A judge ruled on Thursday that D.C. police have to begin recording stop and frisk data in accordance with a 2016 transparency law—one that the agency has openly admitted it does not follow.

The Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (or NEAR) Act is a local crime bill with a variety of provisions, one of which required the Metropolitan Police Department to begin recording detailed information about each person stopped by an officer, including why the individual was stopped, whether any criminal activity was discovered, and the race of the person.

MPD already collects some information from its stops, but not with the level of detail required by the NEAR Act (it has complied with most other aspects of the law). Three years after the law passed, the department still does not collect the data in compliance with the law. D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham says the department will make necessary software upgrades next month.

It has been a long time coming. The D.C. Council allocated $150,000 in 2016 for the department to make necessary updates and changes to its data recording software to comply with the law. Two years later, it still had not spent any of that money, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of D.C. and other community groups.

The ACLU has submitted several Freedom of Information Act requests to MPD for data the NEAR Act specifies officers must collect, including the race of people stopped and frisked by officers. In response to the first one, in 2017, MPD responded that “although the NEAR Act became law, it ha[d] not been implemented as of the date of the search.” Earlier this year, in response to a FOIA requesting information about the race or ethnicity of people stopped in a six month period, the department offered up tens of thousands of hours of body worn camera video footage, explaining that this was the only way the department was collecting race and ethnicity data, according to an ACLU press release.

“Even if we had the capacity to review 31,000 body-worn camera videos, and even if every traffic stop is just five minutes, that’s more than 2,600 hours of footage to get information that could have easily been indicated with a checkbox on a form,” ACLU D.C. legal co-director Scott Michelman said in the release. An estimate for MPD to review and produce just over 1,000 of these videos came to $310,362, according to court filings.

The body worn camera footage was meant as an interim solution while the department made software updates that would allow it to comply with the law, according to court documents.

In May 2018, the ACLU, together with Black Lives Matter D.C. and the Stop Police Terror Project, filed a lawsuit against MPD. The judge ruled in favor of the community groups on Thursday, issuing an injunction and ordering the department to begin collecting information mandated by the NEAR Act within 28 days.

“Having to pay huge sums to receive the videos on all stops, and then to spend countless hours viewing the videos and recording the pertinent information, puts this data, such as it is, effectively out of reach of the community and of organizations like the plaintiffs,” Judge John Campbell wrote in the opinion.

The department must use a simple one page form drafted by the ACLU, which contains boxes for officers to check off indicating the race or ethnicity of the person stopped. MPD has previously objected to the use of such a document, arguing that it would add on to the already considerable amount of paperwork their officers have to do during stops.

Campbell also said that he had been reluctant to issue the injunction, but felt that the department had left him with no choice. “Frankly, the Court has delayed making a final decision in the hope that the defendants, having seen the writing on the wall, as it were, during last Fall’s hearings, would modify their interim solution in order to comply fully with the Act in the near term,” Campbell wrote. “It appears, however, that this hope was not well-founded, and that judicial action is now both warranted and necessary.”

But MPD, for its part, has said that it believes the timing of this ruling is strange, given that it will imminently have the software necessary to come into full compliance with the law.

“We’re a little perplexed because we intend to be in full compliance with the data collection in the month of July,” Newsham said at a press conference on Friday.

The D.C. Attorney General’s office, which represented MPD in the case, told DCist in a statement that its lawyers are “taking a close look at the court’s ruling and considering all of our options.”