A federal agent fired shots at an unarmed Black man during a recent traffic stop while patrolling the nation's capital for President Donald Trump's law-enforcement surge. But a police report on the encounter doesn't mention the shooting, an omission that the man's attorneys point to as evidence of a cover-up attempt.
The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating the shooting by a Homeland Security Investigations agent, who was with police officers and other federal agents when they stopped a car driven by Phillip M. Brown on Oct. 17.
Brown, 33, of Hyattsville, Maryland, wasn't injured in the shooting. He was jailed for three days on a charge that he fled from law enforcement, but a judge has already dismissed the case.
Brown's lawyers claim the police department tried to cover up the shooting by leaving it out of the police report and refusing to provide them with video from police body cameras. At a court hearing for Brown's criminal case, a police officer testified that he was instructed not to include the shooting in the police report, according to civil rights attorneys Bernadette Armand and E. Paige White. They said police also failed to disclose the shooting to a prosecutor assigned to the case.
The judge who dismissed the case against Brown ruled that there was insufficient evidence that he was fleeing, according to Brown’s attorneys. The gunshots struck Brown’s driver-side window and front passenger seat at chest level, the lawyers said.
“We are lucky that our client is alive. He could very well be dead,” White said.
The officer's police report says Brown revved his sport utility vehicle's engine and began driving toward law-enforcement officers before he rear-ended another vehicle. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson says the agent who fired his gun feared for his life “and the lives of others” when he fired “defensive shots” into the vehicle.
“This incident is not isolated and reflects a growing and dangerous trend of vehicles being used as weapons against DHS law enforcement,” the DHS spokesperson said in a statement. “Our officers are facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them including vehicle rammings, terrorist attacks, and even bounties for their murders. The violence must end.”
Armand said it is “outrageous” for DHS to claim that the shooting was justified when there is no mention of the shooting in the police report.
“Of course they're going to say it was justified. What are they going to say? ‘We shot at an unarmed Black man in his car in a routine traffic stop for nothing?’ They're not going to say that. They're going to say whatever they have to say to justify their actions,” Armand said.
A police report that doesn’t mention the shooting was filed in D.C. Superior Court for Brown’s criminal case. Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Tom Lynch provided The Associated Press with a copy of a separate report for the internal affairs division’s parallel investigation of the shooting.
“We are the agency investigating the officer-involved shooting, and we have been continuously since Oct. 17th," Lynch said. He declined to comment on the officer's testimony about the omission of the shooting from the report on Brown's arrest.
In August, Trump, a Republican, issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington. For nearly three months, the White House has deployed hundreds of federal agents and over 2,000 National Guard members to help police patrol the city's neighborhoods.
Agents from the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the Diplomatic Security Service and the U.S. Marshals Service also were patrolling with two MPD officers and the HSI agent who shot at Brown, according to the police report. They stopped Brown for having heavily tinted windows and no front plate on his sport utility vehicle, the report says.
Brown's attorneys say his traffic stop demonstrates the risky nature of patrols by federal agents who aren't adequately trained for police work.
“It's not OK to have agents and officers on the streets who are engaged in shooting at unarmed people and then covering it up after the fact,” Armand said. “There's no trust there. There's no accountability there. And there's no credibility there.”
A federal magistrate judge in D.C. Superior Court ordered Brown’s release on Oct. 21. He was traumatized by his arrest and experiences in jail, his lawyers said. They're weighing a possible lawsuit over his arrest.
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