Young activists aren’t yet finished
After summer of protests, they look to continue push for change in the new year
Micah Stevens, 17, stood on a ledge at City Dock in Annapolis leading chants against police brutality.
Shelyia Brown, 21, produced a video advertising a peaceful protest in Pasadena that brought threats of violence from counter-protesters.
Harold “Mo” Lloyd III, 22, hovered before a microphone at The People’s Park on the grounds of the Old Fourth Ward in Annapolis and implored his generation to become change-makers.
Alderman DaJuan Gay, 23, challenged the Annapolis police to commit to fair policing and shouted the names of those who had died at the hands of police as he led the first march in the city following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
These were just a few scenes from more than a dozen protests, rallies, marches and prayer walks led by young Black Anne Arundel County residents this summer in
the name of racial equality and denouncing police violence against Black people.
The demonstrations spurred town halls and roundtable discussions, opinion pieces and editorials. Legislators and department heads condemned Floyd’s death and knelt with protestors. The movement sparked conversations about what policing should look like and how departments should be funded. It even led the county’s police chief to retire.
This all took place before a backdrop of a raging pandemic that has killed hundreds of county residents and infecting thousands more.
Now, more than six months later, the young activists reflect on their efforts. Some feel exhausted, only now finding the emotional will to talk about their efforts. Others are frustrated by the seeming lack of change that they so fervently called for. And while some tangible policy changes have begun to emerge at all levels of government, there is more work yet to do, they say.
Society’s problems are urgent, but the government is slow, said Gay, a Democrat who serves Ward 6.
“I am most impressed that people gathered and demanded change,” he said. “Now it falls on the politicians to effect that change.”
After Floyd, a Black man, died when a white police officer kept his knee pinned on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, and several other high profile police killings, leaders like County Executive Steuart Pittman and Mayor Gavin Buckley began to explore remedies to make something sure what happened in Minneapolis doesn’t happen in Anne Arundel County.
Among the policy initiatives that have begun to emerge are funding for body-worn cameras for the nearly 800 officers in the Anne Arundel Police Department; a proposed civilian review board to oversee complaints against the Annapolis Police Department and several police diversion programs that are getting underway in Annapolis.
Despite those nascent undertakings, some organizers feel there has been a loss of momentum since the summer, due in part to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic but also because politicians have been focusing on other things.
Gay hopes to recapture some of the lost energy when the Maryland General Assembly convenes next week. In the fall, a legislative workgroup recommended a host of police reforms, including mandating body cameras for police statewide by 2025, banning chokeholds and repealing the Maryland Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.
“We’ll hit the streets again,” Gay said, promising to hold legislators “feet to the fire” to bring about change.
In lieu of tangible policy changes, the activists acknowledged that their efforts have made people comfortable with having conversations about race and equality, Lloyd said. Brown, a student at Anne Arundel Community College, agreed, saying the movement gave an entire generation of people in their teens and early twenties, a chance to stand up for what they believe in.
“They’re not going to stand people being discriminated against anymore,” Brown said. “They will no longer hear like, ‘Oh You’re just a kid,’ you know, like kids have opinions, too.”
Stevens, a senior at Annapolis High, saw her school community respond positively to the summer protests. Eventually, she stopped counting the number of calls she got from teachers, staff and community members who wanted to sit down and talk.
“People were wanting to have that conversation and be open to learning what the Black Lives Matter movement was,” she said. “And how people of color were feeling and really get educated.”
But there’s more to do, Steven said. “I don’t feel as hopeless as I did before. I didn’t think anything was going to change. The more time that went on, the more conversations I was having, the more hope I had.”
In 2021, the City of Annapolis will hold its primary and general elections for all eight City Council seats and mayor this year. In 2022, the Anne Arundel County executive and all seven County Council seats will be on the ballot.
If legislators are unwilling to consider police reforms, they should be replaced, said Keanuu Smith-Brown, president of the District 30 Democratic Club.
“We need people who are going to stand by what they preach,” Smith-Brown said.
He did praise Pittman’s choice to replace former county police chief Tim Altomare, who retired in July because of what he saw as an attempt to strip police of their power. Chief Amal Awad, the first woman, person of color and member of the LGBTQ+ community to permanently serve in the role, was sworn in last month.
Pittman answered the question, “Is there even a Black woman out there who could take a job like this,” Smith-Brown said, “And we’ve proven that there are people out there. We just have to find the best ones to do the job.”
Here is where several police-related initiatives in the county and city currently stand:
Body cameras
Funding for body cameras in the Anne Arundel County Police Department was a late addition to Pittman’s budget in June. Pittman vowed to add the technology as a direct response to national unrest around police brutality and calls by Black community leaders to do so. The cameras are expected to be implemented within the next year and cost $1.8 million, Pittman said this summer.
The Annapolis Police Department has had a body camera program for several years.
Civilian Review Board
A panel of community advocates, activists, attorneys, current and former police officers and citizens met for the first time this month to begin planning a civilian oversight board for the Annapolis Police Department.
At a rally in June, Buckley promised the city would explore creating a body whose job is to field complaints from residents about police officers and have them reviewed by a group of peers.
Will Rowel, a Buckley aide heading the initiative, expects the panel will hammer out a set of recommendations by spring that would be used to draft legislation formalizing the civilian review board.
Other initiatives
Gay has led a charge on the city council to rethink police funding. He has introduced measures including the Violence Intervention Program, to deploy training workers to work directly with community members.
Similarly, the city has hired a coordinator to run the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, program, meant to divert people who have committed nonviolent or victimless crimes out of the criminal justice system and into contact with social services workers.
Some alternatives have been less successful, either running afoul of the City Council or being deemed outright unconstitutional.
First, a $100,000 grant for an Annapolis Police predictive policing program was narrowly defeated by the council after some members worried it could lead to racial profiling.
Then, a resolution to create a drugloitering free zone was discovered to be unconstitutional. The City Code section allowing such zones is in the process of being repealed.