In the three months Pamela Smith has served as D.C.’s acting police chief, the self-described “pistol packing preacher” has undoubtedly shown that she has style. But does she have the substance to match?
Some councilmembers, attorneys, and advocates are still pondering that particular question, even as Smith stands on the precipice of being confirmed as the next head of the Metropolitan Police Department Tuesday.
The Council will almost certainly vote unanimously to give her the top job, considering lawmakers have historically offered little resistance to chief nominees—former At-Large Councilmember David Grosso is the only official to vote against any of the last four people confirmed as chief. With politicians walking on eggshells to avoid looking soft on crime amid rising violence, there’s little reason to expect that to change now. But, quietly, Wilson Building whisperers admit that Smith is far from a slam-dunk hire for Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Some wonder if Smith has the stomach to take on the District’s newly emboldened police union. Chiefs and the union tend to have a complicated relationship under the best of circumstances, as they’re often sparring over how to discipline officers accused of misconduct. The union’s rightward turn in recent years has made even some moderates hesitant to align with it too closely. Yet Smith’s track record with the U.S. Park Police, and her first few months in the chief’s seat, have made some wonder if she’ll curb the union’s worst impulses.
Those fears might not be so prominent if she had the same experience with MPD as her predecessors. She only spent about a year in the department before earning the promotion, and her many years with the Park Police don’t strike some critics as all that valuable when it comes to leading an agency with very different challenges.
And without a long history in the District to draw on, and the union and the mayor in her ear begging for a tough-on-crime crackdown reminiscent of the 1990s, does Smith have the standing to chart another course? She’s made some gestures toward reform since her nomination, but she’s also been a willing cheerleader for Bowser’s more regressive proposals. Many observers feel they still don’t know where Smith really stands.
“As the leader of MPD, she has to move away from this narrative of there being people who are for police or against police,” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who generally supports Smith with some qualifications. “I just think it’s so out of touch with reality. And as the leader of our law enforcement agency, I think she has to be a leader on that message of pulling people together.”
White and many others around the District’s criminal legal system are looking to Smith’s relationship with the union as a key bellwether on this point. The union has whipped up fears about rising crime in the District (even bringing some of these concerns directly to Republicans in Congress), and its leaders have cheered Smith’s hiring so far. She was, after all, a high-ranking official with the Park Police union early in her career.
“The culture of the place is between and among the rank and file, not management. And the sickness at MPD is that union,” says attorney Pam Keith, who represents several women who have alleged racism and sexism within MPD. “If I were to give advice to Pam Smith, it would be to have a deep conversation with your union. They cost your department good officers and cost our city a lot of money. It’s too much of a culture of boys-will-be-boys over there.”
D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson sounded the alarm on this particular point in an Oct. 20 letter to the Council alerting lawmakers that Smith had so far denied her team’s requests to interview rank-and-file officers after the union “asserted their strongest objections.” Patterson is preparing a long-awaited study of MPD’s staffing levels to determine how many officers the department really needs, and she views the perspectives of run-of-the-mill beat cops as particularly valuable to understanding how they’re actually using their time each shift.
The union, however, argued that this could constitute inappropriate “direct dealing” with its members, rather than union leaders, an assertion that Patterson called “wholly inaccurate in many respects.” She found it disturbing that Smith seemed to agree with this assessment.
“We routinely interview government staff at all levels of an agency including those in collective bargaining units,” Patterson wrote, adding that these issues could only grow as her office begins scrutinizing even more sensitive subjects within MPD, like ties between officers and white supremacist groups. “I am concerned that there may be similar barriers put in our way on this and other studies if MPD’s new leadership team adopts a consistent posture of acting at the direction of a labor organization.”
Smith tried to defuse the situation, particularly after Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker sent a letter of his own a few days later expressing his concerns about Patterson’s comments. Smith assured the auditor that she would meet with her staff to discuss the issue, and offered to make anyone above the rank of sergeant available to Patterson’s team.
Still, she remained adamant that the “department is legally prohibited from interfering with the [union’s] representation and dealing directly with their membership,” she wrote in a response to Parker on Oct. 26, adding that the union had offered to cooperate fully with Patterson. Both the auditor and Parker came away generally satisfied with that resolution.
“I have to take the chief at her word,” Parker says. “At this point, I haven’t had any reason to doubt what she’s saying.”
Council Chair Phil Mendelson says he considered a more forceful intervention, too, but backed off as tensions cooled. He added, though, that he would not hesitate to become more vocal if circumstances change.
