FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2020
Contact: Black Lives Matter DC, press@dcblm.org
BLACK LIVES MATTER DC RAPID RESPONSE TO MPD BODY CAM FOOTAGE RELEASE LIVE PRESS CONFERENCE FRIDAY JULY 31, 2020 AT 6PM
Earlier today, Mayor Muriel Bowser, the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Kevin Donahue announced the release of body-worn camera footage of the police murders of Jeffrey Price, Marqueese Alston, and D’Quan Young. Jeffrey Price (Ward 7) was chased to his death by MPD on May 4, 2018. Marqueese Alston’s (Ward 8) killing came just a month after MPD murdered D’Quan Young (Ward 5) who was shot and killed by MPD one less than a week later May 9, 2018.
In a statement to The Washington Post in 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser declared that under her plan, DC police would release more footage from body cameras than any other major U.S. city. This was a departure from her initial opposition to making such videos public. Initially, Bowser wanted to exempt all body-camera footage from DC open-records law. In the same article, Bowser explained that continued police shootings necessitated the change, saying the tide has tilted in favor of more disclosure. In 2017, Mayor Bowser proclaimed that her plan for the body worn camera program “...is the most progressive in the entire nation — the most transparent of its kind.”
In practice, Bowser consistently refuses to release body-worn camera footage in cases where MPD officers murder someone. This is despite continued requests from the families of Jeffrey Price, Marqueese Alston, and D’Quan Young who have demanded full transparency and the unedited footage in the murder of their loved ones. What they have received is hand picked, heavily narrated clips that intentionally do not show some extremely important details. April Goggans, a Core Organizer with BLM DC says, “It is clear that more footage exists and that all of DC should be in the streets demanding to know why MPD has hand picked these short, edited clips. It feels like more of the same purposefully evasive game Mayor Bowser and Chief Newsham have been playing around transparency and accountability. It also begs the same questions. If MPD has done nothing wrong, why did they take two years to release the footage, edit the footage they did release?”.
While the DC Council recently passed the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Second Emergency Amendment Act of 2020, accepting this edited video as compliance, they further prove that their concern for the families is more distraction and performance created to protect their own.
DC has yet to show Black Lives Matter enough to produce more than performative gestures that obscure the Black experience in DC. For this reason we are calling for all people of good conscience to sign our petition to Defund The Police, and volunteer by attending upcoming events, and donate to help us build a world without police.
Black Lives Matter DC is a member based abolitionist organization centering Black people most at risk for state violence in DC, creating the conditions for Black Liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.
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