Call to Action on Police Reform and Racial Justice

During the apocalyptic summer of 2020, as the COVID pandemic ravaged lives and shut down the economy, we witnessed the gruesome murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, and Americans from all backgrounds came together like never before in a national uprising for racial equity and justice system reform.

It was clearly time to take action. Countless people, mostly from marginalized communities, have needlessly lost their lives from police use of excessive force, but George Floyd’s death served as the flashpoint to spark long-awaited policy changes in police practices.

I could not just sit by in that historic moment. I had already been passionately supporting and working on dismantling the institutional structures that have allowed people of color to be treated as second-class citizens for generations, especially in the criminal legal system.

Listening to Black Americans I have tried to imagine how it feels to be so afraid, angry and tired in a community that has suffered from the legacy of slavery, lynching and segregation. That legacy plays out today in more subtle, insidious ways, through discrimination in housing, health care and education, and especially through over-policing and mass incarceration.

For many years already my principal policy focus has been to bring justice back to the justice system, which I believe is the core civil rights movement of our time. In the wake of the national reckoning on race and policing in 2020, it was important to seize the moment and translate the public outcry into legislative action.

In past legislative sessions I had enacted measures to hold police accountable for unreasonable uses of deadly force, to improve police training and to require independent investigations of police misconduct. However, it was painfully clear that much unfinished business remained.

As Chair of the House Public Safety Committee, I brought together a diverse team of legislators in 2020 to develop a set of reforms related to police accountability, police training and tactics, and police-community relations. In the 2021 legislative session, we enacted the nation’s most comprehensive package of new police accountability laws, addressing questionable police tactics such as chokeholds, the “no-knock” warrant and the use of teargas and military equipment, and establishing for the first time a uniform standard limiting police use of force in encounters with the public. We also strengthened the state’s ability to sanction and decertify police who engage in misconduct and imposed new duties on police to report the misconduct of fellow officers and to intervene when witnessing excessive use of force. We also put important transparency measures in place to track disparities in police stops, searches, arrests and uses of force.

These new laws aroused questions and concerns from police and civic leaders, so in the 2022 session I worked with my colleagues to enact follow-up legislation to ensure that police can respond effectively to mental health crisis calls and protect vulnerable and abused children, and to clarify how police may prevent criminal suspects from fleeing a crime scene. Throughout this process we have stayed true to our intent to reduce needless use of force, to ensure equitable treatment of all communities and to uphold the policing profession itself.

Our policy work around police practices has highlighted the need to re-imagine public safety. We may depend on armed officers to run into the danger for us where criminal activity threatens life and limb, but police cannot effectively serve every function to preserve community safety, especially the timely and compassionate response to people suffering from mental health crisis. We are now devoting more resources toward mental health, housing and support for youth and community organizations, but substantial work remains and I’m committed to promoting public safety by addressing persistent social and racial inequities and investing in all communities.