“I do think that the auditor should have unfettered access to officers, and that the chief should not be kowtowing to the union on that,” Mendelson says. “I don’t see it as an union issue at all.”
There’s substantially less resolution over another episode Patterson raised in her letter: Smith’s handling of the Bijan Ghaisar case, in which Park Police officers shot and killed an unarmed man on the George Washington Parkway in 2018. When combined with the staffing study snafu, Patterson suggested in her letter that Smith’s “views on police representation and on policies and practices in holding individual sworn members accountable for their actions may need further review.”
As Smith has repeatedly noted when confronted about the Ghaisar case, she wasn’t chief when the incident occurred. But she was still responsible for handling the fallout from the high-profile case, particularly as the department decided the fates of the officers involved in the incident, Alejandro Amaya and Lucas Vinyard.
The officers faced investigations from federal, state, and local prosecutors over their actions—the Ghaisar family ultimately won a $5 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit over the incident—so it was reasonable to expect that Smith would also pursue disciplinary actions against them. They had, after all, repeatedly shot an unarmed man for the grave sin of fleeing a traffic stop late at night. When Smith took over the department in 2021, she did not order any internal investigation into the matter, and let the officers remain on paid leave, drawing paychecks as the various criminal probes played out.
The Department of the Interior, which oversees the Park Police, ultimately initiated disciplinary proceedings against the officers instead and sought to fire them in November 2021. The Washington Post, citing emails from this time period, reported that she “told officers in roll-call meetings that she was not consulted on the move” and that “she supported the union’s opposition” to their firing. (Years later, the case is still pending.)
In a questionnaire submitted to the Council’s judiciary committee on Sept. 22, Smith confirmed that she “told officers that it was not my decision to propose termination and the decision was made by officials at the National Park Service.” She pointedly did not address the question of whether she opposed the firing of these officers, adding only “I was not asked for a comment for The Washington Post article.”
Tom Jackman, the author of that particular article and many others chronicling the Ghaisar case, says that’s not true, noting that the article itself says “Smith did not respond to an email Friday seeking comment.” “Also worth noting: She never responded to anyone’s emails here, or phone calls,” Jackman wrote in an email. “She has spoken to our DC police reporter exactly once.”
For what it’s worth, Parker says he was heartened by Smith’s commitment in her letter that she will “unequivocally support a fair [disciplinary] process, which requires that our members be heard and that officers engaged in substantiated misconduct are held appropriately accountable.” But it’s one thing to make that commitment in the abstract and another to put it to the test.
And does Smith have the necessary standing within MPD to confront its union? A department veteran like Cathy Lanier was, famously, not particularly shy about doing so. It’s an open question whether Smith has the same credibility after spending a little more than 14 months in the department before ascending to acting chief.
“[There should be] a willingness to view the job not as popularity contest, with the union or anyone else, but to say and do the right things, no matter whose ox gets gored,” says Michael Bromwich, an attorney who has led a series of reviews into D.C. policing practices over the past two decades.
Bromwich admits to feeling “a little puzzled” at Bowser’s selection of Smith, in general, suggesting it was “an odd choice to take someone without substantial big city experience.” Smith has faced similar questions from some quarters since her nomination, particularly those agitating for more of a tough-on-crime approach—Ward 8 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Robbie Woodland memorably remarked at Smith’s confirmation hearing that Bowser “chose a Park Ranger, when we need a Marine general at war.”
Smith and her supporters have argued that she has more than 25 years of law enforcement experience to lean on, and that her roles with the Park Police have involved not only the policing of federal areas but also the management of the sort of large public demonstrations MPD has to deal with every day. (She noted in her testimony to the Council that her “experience in New York on 9/11 and its aftermath” had many parallels to MPD’s response to the January 6 riots, too.)
But Smith has largely done this work while ensconced in the federal bureaucracy, removed from the realities of the District (and its politics). Look no further than her introductory press conference snafu, when she declared that she understood the troubles of people in Ward 8 because she lives there, declining to mention that she rents an apartment in Navy Yard, not one of the east of the river communities coping with rising violence.
“I’m surprised that after only a year and half at MPD, she’s been deemed to be the best that we can do in a major metropolitan city that is undergoing a surge in crime,” Bromwich says. “Enforcing violations in national parks is not the same as carjacking and drug distribution networks and violent crime.”
Smith’s limited time within MPD has left others feeling a little cold.
