting Emergency Amendment Act, which D.C. Councilmember Robert White (D-At large) introduced.
Days after she unsuccessfully attempted to get the name of an alleged groomer arrested by federal officers, Taylor evoked her ancestors in her demands for a solution.
“They arrested the man, but because it was federal law enforcement, I was unable to get the man’s last name,” said Taylor, executive director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, “nor could I track him through CourtWatch DC of his criminal background or what was happening.”
For Taylor, too much was happening for the council not to act.
“We must fight for change,” she said. “My ask is that the council…vote with Councilman Robert White’s emergency legislation that will keep your constituents safe. The only thing changed around MPD and local policing is the year. They are still killing Black people.”
By Feb. 25, the day of the judiciary and public safety committee’s performance oversight hearing, it had been nearly two weeks since a U.S Marshal shot and killed 43-year-old Julian Marquette Bailey on Hayes Street NE. Bailey’s death followed other instances, also in Ward 7, where Homeland Security Investigation officers shot at Philip Brown on Benning Road NE and Julian Brian Nelson on Minnesota Avenue NE during traffic stops.
As Brown and Nelson’s families fight for body-worn camera footage, Bailey’s wife has embarked on a similar mission.
“Why doesn’t our government want to release more details? What are you hiding?” Trenise Wells Bailey said in her testimony before D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) and other judiciary and public safety committee members on Feb. 25. “If the Marshals were a part of the Joint Task Force, this is a further reason that this needs to end now.”
The hearing, which focused on MPD, Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, and Office of Police Complaints, took place more than a week after Wells Bailey, her children, family, and members of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, among others, hosted a candlelight vigil at the scene of the encounter that ended Bailey’s life.
Just as she did on the night of Feb. 16, Wells Bailey spoke about her late husband, a man who accepted her two oldest children as his own while being the best father possible for their other children. In her testimony, Wells Bailey said the U.S. Marshal, who has yet to be identified, had no reason to kill her husband, let alone come into contact with him.
“You are placing District residents at risk,” Wells Bailey said. “How many fathers and sons need to die before you do something? My children will never see their father again. I will never get to nestle in his arms again. I will never hear him say my name because he spoke proudly of me.”
Last year, upon Jeffery Carroll’s installment as MPD interim chief, the entire D.C. Council sent a letter requesting clarity on the local police department’s cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies and its crime data collection process. MPD responded in January, but not to the degree desired by council members, particularly Pinto.
On Feb. 25, Pinto reminded Carroll of MPD’s obligations to the council.
“MPD is required to transmit a report on Jan. 1 of every year to the mayor and the council providing data on requests for information or detainers made by federal immigration agencies,” Pinto told Carroll, “individuals released into the custody of a federal immigration agency, the types of information that the agency shared with federal immigration agencies. To date, we have not received any of these reports from MPD. When can you commit to getting us this report from 2025?”
During their lengthy exchange, Carroll explained reasons why MPD couldn’t provide data about federal law enforcement activity under the Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful Task Force.
“This is a collaboration, but the federal government doesn’t have to provide us with information,” Carroll told Pinto. “So, again, we’re putting our officers that are on the scene in a very precarious situation, almost like we’re trying to have them police the federal law enforcement agencies.”
Pinto, flanked by Councilmembers R. White, Christina Henderson (I-At large), Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), and Doni Crawford (I-At large), continued to question why local police officers, who’ve been equipped with body camera equipment for nearly a decade, couldn’t record data about federal officer interactions.
“It’s very difficult to put our officers in that situation where an officer is running a driver’s license over here, there’s a federal agent doing something else over there,” Carroll explained. “I don’t really know what they would track or what they would put down that someone is running somebody. I get the idea of where you’re going with that, but I just don’t know how that would move forward and how practical that would be [for] every single interaction, just in case later on there was something, they use the information from that stop and they try to go back to it.”
Days later, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has stood in opposition to federal police accountability. Even so, Pinto and White soldiered on. Hours before the council approved the emergency measures on March 3, Pinto told reporters that she took extra precaution to avoid pushback against her bill, the Body-Worn Camera Transparency for Use of Force Emergency Amendment Act.
“My expectation is that if we pass this law today, MPD will follow the law,” Pinto told reporters.
A Call for Something Different
In the days leading up to the council’s vote on the emergency bills, local activist April Goggans visited the U.S. Department of Justice website. As she’s always done, she perused the platform, reading about the legal outcome of officer-involved killings.
As Goggans would later recount, recent posts about officer use-of-force cases were missing a vital piece of information.
“They’re taking the names off of the officers that murder Black people,” Goggans, lead organizer of Black Lives Matter DC, told The Informer. “This is a new thing that’s just kind of like quietly being done. It says a lot about this connection between this part of the state ramping up its protection of each other. The names of Black people are [also] gone to where these people are reduced even further to less than their personhood.”
The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
For more than a decade, Goggans has been on the frontlines of local police accountability activism, so much so that MPD officials allegedly surveilled her residence and whereabouts. Long before Trump evoked Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, Goggans also consoled family members of District residents shot and killed by federal agents.
Alaunte Scott counts among that number. Feb. 28 marked three years since U.S. Marshals shot and killed Scott, a District resident who was enrolled in the Pathways Program and under court supervision at the time of his officer-involved death. Scott’s demise, and that of 17-year-old Dalaneo Martin, happened during a period much similar to now, when Congress was interfering in local matters.
That’s why, for Goggans, it’s hard not to question the timing of the council’s recent response to a longstanding problem.
“It’s very clear [that it’s] because of what’s happening in the news,” Goggans said. “Our council, our elected officials are much more willing to hold federal agents accountable than they are with our local police, because it looks good, and the rest of the country is doing it.”
Goggans said the council had ample time to act in the interests of D.C. residents, especially as it relates to local police department transparency.
“The council had a whole commission,” Goggans said. “Those folks worked really hard on both historical, empirical research, all very specific to D.C. They haven’t implemented the kind of accountability that MPD was going to have. You don’t even hear council members, even those progressive council members, talk about those things.”
With a historic election season underway, there’s a contingent of local organizers who want to do away, not only with the public safety ecosystem, but every other apparatus that’s under government control. Fresh from the launch of the People’s Pan-African Wellness Front, Pan-African Community (PACA) is back once again with their community-based control platform that’s been percolating since before the pandemic.
Longtime PACA member Oliver Robinson told The Informer that if this platform comes to fruition, then Black people and working-class populations of D.C. will have direct control over various aspects of their existence — including education, health, public safety, land, transportation, labor and the environment.
“We want safety [and] we want the ability to make decisions and protect ourselves,” Robinson told The Informer, “but fundamentally preventing certain behaviors, empowering people to see themselves differently, it starts with building up all of these other institutions. Education, health, housing, food, you can’t separate any of those things from public safety and any of those things from how the youth feel or how they behave.”
For years, Robinson and his PACA comrades have advanced the tenets of what’s known as Community Control DC during bi-weekly Assata Shakur Study Group meetings at the Black Worker Wellness Center in Anacostia. In the coming weeks, PACA will take their message wider, all as part of what Robinson calls an appeal to the disaffected masses.
“This call is for the creation of new community-led institutions that are designed by the people, put into place by the people, and that budget is allocated to people to govern over those institutions in their own wards,” Robinson said. “It may look like people electing a police chief. It may look like the people electing a whole community policing force or safety force. It may look like people deciding that money is better spent another way entirely. The key distinction to draw is that it’s not exercising control over pre-existing structures.”