Protecting Our Nation’s Capital Emergency Act

The bill would reverse two sets of changes made to D.C. law by the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022. First, it would reinstate the right of Metropolitan Police Department officers to negotiate discipline-related matters through collective bargaining, restoring language that the 2022 law struck from the D.C. Government Comprehensive Merit Personnel Act of 1978. Second, it would repeal Subtitle M of the 2022 reform law and revive the prior law as if the subtitle had never been enacted — restoring a 90-day statute of limitations for initiating corrective or adverse actions against MPD officers or civilian employees.

Beyond those two operative provisions, the bill would, according to the CRS summary, also eliminate the police chief's authority to increase a police trial board's recommended disciplinary penalty, and remove the requirement that MPD post public schedules of termination-level disciplinary hearings online. The bill makes no changes to D.C. law outside the specific provisions of the 2022 reform act that it targets.

Metropolitan Police Department officers and civilian employees who face or may face disciplinary proceedings, police unions that negotiate on their behalf, the MPD police chief whose penalty-enhancement authority would be removed, and D.C. residents whose access to information about officer termination hearings would be reduced.

MPD officers and their unions would regain collective bargaining leverage over disciplinary terms and a 90-day deadline that limits how long after an incident a disciplinary case can be opened. The police chief would lose the discretion to impose harsher penalties than a trial board recommends. Members of the public would lose access to the online schedule of termination hearings that the 2022 law required.

The bill is largely self-executing: one provision strikes a subsection from existing D.C. statute, and the other repeals an entire subtitle of the 2022 reform law while automatically reviving the prior law it replaced. No agency rulemaking, grant cycle, or reporting requirement is established. The Metropolitan Police Department and any relevant D.C. collective-bargaining units would need to bring existing contracts and practices into conformity with the revived rules upon enactment.