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Landmark police reform taps the brakes

Maryland State House as seen from College Ave. Photo by Martin Falbisoner (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The “driving while black” in Virginia incident that hit the news this weekend continues to make headlines. As I noted yesterday, the Virginia law that would have made that near-deadly encounter last December illegal was passed in November but only took effect in March. Second Lt. Caron Nazario, Black and Latino, is lucky to have survived the encounter.

Next door in Maryland, legislatiors are doing something about police overreach, too (Washington Post):

Maryland enacted historic police accountability measures Saturday, becoming the first state to repeal its powerful Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights and setting new rules for when police may use force and how they are investigated and disciplined.

The Democratic-majority legislature dealt Republican Gov. Larry Hogan a sharp rebuke, overriding his vetoes of measures that raise the bar for officers to use force; give civilians a role in police discipline for the first time; restrict no-knock warrants; mandate body cameras; and open some allegations of police wrongdoing for public review.

Each bill had been hailed by criminal justice advocates as having the potential to make policing in the state fairer and more transparent. Democrats, who hold large majorities in the legislature, made enacting them a top priority after months of protests over the police-involved deaths of unarmed Black men and women.

Republican lawmakers echoes Hogan’s concern that the law would “further erode police morale, community relationships and public confidence,” reports the Baltimore Sun, adding it “raised worries that provisions would leave officers fearful that split-second decisions under dangerous circumstances might cost them their jobs or send them to prison.”

Comply or die

But Black backers of the bills pushed back:

Sen. Jill P. Carter, a Baltimore Democrat who fought for years to pass policing legislation, responded Saturday on the Senate floor to Hogan’s comments. What corrodes community trust in police, Carter said, is years of frustration over abuses that go unpunished, protests that go unheard and a broken system that carries on unchanged.

Carter cited scores of people killed by law enforcement in Maryland over the past two decades and notorious instances of corruption that went unchecked for years. Baltimore residents filed numerous complaints about since-convicted officers on the Baltimore Police Department’s infamous Gun Trace Task Force, Carter said, but members of the force continued to abuse the public with impunity.

“It’s a critically important step in the right direction,” Carter said of the legislation.

Lawmakers approved some policing changes the year after Freddie Grey died in Baltimore Police Department custody in 2015, but critics said they were not enough.

The trial of former officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for the killing last May of George Floyd spotlights the kind of unchecked and uncesessary violence directed by police at Black suspects. Three officers pinned Floyd to the ground while demanding he get into the squad car.

Nazario’s attorney said in a federal lawsuit that video footage of the encounter points to wider trends:

“These cameras captured footage of behavior consistent with a disgusting nationwide trend of law enforcement officers, who, believing they can operate with complete impunity, engage in unprofessional, discourteous, racially biased, dangerous, and sometimes deadly abuses of authority, (including issuing unreasonable comply-or-die commands,) ignore the clearly established mandates of the Constitution of these United States and the state and local laws, and usurp the roles of legislator, judge, jury, and executioner; substituting the rule of law for their arbitrary and illegal conduct.”

Maryland has begun tapping the brakes.

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