Lorenzo Green is neighborhood commissioner for the Deanwood neighborhood where the police searches outside the barbershop took place. (Photo by Patrick Madden / WAMU)

Lorenzo Green is neighborhood commissioner for the Deanwood neighborhood where the police searches outside the barbershop took place. (Photo by Patrick Madden / WAMU)

By WAMU’s Patrick Madden

Police in D.C. are denying accusations they planted a man with a gun in order to search a group of young black men hanging outside a barbershop in Northeast Washington.

The incident outside Nook’s Barbershop in Deanwood—which was captured by cellphone video—is being investigated by the ACLU of the District of Columbia over concerns that police illegally searched the men for weapons.

The videos posted to social media show plainclothes officers attempting to conduct a search of a man. The person puts his arms up and the officer pulls out a gun from the man’s pants.

Police then turn their attention to the rest of the group. They tell the group they have probable cause to search everyone else for weapons.

The men get angry. They tell the officers they’ve done nothing wrong or suspicious—and that they had no idea who the person was who had the gun.

Lorenzo Green, a local neighborhood commissioner for the Deanwood neighborhood, says there’s widespread belief in the neighborhood that the man found with the weapon—which police later said was a BB gun—was planted there by police.

“[The police] chose to use this as an opportunity to shake down everyone on this block and immediately to violate their constitutional rights by jacking everyone up against the wall,” said Green at a press conference Monday outside the barbershop.

Green says the man caught with the gun was not known to anyone in the group, and left while the rest of the men were searched.

“One thing I do not understand is how the individual that they pointed out as having a weapon in this community was allowed to quietly walk away,” said Green.

Green says he wants the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. Council to investigate what happened.

MPD spokesman Dustin Sternbeck says the man caught with a gun was not an undercover officer, and adds that much of the information being spread on social media is “inaccurate.”

Police are reviewing body camera footage of the event, but that video has not been released to the public.

The controversy follows an effort by the Metropolitan Police Department to get more illegal firearms off the street in response to a surge in gun violence.

Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU in D.C., says there’s been a “25 percent” increase in police operating in Wards 7 and 8, which has led to more police encounters with members of the community in neighborhoods like Deanwood.

“And what we saw in the video was police assuming because they found a gun on one individual, they thought could search everyone nearby,” she said.

That’s not legal, Hopkins says.

Hopkins says the ACLU is interviewing witnesses from the incident.

This story was originally published on WAMU.

Filed Under: deanwood, mpd, stop and frisk,