WASHINGTON – Today, an ACLU and ACLU of the District of Columbia analysis of 2022-2023 stop-and-frisk data collected by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) revealed that Black people compose 70% of people stopped in the District, despite making up 44% of the D.C. population.
The report analyzed MPD data collected between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023. With a total of 136,805 stops, police stopped about one person in the District every ten minutes in these two years.
Entitled “Bias at the Core?: Enduring Racial Disparities in D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Stop-and-Frisk Practices (2022-2023),” the report argues that the racial disparities in MPD’s stop-and-frisk practices are consistent with racial bias. “Research in other jurisdictions has shown that the most plausible explanation for consistent disproportionality is racial bias,” the report reads. It concludes that this research, “coupled with the disparities here and D.C.-specific anecdotal and contextual evidence, are suggestive of bias in MPD’s stop-and-frisk practices.”
In addition to documenting racial disparities, the report also revealed that in 2022, only 0.9% of stops resulted in the seizure of a gun and in 2023, only 1.2% of stops resulted in the seizure of a gun. The report concludes that these data indicate that “stop and frisk is not particularly effective at removing guns from the streets” and that gun recovery rates “are not significant enough to justify the overwhelming number of stops being conducted.”
This analysis is the third in a series of ACLU reports on MPD stop-and-frisk data. The first ACLU stops report was published in June 2020 and analyzed stops conducted between July 22, 2019 and December 31, 2019. The second report was published in March 2021 and analyzed data on stops conducted between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020. Both reports found significant racial disparities in who D.C. police stopped.
“It's time for District leaders to truly question why they uphold stop-and-frisk practices that lack community safety benefits — especially when these practices implicate people’s constitutional rights, can be traumatic to Black and Brown communities, and erode trust in the criminal justice system,” said ACLU-D.C. Policy Advocacy Director Scarlett Aldebot. “Instead of leaning into harmful and ineffective policing, the District should build a public safety system that protects us from bias, increases trust in government, and keeps all our communities safe.”
See the full report at: https://www.acludc.org/sites/default/files/aclu-dc_2024_stop-and-frisk_report.pdf