Public Safety Committee Hearings
Last Saturday and Monday of this week, the Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee held hearings for 12 hours on three major proposals packages containing 19 separate bills to reform police departments.
Special Session House File 1 (HF 1) addresses use of force, investigations, prosecution, and bail restrictions. Specifically, it would take authority to prosecute all officer-involved death cases away from County Attorneys and give it to the Attorney General, create a new unit in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate officer-involved death cases, increase the standard for a peace officer to use deadly force from apparent risk of death or great bodily harm to self or another to imminent risk of death or great bodily harm, and require courts to use a presumption of release of a defendant on personal recognizance instead of money bail in most misdemeanor cases.
Special Session House File 2 (HF 2) makes changes to the admissibility of critical incident stress management for emergency service providers in court, appropriates money for community-led public safety grants, creates critical incident review teams, requires use of force reporting to the FBI, and requires every peace officer in the state to be trained in interactions with persons with autism.
The final bill, Special Session House File 3 (HF 3), mandates local Law Enforcement Citizen Oversight Councils for agencies of 50 or more officers, makes complaints against peace officers public data, retroactively removes the statute of limitations for lawsuits against a peace officer for sexual abuse or death of a person caused by a peace officer, prohibits choke holds, hog-tie holds, and “warrior-style training”, and implements a duty to intercede when another peace officer is using unreasonable force. Additionally, it makes changes to peace officer grievance arbitration, requires guidelines for positive community interactions, and allows the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to implement residency requirements for police officers.
Unfortunately, all of these bills are lacking fiscal notes, so we don't have a clear picture of just how much they will all cost. There are aspects of these bills that I do support, like the duty to intercede, banning chokeholds and changes to arbitration so departments can fire officers who violate laws and training standards, but other pieces of these bills are problematic. We do need to take a hard look at use of force and other issues, but we need to do so thoughtfully, to increase public safety and make real change, without just supporting policies that sound good on paper but don't accomplish their stated goals.
HF 1 would have the state come in and take power away from duly-elected County Attorneys. It requires the Attorney General, a partisan office, to take over all prosecutions for officer-involved deaths. While proponents claim that the Minnesota County Attorneys Association supports it, the process they went through to arrive at that decision involved only 26 counties voting on whether to support or oppose the provision. In the end, 16 (mostly metro-area) counties voted to support the provision, and 10 voted against it. When taken in the context of all 87 counties, many of which are rural, I don't think this decision represents the perspective of the majority of county attorneys. The Pine County Attorney, Reese Fredrickson, had this to say about the decision:
"County attorneys are elected to make these tough decisions. Where there is any conflict or appearance of conflict, we transfer our cases to a neighboring county because we have faith in each other as prosecutors. I’ve unfortunately handled a few cases where law enforcement was the accused for other counties - I’ve never once been accused of handling these cases unfairly, and people throughout the system have been satisfied with the results. As officers of the court, we are trusted with keeping bias or an appearance of bias out of the system."
During the committee hearing on HF 2, I was extremely disappointed that the author amended the bill to remove peer-to-peer counseling and stress management for officers. Maintaining good mental health is a key piece of having officers who can exercise sound judgment and connect to the community, and stress management and peer-to-peer counseling are an important part of that.
HF 2 also includes a provision to allow felons who have been released from incarceration to vote, even if they are still serving probation. The argument I've heard for doing this is that probationary sentences can be very long and result in voting rights being taken away for extremely long periods of time. However, in Minnesota the Sentencing Guidelines Commission has already capped probation at five years for most crimes. Felonies are serious crimes that have serious consequences, and probation periods are a part of those consequences. And in the end, this is a police reform bill, not an elections bill, and it should contain provisions only relevant to police reform.
In HF 3, there is yet another unfunded mandate on local governments. Under this bill, every law enforcement agency in the state with 50 or more officers would be mandated to design and implement an oversight board with no guidance from the state on who should be on it, how many members it should have, what sort of expertise is required to be a member, or any other aspect of the board. This undefined board would have power over duly-elected sheriffs and appointed Chiefs, subpoena power, and the ability to conduct investigations, even if they have no legal authority or expertise. They would also have the power to compel the chief officer to appear before the board to explain if they do not implement the board's recommendations. This is too much power to give an unelected board with potentially no legal or law enforcement expertise, and could be extremely problematic.
Additionally, HF 3 would set up a Police Community Relations Council, which could impose mandates on the Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Board through a simple majority vote of the Council. The Council's membership is only required to have 5 members with expertise or experience in law enforcement, and the other 10 members would be appointed by various outside groups. This council would essentially have lawmaking authority, since their recommendations would be binding upon the POST Board, which licenses all of the law enforcement officers in the state, unless a supermajority of the POST Board votes to overturn the recommendation.
HF3 also fails to properly define "warrior training", and could be applied improperly to ban any training that includes instruction that increases the likelihood of using deadly force. How would this work if an officer was receiving SWAT training for example? Instead of specifically talking about combat-type training that dehumanizes opponents and does not value civil rights, which I think we can all agree is a bad thing, the standard in the bill prohibits any training that "increases the likelihood that an officer will use deadly force", which could arguably be any training. Being a police officer is an inherently dangerous job, and this provision could result in officers being ill-equipped to handle the danger they come into contact with every day.
Each of these bills contains "poison pills". The past has shown that we can do really good work if we all put partisanship aside and make informed, well-thought out decisions. Unfortunately, these bills are being rushed through the process without adequate input and include policies that need more examination and fine-tuning before they can be implemented in a way that will increase public safety.
|