She was initially hired as the department’s chief equity officer and she spent the bulk of her time at MPD in that role (though she was promoted to an assistant chief role overseeing the homeland security bureau in April, just three months before her elevation as acting chief). Keith doesn’t see that role as a particularly meaningful one, considering she believes it was mainly an effort by the department to save a little face after 10 Black female officers worked with Keith to sue the department for race and sex discrimination in September 2021.
“There was no planning of that [job] before we filed suit,” Keith says. “It’s great that she has a shiny new job, but my clients don’t.”
Keith gives MPD, and Smith by extension, credit for making some improvements with its equity initiatives in recent years. But she can’t understand why Smith, widely touted by Bowser as the first Black woman nominated to lead the department, never took meaningful action to address the cultural issues her clients raised in their lawsuit or worked directly to see that case resolved. It remains pending in federal court.
“What happened to these girls still happened,” Keith says. “That’s the difference between doing a better thing and doing the right thing.”
Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George is hopeful that Smith will institute broader changes the longer she’s in office. She says Smith addressed these concerns directly in a recent meeting, and the acting chief assured her that she “wants MPD to be a place where Black women can come and do good work and feel respected.”
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable moving forward without her saying that,” Lewis George says. “And so I’m looking forward to her understanding this as a Black woman herself, what it’s like [in the department] and how we can improve.”
Perhaps there is something to be said for an outsider’s willingness to challenge the department’s entrenched problems. Patrice Sulton, a prominent reformer and executive director of the DC Justice Lab, argues that the next chief need not be an MPD veteran “if they know how to build a team” and listen to an array of opinions about the department’s future.
“It matters a lot how you view the role of people around you, and how you put together their expertise and how you value expertise and how you value data and how you value community input,” Sulton says. “And those are the things that I keep looking for and I’m kind of coming up with question marks. Not always red flags, but certainly question marks.”
The problem, as Sulton sees it, is that Smith has so far largely been echoing the most reactionary voices on these issues, starting with Bowser. “If you don’t have a really clear identity up front, then the only option is for you to pick someone to listen to,” Sulton says. “And there’s not a great constellation of folks around right now for her to take her cues from in the public safety space in the executive’s offices.”
For instance, Smith has acknowledged in her submissions to Council and some of her public testimony that the department has deep-seated cultural problems that are hampering its ability to recruit more officers (and she has pledged to address some of the issues raised in a recent survey of MPD’s members), rather than relying solely on the rhetoric favored by Bowser and the union that the Council’s police reforms are driving cops out of the department. Still, it was hard not to notice Smith front and center at the press conference announcing Bowser’s “ACT Now” legislation, which would loosen the city’s ban on police chokeholds among other changes. (Smith even performed a demonstration of the sort of chokehold that she believes has unnecessarily landed officers in hot water, though she declined to repeat that move on camera.)
“She has to move away from what has been this political narrative that [officers are leaving] as a result of the Council,” White says. “That’s just not accurate. That’s not what officers are saying … And we’ve got to address the real issues that officers say are why they’re leaving.”
Lewis George allows that anyone who “serves at the pleasure of the mayor” is going to push her talking points to a certain degree. But she also believes Smith has the opportunity to change the conversation and “build a good relationship with the legislative branch” and say “we need less pointing fingers and false narratives and more strategic work together to solve these problems.”
And all of the councilmembers to speak with City Paper say they have been encouraged by Smith’s commitment to more community policing, and her pledges to embrace data-driven approaches to drive down crime. Smith has repeatedly said she hopes to better align police deployments with hot spots for violence, a solution favored by some reformers. They are hopeful that she intends to pursue these avenues to drive down crime, but Smith’s rhetoric often tells another story.
She has frequently chided parents to hold their kids more “accountable” for their actions, and vocally supported legislative pushes for more warrantless searches. To Sulton, these sound like the same old debunked ideas from decades past, rather than anything that will actually make the city safer, even as she discusses more progressive solutions in more low-key settings. What, she wonders, does Smith really believe in?
“It should be mentioned in every public statement she makes: You are not going to deter someone from wanting to feed their kids, I don’t care how much jail time you put on it,” Sulton says. “I don’t care how stiff the penalties are, I don’t care how aggressive the policing tactics are, you have a third of the city who cannot feed their kids. That has to be part of the conversation … I don’t know that it is lost on her. But it matters what you say out loud.”
Mitch Ryals contributed reporting. This story has been updated.