District of Columbia Policing Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding, and I rise in strong opposition to the gentleman's bill.

I appreciate my colleague from Louisiana. We have had a chance to serve together on committees. I know he has a strong respect for law enforcement, so I am not saying his heart is in the wrong place, but I am saying this bill is wrong. I say that from personal experience.

He is right, I was never in an active car pursuit, but I was a prosecutor here in Washington, D.C., and for 8 years in Prince George's County, which is the eastern border of Washington, D.C., so I have seen the results of some of these high-speed chases.

The bill that is drafted, that he has proposed, actually takes away a reasonable balance that was drawn by the people here of the District of Columbia, as is their right for a democracy.

Also, one of the things we need to keep in mind, and my colleague addressed this kind of briefly but, frankly, skipped over it, what happens when that chase leads to the death of innocent civilians?

When the gentleman said he had been in 100 car chases, a chill went through my body, I have to say, because I have seen the results, the deadly consequences of some of these car chases. When you have to go talk to that family and tell them why their loved ones died, you don't want to have to say that it was over something minor like a stolen car.

The balance that the city struck was that it should be for an imminent violent offense, high-level felony, something like that that you really understand why they would have engaged in the pursuit. This bill would take that away and expand it open so that you could have high-speed chases taking place with respect to misdemeanors.

This isn't a hypothetical for me. When I was the State's attorney in Prince George's County, we actually had one of these. We had several, but I will just pick one for purposes of time. A police officer saw a stolen motorcycle zip down the beltway and decided to pursue it. Stealing a motorcycle is a misdemeanor and speeding is a misdemeanor, but he decided to pursue it anyway.

Mind you, this is during rush hour, so he had to pursue on the border of the road, and speeds got up to over 100 miles an hour on the beltway in rush hour. Of course, it is hard for a car to catch a motorcycle, especially when it can weave in and out of traffic.

He didn't make the apprehension, but what he did do as he was speeding along on the side of the road at 100-plus miles an hour was come across debris on the road, and he tried to swerve to avoid it. When he did that, the car jumped over the Jersey barrier between the two lanes and took him into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic.

The car jumped over, hit the top of a car coming the opposite direction, and killed two men on their way to a concert. They had nothing to do with any kind of high-speed chase. They didn't have anything to do with any kind of criminal activity. These were people who were good folks, actually just visiting in the area--one was from Buffalo--who died because of a high-speed chase over a minor misdemeanor. That doesn't make any sense. It is not like that only happens in Prince George's County.

Here in Washington, D.C., we had a similar kind of case. It was back in 2016. It led up to a deadly chase on East Capitol and Benning Road. The chases the gentleman was talking about, maybe those were rural areas, but those are high-traffic areas even in the nighttime. Sometimes these pursuits take place during the day.

This led to the death of an innocent man. This was over a stolen car. Think about what you would say to that family when you are explaining to them that their father, brother, or son lost his life over a stolen car.

Then the other part that influences me--again, I represent Prince George's County now--but sometimes when they start high-speed chases in D.C., they go into Prince George's County, Montgomery County, or Northern Virginia, and we lost someone during a high-speed chase on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; another stolen car case.

When we make these decisions about when a chase is permitted or should be permitted or not, we need to keep in mind that there can be deadly consequences from when this happens, and it frequently occurs. It is not like this is unusual. The Washington Post just did a piece about the Park Police. There have been 10 of these instances in recent weeks.

I have a couple last points. One is liability. The Federal Government is going to put this burden on the city.

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Mr. IVEY. When that liability arises from a car chase ending in death that didn't make any sense to a jury, the city could be on the hook for millions of dollars. I guarantee they are not going to step in and have the Federal Government cover that for them. When we think about these things, we need to keep all of those things in mind.

The last point I will make, a variation on the home rule argument. D.C. is not a rural jurisdiction. In fact, its roads aren't even as straightforward as Manhattan. We have got diagonal roads that cut across, we have circles, and we have very dangerous intersections. I wish my colleagues knew how tricky it can be out there. A high-speed chase in the middle of the District of Columbia, even during the middle of the day is almost, by definition, dangerous almost under any circumstances, so you better have a really good reason to engage in a pursuit like that.

That is not the balance that is drawn by this bill. That is not the balance that was drawn by the people of the District of Columbia. It should be the balance, and they should make the call because when the deaths happen, my colleagues won't be anywhere to be found.

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