A civil rights group filed an injunction Friday seeking to bar the Metropolitan Police Department from stopping residents at checkpoints, calling the tactic unconstitutional and ineffective.
The Partnership For Civil Justice also filed a class-action suit against the District on behalf of four residents of the city’s Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast who were stopped by police earlier this month.
“The city is employing an extraordinarily unconstitutional system that is subjecting residents to suspicionless searches and questioning,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the group. “It’s the kind of scenario you would imagine in a futuristic movie, but not one we could tolerate in our nation’s capital.”
The organization also requested that police expunge information collected from drivers stopped at the checkpoints.
Police set up the checkpoints from June 7 through June 12 after a series of shootings shocked the neighborhood in the 5th Police District, which has endured 14 homicides from the start of April through Thursday.
Police said they turned away 46 of the more than 700 vehicles that tried to pass through checkpoints and arrested one person for driving with alcohol. There were no shootings in the neighborhood while the checkpoints were in place.
A police spokeswoman declined to comment and deferred questions to city attorneys, noting the lawsuit was filed against the District.
D.C. Interim Attorney General Peter J. Nickles said the lawsuit reads like “an essay written to the media.”
He noted that the checkpoint program began only after consultation with the U.S. attorney’s office and lawyers for the police department in an effort to create a “narrowly tailored” response to the Trinidad section crime wave.
“It was an effort to keep people that didn’t belong in Trinidad from driving into Trinidad,” Mr. Nickles said. “That is not unlawful; it is not unconstitutional; and that’s the end of it.”
Mr. Nickles also said the program was not “an effort to arrest people.” He said it was unclear what the lawsuit was trying to stop, since the checkpoints were no longer in effect.
“I don’t think courts generally are engaged in academic exercises,” Mr. Nickles said.
Miss Verheyden-Hilliard countered that the District’s move away from community policing to “military-style roadblocks” was a publicity stunt.
Her group has won settlements from the District before, such as in November 2006 over police handling of the 2001 presidential inauguration. The District agreed to pay $685,000 to cover damages to two people the lawsuit stated were assaulted by plainclothes city police officers.
In March of last year, Partnership For Civil Justice settled a lawsuit against the District over the Sept. 27, 2002, arrests of four people during a protest against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the impending Iraq war.
The city agreed to pay each of the four $50,000 in addition to attorneys’ fees.
“We don’t think that [Police Chief Cathy L.] Lanier and Peter Nickles should be trivializing policing with these sort of photo-op police measures,” she said.
At a hearing before the D.C. Council Monday, some residents said they felt out of touch with the police department in the wake of new policing initiatives that have been criticized as steps toward a police state.
The initiatives include plans to consolidate oversight of the city’s 5,200 closed-circuit cameras, to ask residents whether police may search their homes for illegal guns and the checkpoint program.
Meanwhile, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, a Democrat, on Friday announced rules for the camera consolidation after the council approved legislation this month restricting use of the devices over privacy concerns.
Members mandated that the cameras be monitored under current police department rules until the council approves a new plan from the mayor.
Mr. Fenty’s office said the new emergency rules are based on the current police rules for monitoring cameras and “no less stringent.” They include a requirement that operators be certified.
“What we’re doing wouldn’t be possible without the support of the community,” Chief Lanier said Monday. “Not everybody that works with us and shares information with us is going to speak up in a public meeting. In Trinidad that’s the case because a lot of people are afraid.”
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