Over the past two years, D.C. police have engaged in more than 130,000 “stop-and-frisks” in search of illegally carried weapons. But according to a new report from the ACLU and the ACLU of the District of Columbia, more than 9-in-10 of the stops failed to turn up a gun, knife, or other weapon.
In fact, according to the ACLU a weapon was found in only about 1 in every 100 stops, and the organization says it’s time the District rethink its policy and curb the use of the tactic.
The ACLU’s findings are stark. Despite Black residents making up just 44% of D.C.’s population, they account for a staggering 70% of those stopped by MPD. The report, which draws from a total of 136,805 stops, suggests that the practice disproportionately targets Black people, raising significant concerns about racial bias within the police department.
This analysis, which follows two previous ACLU reports on similar issues, underscores a troubling trend. The first report, published in June 2020, and the second in March 2021, both highlighted significant racial disparities in stop-and-frisk data. The current report reinforces these concerns.
“Research in other jurisdictions has shown that the most plausible explanation for consistent disproportionality is racial bias,” the report states. “Coupled with the disparities here and D.C.-specific anecdotal and contextual evidence, these patterns are suggestive of bias in MPD’s stop-and-frisk practices.”
In addition to documenting racial disparities, the report examines the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk in reducing gun violence. Data reveals that in 2022, only 0.9% of stops resulted in the seizure of a gun, with a small increase to 1.2% in 2023. The report argues that these low gun recovery rates indicate that stop-and-frisk is not a particularly effective tool for removing guns from the streets.
Like every other city in the U.S., crime in D.C. is largely driven by a small group of individuals who are responsible for a disproportionate amount of offenses. According to a 2022 study from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, as much as 70% of the violent crime in D.C. is committed by just 500 people. The District’s reliance on “stop-and-frisk” to fight crime ignores that fact in favor of casting a wide net over anyone deemed by police to be suspicious when the focus should be on identifying and prosecuting those repeat offenders.
The ACLU doesn’t seem concerned about how these practices impact the Second Amendment rights of D.C. residents and visitors. The right to keep and bear arms is never mentioned in its report. Instead, the organization argues the excessive use of “stop-and-frisk” harms individuals and communities in other ways.
There is a wide range of negative implications for people who experience regular or increased interactions with police and persistent harm associated with tactics such as stop-and-frisk. Constant interaction with police impacts people’s economic wellbeing (e.g., losing a job) and educational attainment and outcomes (e.g., stunted development, not obtaining high school diploma, and/or lower likelihood of attending college). Persistent interaction with police also impacts people’s civic and social engagement, as well as their physical and psychological health. For young people, this can manifest as an inability to self-regulate their behaviors; heightened emotional distress; and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as a rapid heart rate, sweaty palms, uncontrollable thoughts, and a decrease in quality sleep—all issues that can impact their engagement and performance66 in school and how they behave in other areas of their lives.
Groups of people, communities, and/or populations, such as Black, Indigenous, and other POC or LGBTQ+ people who are more frequently subjected to police encounters either because of purposeful and unconstitutional targeting or because of systemic bias are less likely to report a crime even if they, themselves, are the victim. Communities that experience continual police interactions are also more reluctant to come forward and help police with investigations—an issue members of the D.C. Council have raised as a barrier to solving crimes. And, according to the 2023 PERF MPD Cultural Assessment mentioned above, this is indeed true in D.C. Participants reported being “unlikely to report crime, share information, and support MPD if officers don’t treat them with respect and dignity, take the time to explain their actions, and listen to what they have to say—in other words, to act in accordance with the principles of procedural justice.”
Unconstitutional stops and frisks also create a barrier to accountability by making it harder to prosecute people who commit certain crimes. For example, courts can preclude prosecutors from using evidence in a criminal trial if the police acquired the evidence through an unlawful stop-and-frisk (i.e., the stop was initiated without reasonable suspicion). Over the past few years, there have been ongoing reports of D.C. courts throwing out gun possession cases due to unconstitutional stops, stemming from practices such as jump-outs.
Of course, there’s another issue involving “stop-and-frisk” policies: the mere act of carrying a firearm, which is a constitutionally protected right, shouldn’t be probable cause that a crime is being committed. The ACLU’s new report highlights some of the problems with “stop-and-frisk”, but by once again pretending that the Second Amendment is a dead letter, the civil rights organization is intentionally ignoring one of the biggest harms that result from these policies: the denormalization and demonization of gun ownership itself.
“Stop-and-frisk” is a waste of time from a public safety perspective, but it’s also an affront to our fundamental civil rights. That includes our right to keep and bear arms, despite the ACLU’s refusal to defend the Second Amendment. There are much more effective and constitutionally sound approaches to fighting crime than stopping nearly 200 people a day and patting them down for weapons, but so long as District officials view gun ownership itself as a problem that needs to be fixed I doubt we’ll see any major changes to their addiction to “stop-and-frisk”.
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