When Officer Kurtz came around the corner onto 17th Street off Columbia Road, he saw three homeless men looking in the trash can. To me it looked like they were looking for food, and they were hungry. To officer Kurtz, it looked like they were hiding something in the trash can, never mind that the trash can came almost to their chest, and their coordination for retrieving anything inside the trash can was limited.
Officer Kurtz stopped the 3 men and made them wait until he checked the trash can with a flashlight he took out of his top pocket.
He then looked around the corner on Fuller Street to see if he could find something suspicious to pin on the three men he stopped.
A crowd gathered across the street, complaining that Officer Kurtz is against Hispanic people, and he is always stopping someone Hispanic for no reason.
One of the men who had been stopped asked Officer Kurtz why he was stopped. Officer Kurtz turned away from him and noticed the Hispanic crowd gathering across the street.
As soon as he saw the people who knew what he was doing, he got on his bike and left, but not before making a couple of snide comments to the photographer/me.
Officer Kurtz loves to stop people on the street and mess with them, whether he has reasonable cause or not. His unconventional "policing" has gained him popularity among a few people in the Adams Morgan business community, but it's gained him more detractors among members of the Hispanic Community. His unconstitutional policing is bad enough, but his verbalized expressions of dislike for certain members of the community should have been cause for worry at MPD a long time ago. He was removed from Adams Morgan about two years ago, but real estate broker Pap Patrick produced a petition alleged to be signed businesses to have Officer Kurtz returned to Adams Morgan. It is very likely his behavior will cause the city a lot of money in a big law suit before MPD sits up and takes notice he's more of a liability than an asset in Adams Morgan.
