Police bills pass Senate
9 reform measures advance following protests last summer
A slate of legislation touted by supporters as the most consequential law enforcement reforms in a half-century passed the Maryland Senate on Wednesday, moving the General Assembly closer to fulfilling vows from its leaders to tackle such issues following nationwide protests last summer.
Among the nine bills are provisions that would overhaul the disciplinary process for police officers accused of wrongdoing, scrap decades-old job protections that critics claim protect bad cops, create a legal duty for officers to report misconduct within their ranks, levy criminal penalties for officers who use excessive force and put body cameras on every officer in Maryland by 2025.
Each bill passed by wide margins, including six that won unanimous approval, and most received at least some bipartisan support. Even the most controversial proposal — allowing the public to see some disciplinary and internal affairs records, including complaints a department ruled baseless — passed 29-18, a majority large enough to override a poten
tial veto.
The bills now head to the House of Delegates, where lawmakers are working on a similar package sponsored by House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones. The Baltimore County Democrat has described the policing legislation as her top remaining priority this session.
After senators finished voting on the package, people in the chamber broke into applause. The bills had been rewritten extensively over weeks of marathon committee hearings marked by emotional debate.
Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat, described the resulting legislation as a hard-fought consensus and the foundation for “durable and sustainable” change.
“We’re not always going to get everything that we want this session, but I look at this as a down payment on making things right in terms of how policing is affecting this community,” said Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Democrat who represents parts of Baltimore City and Baltimore County and had criticized some of the measures as not going far enough.
“I have law enforcement in my family. I understand it’s a difficult job,” he said. “But it’s a job and all that we’re asking for is to be treated like people. That’s it.”
Overhauling the disciplinary process:
Senators voted 33-14 to scrap the Maryland Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, a 1974 law that enshrines job protections for officers and a broad set of due process rights for those accused of misconduct, and replace it with a disciplinary process that would let a civilian-majority board decide complaints against officers.
Activists have long claimed the current law shields bad cops from discipline and have demanded its repeal. A wide majority of lawmakers appear to be on board with repealing it, although there remain sharp disagreements over what sort of disciplinary process should replace it.
The proposed law would ditch many of the most criticized elements of the current law — including a provision that forced internal affairs investigators to wait at least five days before questioning an accused officer — and significantly overhaul the disciplinary process for those facing complaints.
The bill would ditch trial boards — essentially juries made up entirely of fellow officers who currently decide whether an officer committed wrongdoing — in favor of civilian-majority panels that would weigh complaints and determine responsibility. It also would allow police chiefs to immediately discipline officers criminally convicted of wrongdoing, skipping time-consuming internal investigations and hearings in such cases.
Public access to police disciplinary records: The sharpest divisions in the Senate came over a bill that would allow the public to request copies of internal affairs complaints and other disciplinary records of individual officers. Those types of files are personnel records and shielded from public view under Maryland’s Public Information Act.
Under the change, agencies still could edact personal details like home addresses or phone numbers and block the release of files from active investigations or criminal cases.
Supporters of the bill — dubbed Anton’s Law in honor of Anton Black, a 19-year-old Eastern Shore man who died at the hands of police in 2018 — argue that the secrecy surrounding complaints has helped undermine public faith in law enforcement. The veil of secrecy, backers contend, leaves people in the dark about how complaints are handled and whether agencies do an adequate job of policing their officers.
Some lawmakers strenuously objected to releasing complaints that internal investigators deemed groundless or unproven. Releasing unfounded allegations against officers, opponents argued, could unfairly tarnish reputations, damage careers and humiliate officers’ families.
The bill passed the Senate 29-18.
New criminal charges for police brutality: Officers who kill or seriously injure a person while using excessive force — and any officer who witnesses a colleague using excessive force but doesn’t intervene to stop them — would face up to 10 years in prison under another bill passed by the Senate, 35-12. Officers who fail to render aid to people wounded by police would likewise face potential criminal sanction under the bill.
In addition to potential criminal charges, the bill would empower the Maryland Police Standards and Training Commission to strip officers who use excessive force of their law enforcement certification and ban them from the profession. The legislation also outlines a single use-offorce standard that applies to every agency in the state, establishes a legal duty for officers to report suspected misconduct and creates whistleblower protections for those who do so.
Limits on no-knock and after-hours police raids:
Senators unanimously passed a bill aimed at limiting the use of no-knock warrants — where police officers execute search warrants by bursting into a person’s home without announcing themselves — by requiring that officers outline good reasons for not knocking and obtain written approval from both their supervisors and a state’s attorney.
