Metropolitan Police Department Officer Anthony Smith marveled as he examined a .45-caliber handgun he’d just seized from a man walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE near Anacostia. “This is literally a hand cannon,” he said.
Other cops on the scene also couldn’t help but notice the gun’s size, according to body-worn camera footage of the Aug. 2, 2022, incident. “Have you been doing your bicep curls?” another officer asked Smith as he prepared to hand him the weapon by its long black grip.
But even as officers acknowledged the gun’s abnormal measurements and threatening nature, they failed to arrest the man carrying it. Mayor Muriel Bowser, MPD Chief Pamela Smith, and all manner of other city leaders have spent years emphasizing the importance of getting illegal guns off the street and arresting those who carry them, so what could possibly have motivated these cops to let this man go free?…