USA TODAY International Edition
What it means for reforms
Police’s use of lethal force faces unprecedented scrutiny.
When Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, a special White House panel quickly offered up a wave of reforms expected to help guide law enforcement through the most fraught encounters.
The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing produced 59 recommendations, following testimony from 140 witnesses.
“Building trust and legitimacy on both sides of the police- citizen divide is not only the first pillar of this task force’s report but also the foundational principle underlying this inquiry into the nature of the relations between law enforcement and the communities they serve,” the study group concluded.
Just six years later, the findings in what was then regarded as a landmark analysis of modern policing have been obscured in a new wave of deadly actions that have renewed calls for reexamining American law enforcement.
On Tuesday, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. This represents only one exhibit in a growing body of evidence in which police officers’ use of lethal force faces unprecedented public scrutiny, condemnation and demands for change.
‘ We haven’t learned anything’
During the 14- day Chauvin trial, new images of fatal police encounters in Chicago, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and elsewhere have competed with the nowfamiliar video clips of Floyd pleading for his life while pinned under Chauvin’s knee.
“It’s like we haven’t learned anything,” said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University who studies crimes involving police. “I don’t know if we’ve made any meaningful progress” since the 2015 White House policing report.
Yet Stinson and other analysts said the findings outlined in the study commissioned by the Obama administration are likely more relevant than at the time they were issued.
“If you go back to that report, I think you will find a lot of meat is left on that bone,” Stinson said. “There is a lot there to work with.”
A break in the ‘ blue wall’
During closing arguments in the Chauvin trial Monday, Minneapolis prosecutor Steve Schleicher sought to separate the murder case against the former officer from a referendum against American policing.
“To be clear, this case is called the state of Minnesota vs. Derek Chauvin,” the prosecutor said. “This is not called the state of Minnesota vs. the police.”
But Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, said that the broader implications of the case and policing at large cannot be ignored.
“In an external sense, the prosecutor’s argument is true,” Walker said. “But I think the public’s focus on the related problems with policing is very widespread and deep ... I think there will be a response and that mayors and governors will demand more policing reforms.”
Since Floyd’s death last May, Walker said he tracked community reaction in the country’s 50 largest cities, concluding that local officials approved an array of changes to law enforcement tactics, from bans on police chokeholds to prohibitions on so- called no- knock warrants that led to the death of a Kentucky woman, Breonna Taylor, during a police raid last year.
Walker said 84% of the cities approved at least some changes in local law enforcement policy or operation in just a four- month period, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, last year.
“I am guardedly optimistic” that the pace of reform will continue post- Chauvin, Walker said.
The professor noted that Chauvin’s trial, specifically the prosecution testimony of Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and other city commanders who condemned the officer’s tactics represented a break from traditional so- called “blue wall of silence” in which police have been hesitant to criticize fellow officers – let alone bear witness against them in criminal trials.
“That command officers were willing to testify set an exceptional precedent,” Walker said. “You cannot discount the significance of that and what it signals to other police chiefs.”
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who writes extensively about police conduct, said any rethinking of law enforcement operations must also include shifting responsibilities for calls involving the homeless, mentally ill, even traffic infractions away from police,.
“We just don’t need people with guns and handcuffs for everything,” Harris said. “But any measure of future success has to involve a reckoning with the system that brought us here.”
‘ A guardian - rather than a warrior’
Until Floyd’s death last year, no brighter public spotlight had been cast on aggressive policing than in the aftermath of Brown’s death in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.
Provocative law enforcement tactics, especially those used to put down the civil unrest following Brown’s death, prompted the formation of the presidential task force that delivered a national warning of the potential perils when police agencies lose the trust of the communities they serve.
“Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian – rather than a warrior – mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with the public,” the task force concluded. “Law enforcement cannot build community trust if it is seen as an occupying force coming in from outside to rule and control the community.”
Every aspect of policing, from crime reduction to officer training, hinges on that trust, the task force found.
The brutal manner and public nature of Floyd’s death represents a new call to action that builds on the lessons of Ferguson, Harris said.
“The idea that police officers are warriors means that in war a certain number of casualties are acceptable,” Harris said. “That has no place in law enforcement. That just has to go.”
18,000 police agencies in the US
Laurie Robinson, a former assistant attorney general who co- chaired the policing task force, said there were “high hopes” that the task force’s work would make a difference.
“But we realized because of the decentralized nature of policing ( there an estimated 18,000 police agencies) that this was not going to produce an accelerated solution,” Robinson said. “This was going to be a long haul.”
“The next step for policing has to involve putting pressure on law enforcement leadership and labor unions,” said Robinson, now a professor criminology, law and society at George Mason University. “They are going to have to think long and hard about what lessons have been learned.”
At the end of the task force’s work in 2015, Robinson said President Barack Obama asked her and co- chairman Charles Ramsey, a former police chief in Washington, D. C., and Philadelphia, if there was an aspect of law enforcement that required more examination.
Robinson said that they immediately agreed that a closer study of officer hiring and recruitment was needed.
“If there was one more thing that needed to be added, it was more attention to who was being brought into policing and what kind of officers are going to staff police departments going forward,” she said. “That is fundamental.”
Jim Burch, president of the National Police Foundation, described the document as a “compass” for law enforcement. “It’s not like we don’t know what to do,” he said. “It’s just that we haven’t found the courage to do it.”
“It’s not like we don’t know what to do. It’s just that we haven’t found the courage to do it.” Jim Burch president of the National Police Foundation