What Are We Paying DC Police to Do?

Originally published May 4, 2022 in 730DC
By Ben Perelmuter, Elizabeth Warner, and Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers

This year, both Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Council Judiciary Committee are proposing increases to the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) budget in order to hire more officers. Mayor Bowser is proposing a $30 million increase, while the Judiciary Committee’s proposal is slightly smaller.

DC already spends more than half a billion dollars per year on MPD, and has more police officers per capita than any major city in the U.S. So why does the mayor think we need more police?

Without providing evidence, Bowser ties a small, one-year reduction in the number of MPD officers to a decrease in public safety. She does so despite the fact that DC’s statistics on crime are poorly-reported and, more importantly, that there are a number of other explanations for any increase in interpersonal violence or theft. For one thing, DC’s police-reported crime rates were historically low between 2017 and 2020, so the increase can in part be read as a reversion to the mean. In addition, framing the police as the only or main driver of crime rates is not supported by data. The increase could be the result of broad societal trends such as pandemic-related job loss, evictions, and stress, rather than a small reduction in police officers.

Regardless, Bowser champions the law-and-order argument. She paints officers as crime-fighters who are the best suited to provide important “services” to local communities, though she doesn’t define what those services are. In doing so, Bowser misrepresents what MPD officers do and instead amplifies the MPD’s own false portrayals of police work.

MPD loves to promote small, feel-good stories of cops supposedly doing community service, like delivering valentines to senior citizens or drawing signs with children comparing the MPD Chief to Rosa Parks. They also like to promote supposedly heroic moments when they stop “bad guys” in their tracks. But these stories are almost entirely PR. They represent a tiny percentage of how police actually spend their time. Contrary to what their social media portrays, police almost never do ‘community service’ or stop a violent incident in progress.

So, how do cops really spend their time?

While we don’t have data for how MPD spends their time, according to a 2021 New York Times review of publicly available data from Montgomery County, Sacramento, and New Orleans, police spend 55–60% of their time responding to “non-criminal” calls or addressing “medical” issues, “traffic,” or “other” issues. This begs the question: If these incidents are “non-criminal,” why are the police responding to them? Why not dedicate those resources to civilian medical, social, and mental health services that can better respond to a wide range of problems? The District spends nine times as much money on MPD as they do on mental health services, disability services, and public housing maintenance combined. Police drain resources from agencies better suited to handle “non-criminal” matters and are more likely than those agencies to respond with violence and target marginalized people.

For instance, police often use their traffic enforcement role to make “pretextual stops”: They pull someone over for an alleged minor traffic violation when they really want to pull the person over for some other, illegal, reason. Pretextual stops are racist: police pull Black people over at much higher rates than the general population; and for decades, people have acknowledged that “driving while Black” has itself become a reason to be pulled over. These traffic stops can and do become deadly, like in the nationally publicized cases of Sandra Bland and Philando Castille, and of Karon Hylton-Brown here in DC. This is because police are systemically violent and have become increasingly militarized; they should not be the ones enforcing traffic laws. Certain jurisdictions are already working to create non-violent, civilian traffic enforcement agencies.

Police spend roughly 12% of their time doing “proactive policing,” meaning policing communities before anyone calls 911 or a supposed crime is committed. Proactive policing, which includes controversial stop-and-frisk practices, is racist. For instance, in DC, 87% of the people one police unit stopped were Black; 91% of people they arrested were Black; and 100% of people they used force on were Black. Stop-and-frisk causes serious trauma to community members, and in DC officers have used this practice to sexually abuse Black residents. Proactive policing targets marginalized communities and enables officers to terrorize people.

Police spend roughly 12% of their time policing “property crime.” This often amounts to arresting poor people for stealing small amounts of items in order to survive. Police almost never deal with the much more costly forms of property crime committed by the rich, such as wage theft and tax evasion.

The police spend about 15% of their time addressing incidents categorized as “other crime.” Because government data on this category of “crime” are not well-kept or well-defined, it is hard to know how often police do anything to stop these “crimes.”

Police spend only 4% of their time addressing “violent crime.” Increased police presence is a less effective way of curbing interpersonal violence than funding community nonprofits or planting community gardens.

While Mayor Bowser says that not hiring more officers puts victims of “violent crime” at risk, MPD already employs more than 3,500 officers. If that’s not enough to respond to interpersonal violence, the problem might not be the number of police, but their function.

Cops don’t stop crime, but they get paid like they do.

Police departments aren’t designed to address serious interpersonal violence, and the numbers bear that fact. In 2018, MPD only made arrests in 40% of serious cases. That number is roughly consistent with other departments across the country. These low clearance rates may be particularly concerning given the amount of time departments choose to use not investigating serious violence and instead use to police the daily life of poor and Black people.

While MPD’s clearance rate is astoundingly low, a higher clearance rate wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reduction in violence. Arrests are normally made after an incident has already happened. In these cases, police don’t stop violence; they merely apprehend someone who may have done something violent, sometimes doing more harm in the process. Those people may then end up in jail or prison, where they’re much more likely to experience serious violence, like physical and sexual assault. Even the function most central to the image police portray of themselves–responding to “violent crime”– often leads to more serious violence. In order to curb violence before it happens, the District needs to invest more in programs that make our communities healthier and safer, like mental health services, social services, housing, and violence interruption programs.

Despite the fact that police dedicate little of their massive budget to address harm or stop crime, and instead spend their time abusing poor and Black people, they still claim gigantic overtime salaries, draining valuable resources from the District. In 2020, the MPD’s top 25 overtime earners alone made almost $7 million thanks to overtime payments. The #1 overtime earner’s overtime pay of over $260,000 was only possible if he had worked 60–70 hours of overtime per week, every single week, in 2020. (Of course, this is highly improbable.)

Why do police departments promote activities they spend only a tiny fraction of their time doing? Other DC first responders, like firefighters, don’t tweet photos of themselves delivering cards. They post photos of themselves putting out fires. When the public would approve of the work a department spends most of its time doing, then promoting that work makes sense. That police departments promote work they spend almost no time doing, underscores an important truth: police know that the ways they spend most of their time are objectionable. It wouldn’t be positive PR to highlight the time they spend harassing people on the street, abusing Black drivers, or failing to stop interpersonal violence. So police PR ignore those police functions, and in doing so, create a flimsy image of MPD as community-oriented servants.

Cops don’t stop “crime” or make our communities safer. And still, DC currently spends more than $500 million every year on MPD. Mayor Bowser says that the District’s “ability to deliver services can only be negatively impacted when [it’s] down hundreds of officers.” Yet MPD has never provided the services residents need to be safe. In fact, Bowser, MPD, and the DC council have failed to implement even the basic police reform, like capping overtime spending and taking police out of schools, recommended by the Police Reform Commission that the Council itself created.

The Mayor is pushing for a six percent increase in MPD funding this year. Meanwhile, vital services that can create true safety, like housing, healthcare, and education, remain chronically underfunded. The DC Council should reject that proposal. It’s well past time to Defund MPD and fund the services that will keep us safe.

— Ben Perelmuter, Elizabeth Warner, Jeremiah-Anthony Righteous-Rogers