Interim Attorney General, Others Consulted on Plan

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's demand for a bold solution to a burst of violence in Northeast Washington led to the creation of the neighborhood checkpoint program that now is drawing criticism from many residents, D.C. Council members and civil liberties groups.

New details have emerged through interviews and documents about the evolution of the plan, revealing that Fenty did not look only within the police department for help. Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles, the mayor's point man on many issues, took much of the lead in designing the strategy that had police screening motorists coming into the Trinidad area.

District officials said the checkpoint in the 1400 block of Montello Avenue was a success, noting that no shootings took place in the six days it was in operation. Critics said it alienated and inconvenienced the law-abiding community for marginal benefit.

Checkpoints "engender community hostility and create a bad rapport with the neighbors," said council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who is holding a hearing tomorrow on the initiative.

The strategy had its roots in a meeting called by Fenty (D) about two months ago. The mayor summoned Nickles, Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and other top justice officials after numerous shootings in April, including nine in Northeast neighborhoods west of the Anacostia River.

At the end of the brainstorming session, Fenty told Nickles and Lanier to come up with a plan, officials said. The mayor, Nickles said, wanted something big, a strategy that went beyond putting more officers on the streets. He wanted something more dramatic than the tactics being used by Lanier, his hand-picked chief.

"He wanted us to come up with something that would be effective, not violate civil liberties and that we could implement quickly," Nickles recalled in an interview.

The plan is reminiscent of tactics employed by the D.C. police in the 1980s, when crack cocaine led to a much bigger surge in killings and other violence. Efforts then included Operation Clean Sweep, a massive police crackdown that allowed officers to set up roadblocks, confiscate cars and flood drug corridors with undercover narcotics officers. It lasted for two years and yielded more than 50,000 arrests. But the D.C. Court of Appeals later found it to be unconstitutional -- in a case that involved a roadblock on Montello Avenue.

Nickles said he reviewed case law and was inspired by another ruling: a federal appellate court opinion that upheld the use of a neighborhood checkpoint in the Bronx during the 1990s. New York police set up the checkpoint in an area that was riddled by drive-by shootings, the same kind of violence afflicting Northeast.

"It was: How can we keep people out of a neighborhood who don't belong?" Nickles said.

He said he and Lanier decided that a program that forced people to pass through a military-style checkpoint might work. For her part, Lanier has noted that police had used checkpoints in recent years to secure parts of downtown during meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But unlike in Trinidad, those barriers kept protesters, not gunmen, from causing trouble and did not curtail movement in a residential neighborhood.

Last month, Nickles, Lanier and other officials had a follow-up meeting and decided to move ahead with the "Neighborhood Safety Zones." Early drafts of the plans called for stopping pedestrians as well as cars coming into targeted areas, according to documents and sources. One draft specified that at least one officer would be assigned at each checkpoint to stop pedestrians.