A decade ago at the 9:30 Club, security
didn’t just mean keeping order during
rowdy
rock shows. It meant keeping employees safe during the day. When
the “new” 9:30 Club opened its doors at 815 V St. NW in 1996
(the original at 930 F St. NW opened in 1980), bar manager
Jean Homza says the surrounding neighborhood resembled “an
industrial park.” So the club hired police to patrol the area.
They even kept watch over employees’ parked cars.
The 9:30 Club loved its police detail so
much that when Charles Ramsey, the police chief at the
time, said clubs could no longer directly hire officers to
patrol their premises, 9:30 decided it would rather give up
being a club than give up its cops.
After a year with no cops at all, 9:30
changed its liquor license. “We actively pursued a change in
license so we could hire our own officers,” Homza testified at a
hearing of the Committee on Public Works and the Environment
April 18.
In 2005, 9:30 switched from a nightclub
license, defining it as “a place serving both alcoholic
beverages and food, which may provide music and dancing” to a
multipurpose license, which includes venues like the Warner
Theatre and the National Theatre. It’s also the license held by
the Washington Convention Center and the National Press Club.
Keeping its cops wasn’t the only reason 9:30 changed its
license, Homza says, but it was an important one.
According to those involved in the
debate at the time, Ramsey halted the practice of liquor
licensees directly hiring overtime officers because he feared
the cops might be too friendly with club owners or customers.
According to Ward 1 councilmember Jim Graham, Ramsey
worried things would “get too cozy, too much of a socializing
opportunity.” Ramsey also prohibited police officers from
working inside ABC establishments.
Now, “reimbursable detail” officers are
dispatched to patrol the public space outside certain bustling
nightlife zones. The officers stationed outside of Love
nightclub in Northeast and on 18th Street between Kalorama
Street and Columbia Road in Adams Morgan, among other areas, are
part of these reimbursable details.
Under the current system, club and bar
owners, either individually or in groups, pay extra for overtime
officers to keep the peace outside their establishments. Because
licensees are barred from paying officers directly, they make
their checks payable to D.C. Treasury. The typical rate for
reimbursable detail officers is $55.71 an hour, which includes
“indirect” costs for radios and the like, Assistant Chief
Brian Jordan testified at the April 18 hearing. MPD then
draws from the D.C. Treasury fund to compensate a revolving
cadre of officers who work outside the bars and clubs according
to their individual overtime pay rates. Unless they’re
responding to a specific incident inside the club, reimbursable
detail officers have to stay outside.
In Adams Morgan, the number of officers
working the reimbursable detail changes according to the season
but usually ranges from about two to four on Friday and Saturday
nights, says Anne-Marie Bairstow, executive director of
the Adams Morgan Business Improvement District. The BID pays for
overtime officers to work on the 18th Street strip. At Love,
between five and 30 officers can be employed on a given night,
depending on the event scheduled, Barnes testified.
Reimbursable details get mixed reviews.
“It definitely helps because it allows the regular [Police
Service Area] officers to deal with other issues they need to
attend to,” says Officer Andrew Zabavsky. “It’s better
not to tie officers up from regular patrol to deal with issues
that are germane to a particular club,” Commander Robert
Contee says. And “they have made a solid difference” in
making club zones more secure, says Graham.
But reimbursable details have come
under scrutiny in recent months. When Taleshia Ford was
killed by a stray bullet inside Smarta/Broadway at 1919 9th
Street NW on Jan. 20, the two reimbursable detail officers who
were hired by 9th Street businesses to patrol the block were
processing an arrest elsewhere. Gregory J. Lattimer,
attorney for Smart Aziken, the club’s owner, has said the
shooting never would have happened if the officers had been
posted on the block as they were supposed to be.
Graham calls Lattimer’s claim a “smoke
screen.” After all, the gunman was inside the club when the
fatal shot was fired. But he does advocate tweaking the way
reimbursable details work. His bill, The Taleshia Ford Memorial
Amendment Act of 2007, would make it possible for club owners to
contract with individual officers once again, which he says
would be less expensive for club owners and would improve
security. “What’s at stake here...is to have a strong enough
police presence to prevent crime from happening,” said Graham,
who is chair of the public works committee, at the April 18
hearing. The bill was introduced in draft form for discussion at
the hearing. A vote on the bill has not yet been scheduled.
Marc Barnes, owner of Love,
favors hiring individual officers to work club zones. “We need
to hire those officers,” he said at the hearing. “People don’t
recognize security personnel the way they do a police officer.”
And consistency boosts security, Barnes says in an interview. At
Republic Gardens, the U Street nightclub he once owned, the same
officers were used to monitor the entrance night after night.
“They would be in the front, and they would see the problem
people,” he says. If someone who had been banned from the club
tried to sneak in, “the cops outside would know about it.”
Now, Barnes says, things are different.
The officers stationed outside Love don’t know the crowd. Plus,
the price is high, he says. Barnes says he pays more than
$240,000 a year in reimbursable detail fees. “We just don’t want
to be gouged,” he says. At the hearing, Graham suggested MPD
subsidize reimbursable details so that clubs wouldn’t have to
pay as much. “These zones are contributing so mightily to the
[revenue] of the city. I think this is such a minimal
expenditure.”
But police chief Cathy Lanier
isn’t convinced it’s time to let clubs contract directly with
officers. In a statement read aloud by Jordan at the hearing,
Lanier testified, “In October 1998, members of this Council led
the Special Committee on Police Misconduct & Personnel
Management...in studying the issue of officers working off-duty
for ABC licensed establishments. The Special Committee found
that it is a conflict of interest for officers to work for ABC
establishments.”
That committee report cites “one tragic
case study” in particular. In February 1997, Officer Brian
Gibson was murdered by an Ibex club patron while sitting in
a police cruiser outside the establishment. The patron had “just
been ejected by a police officer who was working there
off-duty,” the report says. Following the report, Lanier wrote,
Council passed legislation prohibiting off-duty officers from
working directly for bars and clubs. “I have not seen any
evidence that this law is less relevant today,” she wrote in her
testimony.
Alcohol board chair Charles Burger
also expressed concerns about Graham’s proposal. “Specifically,
the Board is concerned that having an MPD officer directly rely
upon a licensee for income will hamper the MPD officer’s ability
or willingness to proactively take enforcement action against
the licensee, which the board has seen occur on a limited scale
with ‘details,’ ” Burger testified. If the bill is passed and
the proposed changes to reimbursable details go through, Burger
continued, “It is imperative that the Council takes steps to
ensure that the conflicts of interest that previously existed
when off-duty officers worked directly for ABC establishments do
not reoccur.”
Barnes says that’s fine by him. He
recognizes that “an officer is not necessarily going to go
against me if I’m the one paying his salary. But, he says,
impropriety and corruption can be avoided through oversight.
“It’s just like ABRA. You have somebody to monitor what we
do....There are some bad officers, and there are some bad
nightclub owners. But there are a lot of good officers and a lot
of good nightclub owners....Everybody gets a few bad apples, but
it’s what you do with those bad apples. Do you throw them away,
or do you serve them to the public?”
Graham said he was willing to place his
trust in the police and club owners. “I’d rather believe most
police are ethical,” he said at the hearing.
