We are starting to see the first policy proposals from law makers in response to over a week’s worth of nationwide protests. From reforms, to calls, to defunding police, those proposals cover a wide spectrum.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a package of sweeping police reforms in Congress today.
Dr. David McCuan: The speaker is looking to put forward a pretty vast package. You had Karen Bass, the former California speaker, member of Congress from Los Angeles and leader of Congressional Black Caucus introduce a sweeping measure today: 134 pages, this is an act that would propose policing legislation, revamp legal standards for misconduct, creates a national database for problem officers, tracking them, improving training and practices to emphasize de-escalation. It’s a pretty sweeping set of reforms in this package and will be voted on probably in about two or two-and-a-half weeks. It does a lot, and it certainly puts forward Democrats and the de-fund movement, but more broadly about police reforms across the country.
On Monday’s “The State of California,” we were joined by Jeff Noble, former deputy and police practices consultant.
Jeff Noble: Oh, absolutely. There have been calls for reforms, there have been task forces, there have been commissions, generally aimed at individual departments. Most recently in 2014, the President’s task force on 21st century policing brought up some of these same issues.
JN: I’m not sure that that’s completely true, I think there has been incremental change over the years, but change is slow. And we were seeing things like deescalation, which was something we talked about for a long time, which worked its way not only into department policies, but department training. It is looked at very seriously now.
So I think that over the years, there has been incremental change, but there hasn’t been the depth of change that many of us would like to see.
JN: I think the answer is really a political decision at this point, at the federal, state and local levels. There are things that can be done on each of those levels, that can really drive the force in change.
JN: I think the defund movement is an indicator of a great level of frustration. I don’t think that’s the right answer and when people say “defund,” I think it connotes that we’re just going to eliminate policing, and that’s certainly not the right answer. Rather, it means taking some of the funds away from policing and put those into other things.
I think it’s certainly true that as a country, we have fundamentally failed to build infrastructure and we simply put too much weight on the police over the social programs. We’ve relied on the police to solve problems that really shouldn’t be the responsibility of the police.
JN: That’s one of the biggest issues here, but it’s time for the politicians to step up and we saw last year that that can happen, and it did happen here in California. So last year, the legislature changed the law and ability to prosecute police officers for excessive force, and they also changed the law and ability to make public records of these uses of force and misconduct investigations. Both of these things, the union and the state came out very strongly against initially, but over time they were able to negotiate with the unions and accomplish that.
But there are more reforms that directly impact the union.
One of them—and it’s not just for policing, it’s for teachers and other government groups, as well—is the ability to get rid of the bad people, and there are far too many hurdles that prevent us from being able to do that.
JN: I think that there are a lot of ways to do that and not only should they mandate training, but they should create model policies for departments, and certainly the most important areas are use of force, high-speed pursuits, things where people can be harmed in our communities. Policing is a unique field where if you ask about a best practice for a particular issue, there is no manual or handbook at the national level, or even at state or local levels, that you can go to and say, “This is the right thing to do.”
We look now at consent decrees, and we’ve got a lot of knowledge and ability to change our policies and training based upon consent decrees around the country but that should be codified, that should be centralized and it should be available.
JN: Oh, absolutely. Look, data collection and the ability of the federal government to get involved in policing is way overdue. For years, we look at crime statistics, and the FBI putting out the state, the city, and the nation, all of that information is voluntary. No one audits this, nobody checks it, nobody knows whether or not it’s accurate, we don’t do any data reporting of use of force or things that impact the civil liberties of our communities. And the best comparison, I think, is that if we’re talking about money and you’re a publicly traded company, there are all sorts of audit systems that are required to be in place in all sorts of laws and regulations that control your ability to conduct business when it comes to making money, but there’s none of that when it comes to patrolling civil rights.