Similar approvals would be required before officers are allowed to execute warrants between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Body cameras statewide by 2025:
Nearly every law enforcement officer in Maryland will be required to wear a body camera by 2025 under another piece of legislation unanimously passed by the Senate.
Although most of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies have adopted body cameras, many smaller agencies — often citing a hefty price tag of storing and reviewing hours of footage — have not. A task force would study how best to implement the mandate and potentially provide financial assistance to smaller, cash-strapped agencies to offset the cost.
The bill also would make it far easier for courts to throw out testimony from officers who turn off their cameras or alter the footage. Such officers would be barred from testifying in court unless prosecutors could convince a judge that there was a genuine and innocent reason why the officer failed to properly use the body camera during an incident.
Less surplus military gear for Maryland police:
Senators unanimously backed putting additional limits on the types of military hardware Maryland law enforcement agencies could buy from the U.S. Department of Defense under a federal program.
Many of the items that would be deemed off-limits — including weaponized aircraft and drones — are unlikely to be on the shopping lists of local police.
But the bill also would limit the purchase of equipment such as grenade launchers, which many agencies use to fire tear gas and other crowd-control munitions.
State prosecutor to handle deadly police shootings: The Maryland state prosecutor’s office would gain statewide jurisdiction to investigate any death at the hands of police and potentially bring criminal charges under another piece of legislation passed unanimously by senators.
Local state’s attorneys would retain primary authority over cases where police kill someone, but the bill would allow the state prosecutor to step in and take a second look if county prosecutors declined to bring charges.
Local control of the Baltimore Police Department: Voters in Baltimore would be asked to decide if the Baltimore Police Department should be placed under full local control for the first time since 1860.
Although the Baltimore City Council handles the department’s budget, and the mayor holds the power to hire and fire the police commissioner, the department remains a state agency — at least nominally. That limits the power of the mayor and council to directly manage the operations and policies of the department, and means that state lawmakers must sign off on occasional structural changes.
A referendum on local control of the police would go before Baltimore voters in either 2022 or 2024 under the bill, which passed the Senate unanimously.
Counseling for officers: Every law enforcement agency in Maryland would be required to make mental health services available to officers at no cost under another bill passed unanimously by the Senate.
Now, we all know how frustrated parents of willful children feel. They teach their kids. They model good behavior and make personal sacrifices on behalf of their families. They reinforce key life experiences whenever they can. And then, when it’s time to test that knowledge, to judge whether vital, even lifesaving, lessons have been learned, they discover that it was all for naught. They failed, not because of a lack of capacity to learn on the part of their children, but out of their offspring’s sheer obstinacy and hubris.
Somewhere, the parents of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are surely weeping.
On Tuesday, the Republican governor announced an executive order rescinding his state’s mask mandate and allowing businesses of all types to be 100% open by next Wednesday. To suggest this order is premature is simply to state the obvious. Within hours of his announcement, Texas public health officials were crying out for people to keep those masks on and continue with other well-reasoned COVID-19 restrictions. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a fellow Republican, made a similar announcement on the same day causing many doctors to be flabbergasted there, too. Both governors claimed their numbers justified the decision. Both are, of course, mistaken.
Texas has a COVID-19 test positivity rate of 8.7%, the lowest the state has recorded since last October but still more than double the national average. And while Governor Abbott may brag about how more than 5 million vaccinations have been administered, the number of Texans fully vaccinated is much lower at about 1.9 million. And that’s in a state of 29 million. Meanwhile, Mississippi’s positivity numbers were considered so suspect that the governor of Ohio, a Republican, last week warned residents about traveling there.
We would chalk this up to either presidential aspirations
(at least in the case of Mr. Abbott) or simply playing to base supporters who are both frustrated by restrictions (understandable) and distrustful of medical experts (not so understandable). But, unfortunately, the governors are doing more than endangering the health and lives of state residents, they may very well be prolonging and worsening the pandemic far beyond their borders. As we’ve observed repeatedly, the virus does not respect state boundaries (or city and county boundaries for that matter). The governors can claim they aren’t telling anyone to take off their masks, merely removing a mandate, but how do you think their constituents are going to react? By keeping them on?
Sometimes it seems as if America, at the 1-year anniversary of the pandemic, needs some kind of collective group therapy session. Can Zoom handle 328 million? We have lost more than a half-million Americans, and it doesn’t help that there’s political hay to be made by being contrarian. Better to attack teachers unions or governors or local health officials or whomever than to face facts that this deadly plague requires us to wear masks, keep social distances, wash hands frequently, avoid crowds and self-isolate. None of this is fun. Not for anyone.
