The Fight To Fix Policing Begins At The City Council
In the weeks leading up to the District of Columbia’s primary election, a powerful interest group repeatedly hammered council candidate Janeese Lewis George with an attack that in the past has proved devastating: She was soft on crime and unsupportive of the D.C. police force.
“They get up every morning and serve their city,” a campaign mailer delivered to homes across Ward 4, D.C.’s northernmost council district, warned over a picture of five D.C. Metro Police Department officers. “If Janeese Lewis George is elected, THEY WON’T.”
On the opposite side, it cited a tweet Lewis George posted in October 2019: “I will absolutely divest from MPD,” it said, leaving off a key part of Lewis George’s platform: that she would “put money into violence interruption programs” instead.
Democrats for Education Reform sent at least 4 mailers about JLG’s calls for police divestment to Ward 4 voters, in an effort to boost Todd. Here’s one that came just before the election, as protests broke out nationwide. pic.twitter.com/XZImwTJe0M
— Travis Waldron (@Travis_Waldron) June 3, 2020
But the timing made the mailer less of an attack than an argument in favor of Lewis George: It arrived in mailboxes as protests over police killings of Black people, including George Floyd in Minneapolis, broke out nationwide and sparked calls for massive overhauls of police departments across the country. Lewis George, who had argued that D.C. should demilitarize its police and pull money from law enforcement budgets to invest in other social services and crime prevention programs, might not have been able to produce a better piece of campaign literature for herself.
Normally, a local council race would have little resonance outside the city or district where it took place. But the mailers and the protests in Washington and nationwide transformed the election into the “first major referendum on policing” in the country since the demonstrations began, said...
