Amidst President Donald Trump’s controversial deployment of the U.S. National Guard to Washington, D.C., U.S. Senator Katie Britt, R-Ala., is joining several of her Senate Republican colleagues in attempting to repeal local legislation passed by the D.C. City Council aimed at improving transparency in policing and combatting police brutality.
On Thursday, Sen. Britt announced that she would join U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX, and other Republican colleagues in introducing the “Clean D.C. Act,” a bill that would repeal the D.C. City Council’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022. In an official press release, Britt argued that the 2022 law is contributing to a “crime problem” in D.C.
“In 2023, one of my staffers was carjacked and held at gunpoint, just one mile from our nation’s Capitol building. D.C.’s crime rate is higher than the national average and even higher than that of many capital cities in third-world countries. To put it simply, anyone who says D.C. doesn’t have a crime problem isn’t facing the facts,” Britt stated.
“I’m proud to join Senator Cruz and my Republican colleagues in cosponsoring the CLEAN D.C. Act, which builds on President Trump’s historic action to make D.C. beautiful and safe again by reversing the liberal D.C. City Council’s reckless 2022 law that lessens penalties for violent crimes,” she continued.
While Britt touts the new bill as a means of fighting crime in D.C., repealing the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022 would actually eliminate several measures that look to improve transparency between law enforcement and the local community while also reducing instances of police brutality.
Among its provisions, the law prohibits the use of asphyxiating restraints and neck restraints in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin; increases public access to body-worn camera footage; mandates that police inform individuals of their right to deny a consent search; ensures that officers clearly identify themselves when policing protests and other assemblies; establishes a Police Complaints Board to review complaints of police misconduct; and expands both the D.C. Use of Force Review Board and the Police Officers Standards and Training Board.
The law also increases public access to officer disciplinary hearings and records, prevents the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department from hiring individuals who had previously committed serious misconduct at other law enforcement agencies, and establishes limitations on the department’s purchase of military-grade weaponry. Other measures aimed at further combatting racial biases and excessive use of force in policing are also included in the law.
The closest the legislation comes to “lessening penalties for violent crimes”–as Britt alleges–is its repeal of two other statutes, one which had previously made it an additional crime to wear a mask while perpetrating a crime, and a statue which made it illegal for law enforcement to fail to arrest an individual committing a crime in their presence.
Despite Britt stressing in her own personal comments that the “Clean D.C. Act” is focused on reducing crime in the city, her own office presents a different perspective within the very same press release, emphasizing the need to repeal the 2022 law because of its measures aimed at reducing police violence and increasing public transparency, not despite them.
Britt’s office argues that the D.C. law “weakens local law enforcement by banning longstanding police tactics, strips legal protections and due process rights for officers, threatens police officer safety by authorizing public release of records, and imposes restrictions on policing protests and the use of non-lethal crowd control.”
It is also important to note that despite claims made by President Trump, Britt and other Republicans, violent crime in D.C. is actually at a 30-year low and only continues to drop. In fact, violent crime in the nation’s capital is down 26 percent just compared to last year according to the MPDC, with homicides alone dropping by 12 percent.
The same trend is occurring nationally, as violent crime figures have continued to drop across the country since 2023. Overall, crime in the U.S. has decreased dramatically since the 1990’s.
