[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 57 (Tuesday, May 6, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2171-H2172]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            INTRODUCTION OF POLICE COORDINATION ACT OF 1997

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Miller of Florida). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 21, 1997,

[[Page H2172]]

the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton] is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today I have introduced a bill that is of 
importance to every Member of this House if they have constituents who 
come to visit this city. It is called the District of Columbia Police 
Coordination Act of 1997.
  What it does is very straightforward. It would make mandatory 
cooperative agreements between the Metropolitan Police Department and 
the Federal agencies so that they would have to come to terms with 
sending agency personnel to patrol areas around their own Federal 
buildings, donating or sharing equipment and supplies, sharing radio 
frequencies, and streamlining the process of arresting suspects. The 
U.S. attorney would be the coordinator.
  This is so straightforward, why is it not happening already? We have 
got thousands of police, we have got 30 police forces in Washington, 
DC, and they all operate as private police forces. No coordination goes 
on. And so the hard-pressed District police, faced with violent crime, 
are duplicating efforts that could be going on downtown.
  My bill seeks to introduce rationality and cost efficiency into a 
totally uncoordinated, very inefficient, and wasteful use of Federal 
police power.
  We send many of our Federal law enforcement officers to the state-of-
the-art facility at Brunswick, GA. Then we come back and capture them 
inside Federal buildings. One of the officers told me that in this day, 
when we are concerned about security, a Federal police officer in a 
Federal building, if he sees a van, a suspicious looking van outside a 
Federal building, does not have the authority to go outside and ask 
that van to move along. We need to empower these police to do police 
work.
  There is already good coordination between the Park Police, which has 
jurisdiction all over the whole city, but there are multiple police 
forces, such as the Government Printing Office police force, the Naval 
Observatory, the Federal Protection Service for the Federal buildings, 
the Library of Congress. The list goes on, and it is very long. Most of 
these officers are unable to make arrests except in the building or in 
the immediate environs of the building. Most do not even patrol the 
block around their Federal agency. Worse, on the few occasions in which 
they do intervene into unlawful activity, many call 911 to get a 
District police officer as if they were a regular citizen. Instead, 
they are people with arrest powers. I am talking about people who carry 
guns and cannot come outdoors to play with the thugs.
  My bill says, hey, you get more money than the D.C. police, you get 
better pensions, you face a whole lot less crime. Come out here where 
the real crime is.
  When the high crime rates went up in the District, there was a lot of 
blame to go around and a lot of it belonged to the District. Always, 
the District gets stinging criticism. Criticism of our own local police 
or death penalty rhetoric is not going to do anything to assist our 
police on the streets today, right now. Federal law enforcement 
officers should not be left underperforming when--by the way, they 
desperately want to perform because they lack the authority to render 
service commensurate with their police power and their arrest 
authority.
  There is ample precedent for my bill. In 1992, this body passed my 
bill that freed the Capitol Police to go beyond the few blocks around 
the Capitol, and so they now patrol the high crime Capitol Hill area. 
This body understood immediately that we should not be training cops at 
the level we do and then failing to get the highest and best use of 
them. This is a period when we are losing policemen as if they were 
fighting wars. The high crime areas will always be patrolled by our own 
District police; but surely in the middle of town, thousands of police 
officers assigned to Federal agencies, who carry guns, who have police 
power, ought to be freed up to use that police power.
  We are requiring greater efficiency from police these days. We are 
not responding simply to the call for more money. The call for greater 
efficiency is paying off. We see it in the large cities where crime 
rates have tumbled down. They can tumble down in this city, too. We are 
doing saturated arrests, and the crime rates have come down remarkably. 
How long can our police keep it up if we do not get help from police 
who are perfectly willing to, indeed, help?
  I appreciate that many of those uniformed police came to stand with 
me this morning in a press conference. I ask the Congress and this 
House to pass my police coordination bill and help me get rid of crime 
in the District of Columbia.

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