A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, JUNE 7 , 2022
cently reporting that the firearm
homicide rate in 2020 reached its
highest level in a quarter-
c entury. Police and prosecutors
have focused on reducing the
number of illegal firearms on the
streets, as other officials debate
tightening who can purchase
guns legally.
The experience in the District
highlights how aggressive tactics
to seize guns can exacerbate ten-
sions with communities and col-
lide with the realities of success-
ful prosecutions. To substantiate
a case in court, police must show
they had legitimate reason to
conduct a search and tie a gun to
a specific person, which can be a
difficult task.
And defense attorneys and
criminal justice advocates say
officers are often stopping young
Black men on flimsy pretexts and
bringing weak cases in a so-far-
unsuccessful effort to quell
shootings.
Police said they seized more
than 2,400 illegal firearms in
2021, a slight increase from the
previous year. The pace is acceler-
ating this year, with 54 percent
more illegal firearms confiscated
than at this time in 2021. At the
same time, homicides are rising
for the fifth year in a row.
About half the people charged
with murder typically have a
prior gun arrest, according to
police, though not necessarily a
conviction. In the week the men
in the Bonneville were stopped,
D.C. police arrested 23 people for
gun offenses; prosecutors did not
pursue charges against 13 of
them. Of the 10 people charged,
six were convicted, with sen-
tences ranging from participa-
tion in a diversion program to 18
months behind bars, court rec-
ords show. Four are awaiting
trial.
At a news conference to an-
nounce a crime-fighting initia-
tive last fall, D.C. Police Chief
Robert J. Contee III told report-
ers and residents that prosecu-
tors’ declining to bring cases was
“very frustrating,” and he worried
people released from custody
pending further investigation
could be “picking up another
gun.” He said he wanted investi-
gators to build solid cases but
added: “I also want to see people
going to jail and being held
accountable when they violate
our community and go out there
and use illegal firearms in our
city.”
The aggressive tactics police
use to seize guns have long drawn
scrutiny. The Police Reform Com-
mission, a panel formed by the
D.C. Council after the killing of
George Floyd by police in Minne-
apolis, argued in an April 2021
report that officers on special
squads such as the Gun Recovery
Unit “use aggressive stop and
search tactics” and recommend-
ed sweeping changes, such as
barring officers from citing “high
crime areas” as a partial justifica-
tion for stopping people. Social
and racial justice advocates have
called for D.C. police to disband
the unit altogether.
In 2019, an effort by the U.S.
attorney’s office in D.C. to pros-
ecute felons caught with illegal
firearms in federal court, rather
than Superior Court, generated
controversy after it was learned
the initiative targeted three pre-
dominantly Black wards. Offi-
cials had claimed it would be
enforced citywide. Sentences in
federal court are generally harsh-
er, which officials hoped would
be a deterrent.
Police have signaled openness
to change. Two months after Con-
tee became chief in January 2021,
a Gun Recovery Unit commander
circulated a memo urging others
to rethink some of the aggressive
tactics.
“No idea is too small or too
radical,” the commander wrote,
causing a stir in the office for
saying the policing style of the
past two decades was “no longer
what we should be doing.”
Contee said at the time that he
wanted police to shift away from
seizing as many guns as possible
to finding the people “that pull
the trigger.”
But with a steady drumbeat of
police-blotter items flowing
across Twitter — spitting out
shards of frightening crime alerts
that include shootings, gun of-
fenses and carjackings across the
District — making significant
changes is easier said than done.
The increase in gun violence has
led to a clamor from some resi-
dents to crack down on offenders,
even as members of the D.C.
Council work to restrict police
tactics as part of efforts ushered
in by social justice protests in the
summer of 2020.
‘A very high standard’
Each week, D.C. police post
listings of gun seizures and peo-
ple arrested, along with photos of
confiscated firearms. The weap-
ons range from small pistols to
semiautomatic rifles, many built
from home kits.
Police in the District seized 52
illegal firearms in the first week
of May, near Union Station, the
GUNS FROM A
off the street and worry about the
constitutional issues later,’ ” she
said.
Patel represents clients suing
members of the D.C. police Gun
Recovery Unit, alleging a pattern
of illegal tactics and indiscrimi-
nate stops of young Black men in
high-crime neighborhoods.
One of the plaintiffs alleges he
was stopped in 2020 while walk-
ing down a street carrying a
backpack strapped to his chest.
Seeing officers in a car behind
him, the then-24-year-old slung
the backpack he had been hold-
ing with one hand to over his
shoulders, a move police deemed
suspicious.
Police said the bag appeared
unusually heavy; the man
claimed only a bag of marijuana
was inside. The suit alleges that
one officer felt the bag and heard
a sound when the man shook it.
Police searched it and found a
loaded .380 handgun. Prosecu-
tors did not pursue criminal
charges.
The D.C. Office of the Attorney
General, which is defending the
officers, called the arrest an ex-
ample of solid police work, writ-
ing in court papers that the man’s
behaviors, “when examined in
totality,” justified the stop.
In the lawsuit, Patel disputed
the officers’ account, asserting
that the case is an example of
what she described as the Dis-
trict’s “war on guns and young
African American men who
might carry them.”
The case remains unresolved.Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this
report.“Imagine, having to prove that
a person actually had a gun on
him to prove he had a gun,”
Anne-Marie Moore, a defense
lawyer in the District, said sarcas-
tically.
Moore represents one young
man in a group of eight people
whom police charged in January
with gun offenses. Authorities
said they found seven firearms in
two vehicles linked to the group,
whom they accused of breaking
into cars in downtown Washing-
ton.
