Protecting Our Nation's Capital Emergency Act

HR 2096/S ???

Author

Dusty Wilson
June 10, 2025

What is this bill & what makes it fascist?

I have to kick this article off with a quick statement that this bill threw me completely out of my depth. I have no background in collective bargaining, let alone in regards to cop unions or disciplinary proceedings. It also doesn’t help that the details of this bill don’t seem to match up at all with the reality of basic District of Columbia law. I’m going to give this bill my best shot, but please, please, please, season with the biggest grains of salt you can find.

To start, we have section 2(a), which would require the city to discipline police via collective bargaining with the Fraternal Order of Police. Specifically the law would do this by striking a subsection from the District of Columbia Government Comprehensive Merit Personnel Act of 1978 that says “all matters pertaining to the discipline of sworn law enforcement personnel shall be retained by management and not be negotiable through bargaining, including substantive or impacts-and-effects bargaining.” Management, in this case, would be the city of DC.

One of the best sources I’ve been able to find as to why this is such a cataclysmicly bad idea comes from an essay published by the Duke Law Journal entitled Police Union Contracts. Law professor Stephen Rushin goes into great detail on all details of such contacts, but in regards to this bill, I’d recommend reading Chapter IV. How Many Police Union Contracts Limit Accountability (which begins on page 32 of the downloadable pdf). Rushin notes that in 2017, the MPD union had negotiated that officers under investigation would have access to all evidence against them before they were interviewed, that the officer’s disciplinary history would be limited in deciding punishment, that the length of the investigation would have a maximum limit & statute of limitations, that civilian-oversight would be limited, and that the offending officer would have access to arbitration if disciplinary measures were enacted. Such lax standards might explain why the DC Police Oversight Board found in 2020 that 60% of complaints of police misconduct resulted in “mild punishments.” And this was all without the union forcing the city to the table over any and all disciplinary measures.

Next is Sec 2(b), which would require the city to restore a “…statute of limitations for claims against members or civilian employees of [the] Metropolitan Police Department.” In order to do this, the bill calls for repealing Subtitle M from the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022.

So, bit of a maze here, but Subtitle M repeals and edits parts of Section 502 from the Omnibus Public Safety Agency Reform Amendment Act of 2004. Rep. Garbarino’s bill calls for repealing the repeal of Sec 502(a). The original text of 502(a) seems to say that, at minimum, the city has to wait 90 work days after the date of the officer’s offense before doling out a punishment.

And this is where I think my biggest confusion came from. When I read the bit about statute of limitations, I assumed it meant the amount of time you could sue or charge someone for a crime. In regards to Section 502, the SoL is entirely referring to that 90 day period the city would need to wait to begin the punishment.

Subtitle M requires the MPD to publish online “a schedule of adverse action hearings for cases in which the proposed discipline is termination.” This bill would end that requirement.

Putting these two things together and you have a bill that succinctly makes it harder and take longer to punish offending cops, which is pretty ideal if you want cops to feel like they won’t ever have consequences for their actions.

Which Dems voted for it?

Did it pass?

  • Passed the House on 6/10/25 by a vote of 235-178-1