On Monday, September 17th, Councilmember Tommy Wells called again for a reform of the burdensome requirements on Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers to personally take booking information on an arrested individual to court at 7:30 a.m. the morning after an arrest takes place – a practice commonly known as “papering.” Councilmember Phil Mendelson, chair of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, held a public hearing on the “Sense of the Council to Reform Police Court-Papering Requirements Resolution of 2007” introduced by Councilmembers Wells and Mendelson earlier this year.

“Our challenge is to do something different, not just do what we do today a little bit better,” stated Councilmember Wells after hearing several MPD officers testify about the demand the papering process puts on their time. Wells added, “Too often, I hear stories of officers forced to sleep in their car when their shift ends but before they are required to go back on duty, on overtime pay, for the 7:30 a.m. papering call at court.”

The current papering process is required by the MPD, the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and District of Columbia Superior Court and takes officers off the streets, creates significant overtime costs to MPD, and puts an undue administrative burden on MPD officers - creating a system that hinders an officer's ability to make arrests.

In an earlier letter to Council on the subject, MPD Chief Cathy Lanier reported that for the week of January 24 through January 31, 2007, MPD reported that it paid 1,616 overtime hours dedicated for officers to comply with papering requirements for lock-up cases, approximately $90,000. Over the course of a year, the papering process is costing the District nearly $5.0 million in overtime pay – an amount that could pay for at least 52 additional officers a year.

Officers also testified that the papering burden leads to low morale, hurts officer retention in the force, and occasionally contributes to whether a criminal is arrested late at night when an officer knows they will be required to stay on the job after their shift ends for several hours the following day when the courts open.

“The time of day should never be a factor in whether an arrest is made. No one has taken responsibility for solving this chronic problem and passing the buck has hit our front line officers the hardest,” commented Mr. Wells. He concluded, “Our police retention rate takes a hit with every overtime hour paid due to papering.”

This Sense of the Council Resolution calls on MPD, the US Attorneys Office and the District of Columbia Superior Court to work together to develop a streamlined, less burdensome, and less costly court-papering process, benchmarked against neighboring and similar jurisdictions, to keep MPD officers in the field to protect and serve the residents of the District of Columbia.