One juvenile in the group had a
gun on him, police said. But the
other unregistered firearms were
found under seats or on the
floorboards of the two vehicles.
Prosecutors dropped the fire-
arms counts against the four
adults.
Only one of them, Moore’s
client, was charged by prosecu-
tors in adult court, and only with
misdemeanor property destruc-
tion and breaking into a vehicle.
He was freed pending trial.
Prosecutors said further inves-
tigation is needed before filing
more serious firearms charges
against any of those involved.
Moore declined to specifically
discuss her client’s case, but she
said police are often too quick to
arrest, noting “there is a discon-
nect between the police and the
prosecutors.”
Sweta Patel, a defense attor-
ney, said prosecutors are forced
to drop gun cases “because of the
lack of training that is taught to
the officers who are in charge of
making these arrests.”
“I think MPD has worked on
the premise of, ‘Let’s get the gunto drop a case.
“If we can prosecute a gun
case, we’re going to do it,” said
Alyse Constantinide, who depart-
ed as chief of the U.S. attorney’s
office’s early-case-assessment
section shortly after an interview
for this article. “But we are bound
by the law... and that’s why we
try to get more evidence and
bring cases back later, rather
then just sending them away
forever.”
Police Cmdr. Ramey J. Kyle,
who heads the Narcotics and
Special Investigations Division,
which includes the gun squad,
said the department has adjusted
its tactics to try to build stronger
cases. Where the department
might once have stopped and
questioned all 30 people in an
area experiencing violence, now
officers are “taking a couple of
steps back — who’s out there,
what’s their background, maybe
we set up on them and watch.
Instead of stopping all 30, we’re
getting in that crowd the person
who actually has that gun.”
“The boxes we have to check
for each arrest keeps growing
and growing and growing,” Kyle
said. “But at the end of the day, it
makes for better officers and
better cases.”Pushing legal boundaries
Defense lawyers say police
sometimes trample constitution-
al rights to justify stopping some-
one to prove a hunch that they
are armed. Requiring concrete
evidence that a person possesses
a firearm should not be consid-
ered a hurdle, they say, but the
starting point for an arrest.ings by the couple’s child under a
bed.
Prosecutors ultimately won a
conviction against the man on
gun charges. But the D.C. Court of
Appeals threw it out, saying the
evidence connecting the man to
the gun was “quite thin” and
ruling authorities had failed to
“establish the link between the
gun and a criminal enterprise.”
Similarly, in January, the D.C.
Court of Appeals overturned the
conviction of a man who was
arrested by members of the Gun
Recovery Unit in 2016 in North-
east Washington. The appeals
court decided officers did not
have sufficient evidence to detain
the man, rejecting prosecutors’
argument that police were in
their rights to approach him be-
cause he was in a “high crime
area” and had made “slight ad-
justments with his front waist-
band.”
“We must meet a very high
standard of connecting a given
person to a given gun,” said
Chrisellen Kolb, the chief of the
appellate division for the U.S.
attorney’s office in the District.
A person does not need to be
caught holding a gun by authori-
ties. But if a gun is found in the
trunk of a car with five people
inside, who can get charged?
“The answer is, probably no-
body, until we can get DNA off of
the gun,” Kolb said.
Police and prosecutors say
they confer daily over gun ar-
rests, reviewing body-camera
video to help build cases or learn
of unforeseen pitfalls. Prosecu-
tors said they try to talk with the
arresting officer before decidingWhite House, Capital One Arena
and elsewhere. Police seized an-
other 58 illegal guns the follow-
ing week.
To the frustration of police, the
path from arrest to prosecution
to prison is a difficult one.
During the first half of 2021,
the U.S. attorney’s office said
prosecutors in D.C. Superior
Court pursued 112 of the 186
felon-in-possession cases
brought by police. Forty-five of
the cases were considered still
under investigation, and 29 were
dropped altogether.
The U.S. attorney’s office said it
was unable to provide more re-
cent data or data for federal court
in the District. Officials also said
they did not have data on other
types of gun crime prosecutions.
Prosecutors argue they are
limited by case law in D.C. To
survive legal scrutiny, they have
to assess why an officer stopped a
person in the first place, what
cause they had to search a person
or their vehicle, and what evi-
dence they have tying a particu-
lar person to a particular weap-
on.
The U.S. attorney’s office has
experienced losses in the appeals
court, which officials said have
shaped their strategies.
In 2014, for example, D.C. po-
lice stopped the driver of a vehi-
cle with a broken brake light in
Southeast Washington and found
suspected marijuana in the cen-
ter console. The vehicle was reg-
istered to the driver’s girlfriend,
and police got a warrant to search
her home, finding a bag contain-
ing a Glock 9mm handgun, mail
in the driver’s name and draw-Gun seizures by D.C. police are soaring. But thepath from arrest to prosecution can be di∞cult.BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
From left, D.C. Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chris Geldart, Police Chief Robert J. Contee III and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, with guns collected from the shooter who
terrorized Washington’s Van Ness area i n April. Police in the District seized 52 illegal firearms in the first week of May and another 58 illegal guns the following week.MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST; BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POSTT
Linda Harllee Harper, D.C.’s first gun violence prevention director, a nnounces the mayor’s Building Blocks DC program to limit gun crime on Feb. 17, 2021. A rise in violence
has led to a clamor from some residents to crack down on offenders. Guns at the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences in 2019. To build a court case, police must show they
had legitimate reason to conduct a search and tie a gun to a p erson. Defense attorneys say the police are bringing weak cases.