The Minneapolis City Council announced its intent to dismantle the city's police department following the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. That—in the city where Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while other officers looked on—is the most sweeping change any major city is proposing, but other cities are responding to the Black Lives Matter movement. The question is how seriously they’re responding, and whether the reforms being announced will ever be enforced. In too many cases, the loopholes are going to be big enough for police officers to use to get away with murder.
Donald Trump offered up a great example of a “reform” package that’s all for show with his do-nothing executive order Tuesday, while House Democrats are pushing a stronger reform package and Senate Republicans are pushing back. The real action at this point is in the cities and states—check out this roundup of those reform measures—but you always need to read the fine print in assessing the reforms being touted. Case in point: neck restraints.
The Phoenix police department announced it will “suspend training and use of the Carotid Control Technique, effective immediately.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom similarly called for an end to training in the brutal technique. In Florida, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office banned the tactic—except when they want to use deadly force. (Well, they would say “when deadly force is justified,” but police have a way of justifying what they want to do.) It’s the same with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and in Chicago: carotid restraint can’t be used except as a means of deadly force. It’s all about the loopholes!
The thing is, Minneapolis had stopped training in neck restraints before Derek Chauvin used one to kill George Floyd. They need to be banned. Not training officers to do something they’ve seen on video a thousand times is not going to stop them from doing it, it’s just going to mean they’re imitating a video and feeling like a badass killer while doing it. Again: Ban them. The Minneapolis City Council and a Hennepin County judge have done just that while the council works on the longer-term project of dismantling the police department. Denver, Colorado similarly banned chokeholds and carotid compressions “with no exceptions.”
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh made some announcements of police reforms that sound better upon first hearing than they do when you dig a little deeper. In addition to the now-familiar chokehold and neck restraint ban “except in the very limited situations when deadly force is necessary to address an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death,” Walsh has a plan to reallocate $12 million of police funding—$2 million internally and $10 million to nonpolice programs. That amounts to 20% of the Boston Police Department’s budget … for overtime. It’s a 2.4% reduction to the department’s overall budget. The city’s use of force rules will now include deescalation, verbal warnings before use of deadly force, and the duty to intervene. Officials say all three practices had been incorporated in training but not fully included in the use of force rules. Boston is also making a move that may help diversify its police force by abandoning use of a racially discriminatory hair drug test for officers.
The city council in Austin passed the familiar no-chokeholds-unless-you-really-mean-it policy and made some other changes that are all about how they’re applied. The new policy there says, for instance, “that someone fleeing officers must pose an imminent threat before officers can shoot,” The Texas Tribune reports. Which gives an awful lot of leeway to officers to claim that the person posed an imminent threat. Austin also made some tentative moves toward reducing police funding and banned the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, and other “less lethal” munitions during protests.
Washington, D.C., has a different kind of “but” on a neck restraint ban. The council there made neck restraints a felony, which is a big step. That’s one of a set of major reforms the council passed—but only for 90 days. The emergency bill also bans the use of tear gas (except that in the District of Columbia, there are a lot of federal police not affected by the measure), bans the hiring of police officers with a history of misconduct (which should be a no-brainer everywhere), requires the prompt public release of information about and body camera footage of any serious use of force by police, and cuts the police union out of discipline. The 90-day legislation can be renewed for up to 225 days, while public hearings will be required before the council can permanently pass the reforms.
New York’s state legislature passed and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a package of bills making chokeholds a felony, repealing a law preventing the release of police disciplinary records, and putting investigations of police killings of unarmed civilians into the hands of the state attorney general’s office. Cuomo also signed an executive order calling for police departments to work with communities to implement reforms by April 1, 2021.
In New York City, though, Mayor Bill de Blasio rejected a City Council proposal for $1 billion in cuts to the city’s $6 billion police budget. The NYPD announced it would disband a plainclothes unit that has been a culprit in “some of the city’s most notorious police shootings,” The New York Times reports. But those officers will now be spread out throughout the police department, including in neighborhood policing, which can’t be comforting for people in the neighborhoods in question.
Colorado is another case where significant—if incomplete—reforms have passed at the state level to back up changes in Denver. The package of legislation there includes limits on the use of deadly force, the use of body cameras and a requirement for public release of body camera footage after incidents, a ban on the use of chemical agents on protesters and restrictions on the use of rubber bullets and similar projectiles, and empowering the attorney general to investigate civil rights violations. Perhaps most interestingly, Colorado will make it easier for victims to sue police officers for misconduct.
The Seattle City Council passed a ban on chokeholds (without any exceptions); a ban on the use of “kinetic impact projectiles, chemical irritants, acoustic weapons, directed energy weapons, water cannons, disorientation devices, ultrasonic cannons or any other device” with similar crowd-control purposes; and a ban on police officers using mourning bands to cover their badge numbers. The ban on crowd weapons applies to all Seattle law enforcement agencies and to outside agencies operating in Seattle. “Under the city’s regular process for adopted bills, [Councilmember Kshama] Sawant’s laws should take effect sometime next month,” The Seattle Times reports.
Other key areas of reform under consideration in some cities include taking police out of schools. Cities including Minneapolis; Denver; Seattle; Oakland and West Contra Costa, California; and Portland, Oregon, have moved to do that. Chicago, under pressure from the Chicago Teachers Union, is considering it.
There’s a lot going on, which is good. But in many cases we’re hearing big talk about half measures, while in others, activists will need to watch closely to be sure that the claims about reform are matched by the reality of reform. The outcry over the murder of George Floyd has created more change than we might have believed possible just a few weeks ago, but the work isn’t done.