Dozens of police officers in D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods are getting red flags on their files and being referred to a special department program that aims to prevent brutality before it happens, internal police documents show.
Eighty-four officers in the 5th, 6th and 7th police districts have been referred to the department’s “supervisory support program” because the bosses are worried that they are too aggressive, a July 13 internal police report obtained by The Examiner shows.
That’s nearly 40 percent of the total officers on the watch list, according to the internal documents.
Those three police districts are consistently the most violent in the city. Combined, they’ve been home to more than three-fourths of D.C.’s homicides, two-fifths of its robberies and half of its rapes, according to police statistics.
Violence has gotten so bad in the 5th District that Police Chief Cathy Lanier has twice tried to quarantine it with her controversial barricade program.
The police department is just coming out of a decade of Justice Department monitoring, brought about because trigger-happy cops made the capital one of the most dangerous places in America to run into the police.
Johnny Barnes, of the D.C.-area American Civil Liberties Union, said he was concerned about the numbers of officers in need of “support.” He said the public ought to have broad access to the department’s records to see whether there “are issues about safety and competence.”
“The public deserves that kind of scrutiny, at a minimum,” Barnes said. “Too much is at stake.”
But some say that the statistics are misleading. Kris Baumann, the chairman of the D.C. police union, said that officers get flagged when suspects resist being handcuffed. They can also wind up getting a negative referral when they don’t file their mountains of paperwork properly.
The real concern, Baumann said, is that Lanier isn’t letting the officers do their jobs in dangerous neighborhoods.
“If you’re the working police, you get crushed by downtown,” Baumann said. “It’s just a grind. We’re not talking about bad police officers doing bad things, we’re talking about minor paperwork errors.”
Neither Lanier nor her spokeswoman responded to requests for comment.
Got a tip on the D.C. police? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or e-mail [email protected].
