In response to resounding calls for racial justice, the Senate’s S.2800 An Act to Reform Police Standards and Shift Resources to Build a More Equitable, Fair and Just Commonwealth that Values Black Lives and Communities of Color—the *Reform, Shift + Build Act*—proposes a number of reforms. The bill is a product of the Senate’s Racial Justice Working Group on which I’ve been proud to serve at the request of the Senate President.
You can also download a summary of the bill here.
The bill seeks to:
- Encourage the use of de-escalation techniques by police officers
- Foreground work to better resource mental health and substance use crisis response
- Increase police accountability
- Combat instances of racial violence and racism
The bill:
- Narrows legal authorization for use of force
(Note: All of the use of force standards in the bill provide an exception for instances where there is imminent harm to the officer or another person. See Section 2 under SECTION 55 of the bill)
- Eliminates an individual escaping as a justification for use of deadly force by an officer
- Restricts the ability to grant no-knock warrants to judges, not magistrates, and restricts the justification for granting a no-knock warrant to situations in which the lives of the officers or of others will be in danger if it is not granted
- Restricts the use of crowd control tools to situations in which individuals are in imminent danger, and de-escalation techniques have been exhausted
- Encourages officers to use de-escalation techniques throughout the entirety of their interaction with an individual to handle the situation safely
- Creates a statewide police certification authority in the form of the Police Officer Standards and Accreditation Committee (POSAC)
- POSAC receives and investigates misconduct complaints
- POSAC can decertify police officers
- Maintains a disclosure database of complaints against police officers (Note: No personal information besides the name of the officer is included in this database)
- Eliminates the legal defense of qualified immunity
- Qualified immunity is an important defense that shields police officers and all public employees from personal liability in civil lawsuits unless they violate ‘clearly established’ legal principles.
- The bill only bars qualified immunity if no reasonable defendant could have had reason to believe at the time that such conduct would violate the law. It is a bit of a higher standard, but still accounts for situations where the current state of the law is really murky. See SECTION 10 of the bill
- Prohibits the use of NDAs in police misconduct settlements
- Addresses state police reform
- Allows Governor to select colonel from outside
- Creates state police cadet program
- Creates a task force to review all aspects of body camera use and make recommendations for a uniform code
- Establishes transparency on military equipment acquisitions by police departments through required disclosures to local legislative bodies and requests for approval to one of three cabinet secretaries
- Expands community-based mental health interventions
- Eliminates a mandatory school resource officer and allows the decision to be made by the school superintendent
- Issues a ban on the use of racial profiling
- Requires data collection including measures of race and ethnicity for all police stops
- Creates a Commission on the Status of African-Americans that will make policy recommendations to to the Legislature and Executive Agencies
- Allows POSAC to order an investigation into a complaint of officer misconduct by the officer’s appointing authority or conduct an independent investigation of the complaint
- POSAC will conduct an independent investigation of any officer misconduct that, if sustained, would result in revocation of certification
- In any investigations regarding a complaint, an officer has the right to request formal hearings, be present with legal counsel at said hearings, and submit materials or testimony regarding the complaint
- See SECTION 6, S225 for a full list of justifications for revoking an officer’s certification
- Any decisions by POSAC of revocation of certification are appealable pursuant to Chapter 30A of the General Laws