But here we are making steady progress, with vaccines slowly working their way into arms. This isn’t the time to declare victory prematurely.
Perhaps it was this frustration that compelled Gov. Larry Hogan this week to reinforce his callous claim that Baltimore was getting more COVID-19 vaccine than it was “entitled to.” First, that’s a bad choice of words in the context of a lifesaving vaccine. And second, it demonstrated a remarkable disinterest in the extent to which vaccines shipped to a majority-Black city are winding up in majority-white suburban arms. As his own health department has reported, less than 40% of doses designated for Baltimore went to actual city residents last week. And it’s perpetuating the problem of Black Maryland residents not getting immunized.
So at the risk of sounding like a broken record — or maybe the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Dr. Anthony Fauci or your parents — here’s the bottom line: Let’s act like responsible adults and remember we’re all in this together. As President Joe Biden observed this week, there is a light at the end of the tunnel but we can’t assume victory is inevitable: “We must remain vigilant, act fast and aggressively and look out for one another.” Sometimes, it seems as if the looking out for one another part is the most difficult assignment of all.
If we were paying attention, we learned a lot in February about little known Black leaders who are part of the long chain in the fight for freedom and equity. In the women’s movement, there is a similar chain of little-known leaders who have and are building the bridge to women’s equality. One of them is Lois Wilson, whose 1891 birth we celebrate on March 4.
Lois Wilson, who died in 1988, empowered millions of women and offered each a path out of the slavery of a toxic, life-threatening relationship. She and her husband, Bill, along with many others built a movement that is today the largest and most successful self-help movement in the world.
Given such an amazing contribution, why don’t we know much about Lois Wilson? While that is an interesting question, an even more important one is: What might we learn, about how to get out of our current national leadership and trust crisis, from Lois and the movement she helped lead?
Lois started out trying to get her husband Bill to stop drinking. She was sure her love for him would be enough. She tried everything to get him to stop. She organized trips to the mountains for weeks of hiking and camping. She prayed for him. She was patient with him. She got angry and threw things at him. None of it worked. Bill was drinking himself to death. Along the way, Lois suffered the humiliation of being turned down for adoption because of Bill’s drinking and was homeless living on couches of friends for three years after Bill stopped drinking.
How hopeless do you feel about what is going on in America? Do you fear there is no return to being able to disagree without hatred and violence? Will we ever be safe from viruses that fly around the world like poisonous bees stinging people in their path?
Lois learned a powerful lesson that is the bedrock foundation of the organization she cofounded — Al-Anon Family Groups. This principle is to admit defeat and focus on what you can change about yourself. Lois and the many members of Al-Anon who followed her came to see that being angry at the person with alcoholism and trying to change his behavior was a waste of time. All it did was make the spouses of people with drinking problems sicker and more obsessed with a problem about which they could do nothing.
America and the world are in a time when there appear to be many things out of our control. As hard as President Biden tries, it is a challenge to imagine how American “get-it-done” optimism is going to change the current global dysfunction. The amazing thing for Lois and the women and men who have tried Al-Anon and its 12-step program is that once the focus shifts to one’s small “s” spiritual development, there are more choices for how to improve the world around us.
Imagine if we all decided to be open-minded and go a little deeper in looking for the truth. What if we decided to let go of preconceived ideas and our favorite safe ideological beliefs and listened to other points of view? What if we aimed to do whatever was best for the common good in our families, neighborhoods, cities and country?
These are just a few of the principles that Lois Wilson and others decided to follow to get out of hopelessness. One other thing about Lois was her willingness to not worry about who got credit. Everyone was equal in Al-Anon. There were no leaders, just “trusted servants” given authority for a limited period of time by the members of the group. No one had a role for too long; the trusted servants rotated roles to make sure all were contributing.
Alcoholism, drug abuse and other addictions are not pretty. No one particularly likes to talk about them. Families impacted too often feel shameful and defeated. That is one reason Lois is not too well known.
The other is that she was leading from 1940 to 1970, when women weren’t expected or invited to lead. Her husband Bill, who cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous, is much better known than Lois.
That is unfortunate because without Lois and the other women who shaped the 12-step movement, it most likely wouldn’t exist. It’s time for Lois Wilson and the other women who helped launch the 12-step movement to take their place in the history of women’s rights in America — and for the lessons learned by these women and those who came after to be shared with the many hopeless people in America today.