In the months since D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced Metropolitan Police acting Chief Pamela Smith as her pick for the District’s top law enforcement official, she has been making the rounds at churches, community meetings, and youth lunches to meet with constituents.
As Smith explained at her confirmation roundtable, she has also been meeting public safety agency leaders and D.C. residents who are intimately involved in anti-violence efforts. Though she hasn’t completed her tour, Smith told the D.C. Council members who attended her confirmation roundtable that she plans to continue these efforts.
“As we continue to come up with ways to deal with crime, it’s going to take time,” Smith said on Sept. 27 while speaking before the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety.
During her confirmation roundtable, Smith revealed an updated strategic plan for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). The goal, as outlined in the document, centers on decreasing crime and increasing feelings of safety in the community. It centers on crime prevention and intervention, accountability for those who perpetrate crime, and sustainability via the recruitment of new officers and inclusion of partner agencies.
Smith highlighted the guiding principles, including focused law enforcement and strategic deployment of resources, impactful community engagement, and a more engaged police workforce. According to the strategic plan, these principles permeate through the interactions with different stakeholders within D.C. government and in the community.
“We didn’t get here overnight so we have to be strategic in our approach to work with other agencies and look within our department to look at other approaches to drive down crime,” Smith continued. “That’s my biggest challenge but we have dedicated members in our leadership and executive team to take on the task of safer communities and driving down crime. They are ready to do that work.”
D.C. Council Examines Smith’s Plan for Interagency Cooperation
Smith’s confirmation hearing took place a day after the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) recorded more than 200 homicides for the calendar year)– including the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s late determination of eight homicides. Other deadly shootings that week involved a student who attended Dunbar High School in Northwest. Hours after the roundtable ended, a violent ambush of five people in the Brentwood neighborhood of Northeast claimed two more lives.
The council members who attended Smith’s confirmation roundtable were: Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, along with At large Council members Kenyan McDuffie (I) and Christina Henderson (I), Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), Matt Frumin (D-Ward 3), Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), and Council member Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7),
In their remarks, each council member focused on a different aspect of Smith’s role. Henderson, chair of the D.C. Council Committee on Health, gathered Smith’s thoughts on drug trafficking and how to go about stopping the flow of opioids and other illicit drugs into District neighborhoods. McDuffie, who visited Dunbar community members earlier that morning, identified the lack of economic opportunity as a key driver of violence.
Other topics of discussion included traffic safety, equitable deployment of officers, collaboration with the Office of the U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, tracking guns, and better engaging young people. In regard to the last point, Smith often circled back to MPD’s pilot curfew program as an effective strategy in connecting at-risk young people with resources.
In his remarks, Parker mentioned his requests of the Bowser administration for a holistic crime-fighting approach. Allen expressed a similar viewpoint during the confirmation hearing, referencing what he described as a lack of strength in the local crime prevention ecosystem.
Allen later told The Informer that, after speaking with Smith, he got the sense that Smith was building relationships that should have already been solidified.
“We can’t be in a position where for every [new] chief and agency director, we have to start over,” Allen said. “To have a whole-of-government response, how do you turn words into action? They have to be backed [by] relationships so when an agency head moves on, the work remains.”
Community Members Speak — and Police Transparency Remains a Major Issue
More than 40 people from different parts of the District appeared as public witnesses at Acting Chief Smith’s confirmation roundtable on Sept. 27.
Some people, like Cherita Whiting of the Ward 4 Education Council and Robert Vinson Brannum of the Ward 5 Leadership Council, touted Smith’s enthusiasm for meeting residents. Kenneth Rioland, Jr., pastor of Paramount Baptist Church, later spoke of Smith clearly communicating her concerns to residents and making herself available to them during community events. ,
Other witnesses, like Ward 7 resident Ron Williams, touted the need for increasing the District’s police force. During the hearing, his comments bore a similarity to Whiting and Brannum who expressed concerns about the council not allocating enough money to MPD.
Parker later challenged that notion, telling witnesses that council members honored Bowser’s budget requests earlier this year.
Other witnesses, like Mahdi Leroy Thorpe of the Red Hats Patrol said that Smith wasn’t prepared to tackle crime, citing marijuana use among young people and what he described as sexual deviant behavior among adults. In his remarks, public witness Brian Mulholland said he didn’t quite see Smith as the “fighter” that could curb crime.
Even though she supported Smith’s confirmation, Lisa Leval, a white woman representing the Ward 2 Citizens Advisory Council, suggested that Smith not tap MPD officials based on race, ethnicity or gender. She also asked that Smith not fully depend on violence interrupters and attempt to establish rapport with potential offenders by “passing out footballs.”
Rahman Branch, former principal of Ballou High School and Ward 8 D.C. Council candidate, asked that government officials, and the police chief in particular, acknowledge the multifaceted and collaborative nature of crime prevention. He said he wanted to see situations where officers recognize community members’ humanity and build authentic relationships that better compel their cooperation.
Miles away, Patrice Sulton, executive director of the DC Justice Lab, tuned into the confirmation hearing, deciding not to fully express her thoughts until the end of the proceedings.
Sulton told The Informer that, even with cautious enthusiasm about Smith, she hasn’t heard much about how the acting chief plans to stop police misconduct — specifically falsifying statements, use of excessive force and racial profiling. She said that this problem has engendered community members’ distrust of police, and even jeopardized the prosecution of violent crime.
During the roundtable, public witness Brent Sullivan expressed a similar viewpoint. In his testimony, Sullivan spoke about a situation involving MPD Sergeant Charles Viggiani, who, after being caught falsifying documents to secure an affidavit, secured a promotion to the homicide division in MPD’s 7th District.
Sullivan expressed his dismay that not much had been done by the council, nor MPD or the U.S. Attorney’s Office, to hold Viggiani or his colleagues accountable.
Similarly for Sulton, no community engagement strategy is complete without MPD’s diligence in bringing corrupt officers to the light. As DC Justice Lab works with Smith to schedule a meeting, Sulton has designated transparency as an area of focus in future discussions.
“When someone talks about listening to the community, transparency is part of it,” Sulton said. “That obscurity has been a problem in the past and I can’t wait to get Acting Chief Smith’s views on transparency and what’s been done to curb racial profiling, false statements and excessive force by police officers. You can’t speak to officer accountability without those three things. The council should be more diligent about asking [those questions].”
