Two D.C. police officers are facing a lawsuit for allegedly conducting an illegal stop-and-frisk of a man in Columbia Heights in 2019.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for D.C. earlier this month, the suit alleges that officers Noah Duckett and Byron Alacron followed Rudy Flores, harassed him with homophobic language, and illegally stopped and searched him based on the officers’ unjustified suspicion that Flores was involved in gang activity. The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, the group representing Flores, described the incident as one of the “devastating” consequences of the Metropolitan Police Department’s opaque gang database, which contains majority Black and Latino residents.

“The police attempted to justify the stop-and-frisk by alleging Mr. Flores was hanging out with known gang members without providing any evidence to support the allegations. This stop was part of a pattern of unjustified stops-and-frisks of Black and Hispanic/Latinx people in the District by the Metropolitan Police Department,” reads a statement on the suit from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.

D.C. Police did not immedately return DCist/WAMU’s request for comment. A spokesperson for D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine’s office declined to comment, as the case is pending litigation.

According to the lawsuit, in May 2019, Flores was hanging out in a group of friends, exiting the back of an alleyway in Columbia Heights when a group of officers arrived and told the group to disperse. When Flores began walking away, a police car followed him, and Alacron began following him on foot, the lawsuit says. Duckett, the officer driving the vehicle, allegedly began taunting Flores with homophobic remarks as they followed him, before eventually approaching Flores, pinning to him to a fence, and handcuffing him. According to the lawsuit, Dockett told Flores that he was stopped because he was in “the vicinity of other individuals they thought to be gang members.”

Duckett then continued to conduct an illegal search of Flores, according to suit, inspecting his body for tattoos and searching his pockets. The detainment went on for nearly ten minutes before Flores was released, the suit says. He was not charged with any crimes tied to that evening.

“Police driving down the street should not make you afraid for your life, but that’s how I felt when these officers chased me down. I hope that this lawsuit helps stop other people from experiencing what I have,” Flores said in a statement provided by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.

The suit alleges that Duckett’s actions violated the Fourth Amendment, and accuses Alacron of failing to intervene as Duckett violated MPD’s own orders by stopping Flores without reasonable suspicion and conducting a search of his body and pockets without receiving consent.

“As a direct and proximate result of Defendant Duckett’s actions in searching him, Mr. Flores suffered humiliation, deprivation of his liberty, and was otherwise damaged and injured,” reads the suit, which is seeking compensatory damages for Flores.

The lawsuit follows years of scrutiny over the city’s stop-and-frisk policy, which predominantly targets Black residents, and recent reporting on the nebulous ways the department tracks suspected gang activity.

Passed by the D.C. Council in 2016, the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Act requires MPD to collect an extensive record of all police stops, including the reason and duration, and whether a search was conducted. It took a three-year-long legal battle before the department complied with the law, releasing the first round of public stop data in Sept. 2019. It took another lawsuit from the D.C. ACLU before MPD released 2020’s data, which found that 75% of stops were of Black residents. (The city hasn’t released a comprehensive report on 2021’s data yet, although a log of stop-and-frisk incidents from January to June 2021 is publicly available on MPD’s website.)

In June 2021, the Intercept reported on leaked emails from MPD (part of a ransomware attack on the department), which revealed how officers use ill-defined criteria when adding individuals suspected of gang activity to the city’s gang database. Additional documents reviewed by the Intercept revealed that the database has drastically expanded since it began in 2009, containing more than 3,700 names as of July 2021, and adding hundreds of juveniles – some as young as 10. Earlier this month, Ward 6 Councilmember and Chair of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee Charles Allen wrote a letter to D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee, asking a slew of questions about how the database works and how individuals are added.

According to the Washington Lawyers’ Committee, 99% of the individuals on the list are Black or Latino residents

“Officers Duckett’s & Alarcon’s deplorable treatment of Mr. Flores stands alone as a dangerous infringement on civil rights,” reads a statement from Carlos Andino of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “However, when you review the District’s practice of unlawful and racially biased stop-and-frisk procedures that overwhelmingly target Black and Brown men, a very clear pattern is seen. The District’s ongoing racial discrimination is only exacerbated through the use of gang databases, which do not require any form of due process before a resident is marked.”