Anthony Lorenzo Green, an ANC in Deanwood, speaking at the roundtable on policing earlier this month. (Photo by Patrick Madden)

The ACLU of D.C. and 14 other advocacy organizations have signed onto a letter asking Mayor Muriel Bowser to release body-worn camera footage from officer interactions with residents in the Deanwood neighborhood that caused an uproar last month.

On June 13, cell phone videos show a confrontation between officers and a group of men outside of Nooks Beauty and Barbershop in Deanwood. Officers said they approached the group because of a Volvo with darkly tinted windows parked nearby. The video shows tensions began to escalate when one of the plainclothes officers asked the men outside for their identification, seemingly unprompted. An officer then searched a nearby man and found a gun (officers later determined that it was a pellet gun) and began asking to search other men in the group.

There has been widespread community talk that the man with the pellet gun was an MPD plant, including in a letter circulated by the area’s ANC Commissioner, Anthony Lorenzo Green. Police Chief Peter Newsham has publicly denied that claim to several news organizations.

On June 25, officers returned to the neighborhood and had yet another altercation with residents, where the ACLU’s letter says MPD officers pepper-sprayed residents, “including a small child,” and made several arrests.

These incidents have created an outcry among residents, who have said on social media and at a public roundtable earlier this month that they do not feel safe or comfortable with the police presence in their neighborhood. The incidents have also prompted questioning from the D.C. Council, who have been sharply critical of the officers’ decision to ask for identification from the men and to attempt to search everyone in the group.

The ACLU of D.C. began looking into the incidents back in June, shortly after they happened. Lawyers with the organization argued that officers’ attempted search of the men was illegal.

“What we saw in the video was police assuming because they found a gun on one individual, they thought they could search everyone nearby,” Monica Hopkins, the executive director of the ACLU of D.C. told WAMU last month. That’s not legal, she said.

The organization submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on July 9 for the officers’ body-worn camera footage from both of the Deanwood incidents. MPD denied the FOIA on July 13 on the basis that the records “are part of an ongoing administrative investigation.”

But Bowser has the option to release the video to the public, anyway. According to D.C. law, the mayor can choose to release body-worn camera footage in matters she deems are of “significant public interest.”

Bowser has made this choice before, including in the case of 31-year-old Terrence Sterling, who was killed by police in 2016. At the time, Bowser said the release of the footage was “in the public interest and consistent with the goals” of the city and the body-worn camera program.

Now, the ACLU of D.C. and 14 other organizations, including Black Lives Matter D.C. and the Stop Police Terror Project D.C., are asking her to make the same determination in this case.

“BWC use will not on its own improve police transparency and accountability. When MPD frames the narrative around an issue of great public interest but refuses to release BWC footage to allow the public an opportunity to “gather all of the facts” or assess the validity of the agency’s narrative, it has failed to be transparent,” the letter reads.

The mayor’s office hasn’t responded to comment as of press time.