The current deployment allows for 62,000 people to be stopped by police over a five month period, and for 15,000 people to be arrested annually.

DC spends a half-billion dollars every year on the Metropolitan Police Department, and along with our city-run police department and agencies that police schools, the transit system and housing authority, there are over thirty-two federal law enforcement agencies operating in the District.

While there are significant resources being spent on policing, public trust that these entities can operate fairly and effectively are at all-time lows: most Americans say they don’t trust that the police can treat Black and white people equally, that they do not have enough training around the use of force, and three out of four voters see police violence as a problem. At the same time, research shows that police encounters can cause lifetime trauma and health issues. Too often, police encounters can lead to tragic consequences of someone losing their life.

83 percent of people arrested in DC are Black.

The negative consequences from poor policing practices and the lack of oversight of them almost exclusively impact Black communities in DC: In 2024, 83 percent of all DC arrests were Black, about nine out of ten of use-of-force incidents involved Black individuals, and only about one in ten people arrested in DC were white.

While the DC Police Reform Commission has developed hundreds of policy proposals to change this picture, the city has only adopted a few of the recommendations offered in a near year-long review.