D.C.’s police chief is denying any wrongdoing within her department following accusations police tried to cover up an incident during which a Homeland Security officer fired into a vehicle during a traffic stop.
The alleged shooting happened Oct. 17 on Benning Road in Northeast. Officers said they attempted to pull over a vehicle for not displaying a front license plate, but the vehicle fled.
Once it was stopped, the Homeland Security officer fired multiple rounds into the vehicle, driven by Phillip Brown, according to his lawyers. Brown was not struck by any of the bullets.
A police report on the encounter doesn’t mention the shooting, an omission that the man’s attorneys point to as evidence of a cover-up attempt.
During a hearing Thursday on another matter before the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, Chief Pamela Smith was asked about the incident, and she squarely denied any wrongdoing by the department. She said she was insulted that anyone would claim D.C. police would try to cover up anything.
Police are investigating the shooting by a Homeland Security Investigations agent, who was with police officers and other federal agents when they stopped the car. Brown was jailed for three days on a charge that he fled from law enforcement, but a judge has dismissed the case.
Brown’s lawyers said the police department tried to cover up the shooting by leaving it out of the police report and refusing to provide them with video from police body cameras.
At a court hearing for Brown’s criminal case, a police officer testified he was instructed not to include the shooting in the police report, according to civil rights attorneys Bernadette Armand and E. Paige White. They said police also failed to disclose the shooting to a prosecutor assigned to the case.
“Whenever we have an officer-involved shooting, there are two reports that we generate case numbers for,” Smith told a group of reporters Thursday outside the hearing room. “One is for the incident that led up to the shooting. And then there’s another report that simply says, ‘Hey, this date and time, an HSI agent was involved in an officer-involved shooting related to,’ and then we typically annotate the case number.”
“Let me say this to all of you,” Smith added. “There’s a transcript with regard to what the officer stated. It will tell you what he said during the court hearing, and I’m not going to answer any more questions about that.”
The gunshots struck Brown’s driver-side window and front passenger seat at chest level, the lawyers said. The officer’s police report says Brown revved his sport utility vehicle’s engine and began driving toward law-enforcement officers before he rear-ended another vehicle.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agent who fired his gun feared for his life “and the lives of others” when he fired “defensive shots” into the vehicle.
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