A recent report has revealed that African Americans were primarily targeted by the DC police’s Narcotics and Specialized Investigations Division (NSID) in terms of arrests, stops, frisks and use of force.
Out of the 3,680 persons stopped by NSID-assigned personnel from August 1, 2019 through January 31, 2020, 87.7 percent (3,226) were black. White people made up only 5.1 percent with 187, which was followed by Hispanics with 4.6 percent (168 individuals).
Black people were also the subjects of 91 percent of 2,180 arrests that took place during the same time period, according to the report. A total of 1,984 black people were arrested, while the figure was 136 (6.2 percent) for white people and 13 for Asians (0.6 percent).
Officers used force against 59 persons in 52 incidents, and all of them were African Americans. It was also reported that all were male, except for three individuals.
The report, which has been released by the National Police Foundation (NPF), is based on six months of data provided by MPD and interviews conducted with staff assigned to NSID.
The MPD data releases and the NPF report are stipulated by the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment (NEAR) Act that unanimously passed the DC Council and went into effect in 2016.
The legislation aims at increasing accountability of police officers. It requires for MPD to collect 14 categories of data for all stops such as the date, location, and time of the stop, the approximate duration of it, whether a search was conducted as a result of the stop, whether an arrest was made as a result of either the stop or the search, etc.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the District for failing to implement the NEAR Act in 2018. MPD was ordered by the court last year to collect data as per the law.