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https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...d3beccdd7a3_story.html?utm_term=.afca308e3e58
In the afternoon sun, the group takes cover under the trees that drape over an alley on Sheriff Road in Northeast Washington. Each evening, they move across the street, in front of Nooks Beauty and Barber Shop.
“Chasing the shade,” the young men say.
But as they hang out in their community, they feel like the police are chasing them.
It’s been that way for years in this rough corner of the city’s Deanwood neighborhood. Police say they respond to frequent complaints about the group, while the men say they are repeated targets of police harassment.
But those who claim this piece of real estate on the border with Maryland say their encounters with police have ratcheted up in recent weeks as a surge of officers was assigned to the area amid a rise in homicides.
It’s a tension that residents and police in the District and other cities throughout the country have struggled with for years — and an issue that goes to the heart of some of the most common complaints of police abuse.
A video of a June 13 police encounter with the Sheriff Road group has sparked an uproar in Deanwood and opened a window on how police fight crime, find guns and work to curtail violence in the almost forgotten corners of the District. It also shows how some of their tactics have residents feeling like officers hassle people for no reason.
Another video shows officers returning to the same street 12 days later, a standoff that escalated into skirmishes and four arrests. One man in the group accused officers of returning to “taunt” them.
City officials said they are investigating the police response after complaints from a council member and an advisory neighborhood commissioner.
The incident that initially sparked the debate occurred on a Wednesday night when plainclothes members of the Gun Recovery Unit, attracted to the dark tints on a parked vehicle with expired license plates, began to question and then pat down some young men. After an officer found a pellet gun hidden under one man’s shirt, another officer can be heard on video saying police had the right to search others.
To the men on Sheriff Road, the actions by police harked back to another era of policing — when officers randomly drove up on crowded street corners suspected of being open-air drug markets, leaped from their squad cars and searched everyone, a tactic known as “jump-outs.”
Police say that they disbanded the practice three years ago and that squads such as the gun unit are more targeted in their approach. To the men on Sheriff Road, the “jump-out squads” have merely been rebranded.
They are convinced that because police freed the man with the pellet gun that he was an undercover officer who infiltrated the group with a weapon to provide cover for an illegal raid. D.C. police deny that assertion, but the residents are not swayed.
“A plant,” said Jake Robbins, 27, echoing his friends. “If it had been one of us with the gun, we’d be locked up. . . . I never saw cops so calm after finding a gun. They just let him go, nice and easy.”
A police report says the incident began when a member of the Gun Recovery Unit tried to question people in front of the vehicle with tinted windows.
The video shows the officers talking to a man near the car, then moving to another man standing nearby. An officer searches him and finds the pellet gun. Other officers then question a man sitting in a lawn chair. The police report says he had a bulge under his shirt at the waistband. The man declined to be searched, but police did it anyway, “based on the suspicion that he was concealing a bulge behind his sweatshirt that may be a firearm.”
No gun was found.
Another officer then approached other men in the group. “Can I see your waistband?” the officer asked. “We just found a gun and he’s hanging out with you all.”
The men objected. “Sounds like jump-out tactics,” one said. “I’m not showing you my waistband cause I didn’t do anything.”
A police spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, said part of the reason the group was targeted was because representatives of the barber shop and adjacent Little Jewels Child Development Center have “expressed frustration” with the men. Employees at both establishments told a reporter the young men pose no threat or disrespect; neither would give their name.
Sternbeck said that with tensions running high, “officers used their discretion to not make an arrest” for possession of a pellet gun. He said police confiscated liquid PCP and a bag of marijuana from the group.
Police Chief Peter Newsham told reporters that in the June 25 confrontation, “some members of the community took it upon themselves to provoke the police. The police in my opinion were extremely restrained.”
But the police action has drawn criticism from Anthony Lorenzo Green, a advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area, who wrote to Newsham questioning “what kind of ‘community policing’ does MPD consider this to be?”
D.C. Council member and former mayor Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7) called for the police investigation to be quick. “This is just the kind of situation that breeds mistrust of our police officers,” he wrote in a letter to Newsham.
Jake Robbins recorded video when police returned to the block Monday night. “They came to fight us,” said Markus Johnson, noting that the video shows officers who formed a wall three people thick in front of the shops.
“You came up here,” one man shouted at the officers, calling them instigators. “We ain’t going nowhere.” Another urged an officer to remove his badge and uniform to fight. “We was chilling until you came up here,” another man said.
A few skirmishes broke out. Police chased one man down the street as the crowd shouted encouragement to the runner: “Don’t give up, don’t give up, fool.”
One young man’s T-shirt seemed to sum up the tension. It read: “No easy summer.”