Md. Bill Would Require Uniform Reports When Police Agencies Kill Civilians
Del. Washington’s bill requiring reporting on police homicides passes the General Assembly.
When Marion Gray-Hopkins saw a recent ACLU report saying that at least 109 people had died after encounters with police in Maryland over a recent four-year period, she “went into a funk.”
Gray-Hopkins, whose son died in 1999 after being shot by a Prince George’s County police officer, said it was disheartening to see that so many others suffered the same fate as her child.
“The numbers tell the story,” said Gray-Hopkins, 58. “Hopefully this will ring off in someone’s heads that this is an issue.”
The Maryland mother is one of many backing a bill making its way through the General Assembly that supporters say would make those numbers and stories easier to find. House Bill 954 would require law enforcement agencies in the state to report when civilians are killed by a police officers in the course of their duties and generate an annual report analyzing the figures.
The proposed legislation, scheduled for a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday afternoon, aims to create a uniform way of counting how many people die during interactions with police and make it easier to spot problems and identify trends, said Del. Alonzo T. Washington (D-Prince George’s), the bill’s lead sponsor. The proposal recently passed a vote on the House floor, 98 to 42.
“It is taking us in the right direction in transparency and accountability,” Washington said. “With this piece of legislation, we’ll see a better relationship between the community and the police department.”
The bill is just one of many police-accountability measures before state lawmakers after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York heightened concerns over police encounters with civilians. The national controversies also highlighted the fact that no reliable national data exists to track how many people are killed by police officers.
Last month, the ACLU of Maryland released a report stating that 109 people in the state died in police-involved homicides between 2010 and 2014. The report determined that about 69 percent who died were black even though they make up just 29 percent of Maryland’s population. The report also found that 41 percent were unarmed.
“When we don’t track these cases and don’t look at what has happened, we are treating these as inevitable,” said ACLU attorney Sonia Kumar, who wrote the report. “There’s clearly room for improvement and opportunities to learn to prevent future deaths.”
Kumar said that in the midst of the research, the ACLU realized how difficult it is to track and count these types of killings. Much of the existing data is based on news reports, news releases or sources that may not give the complete picture, she said.
Vince Canales, president of the Maryland State Fraternal Order of Police, said his union, representing more than 200,000 people, hasn’t taken an official stand on the bill. But he said that the state already collects adequate data from law enforcement and that several safeguards are in place to screen police-involved homicides. And each case cited in the ACLU’s report, he said, was screened by local or federal prosecutors, he said.
“We think the bill is redundant, but we understand it,” Canales said. “It’s a transparency bill.”
Del. Deborah Rey (R-St. Mary’s), one of five House Judiciary Committee members who voted against the bill, worried that its requirement to compile data going back 10 years could be a waste of time and money.
“It does take manpower to re-create these things,” Rey said.
The ACLU report tried to find comparison data for its report and used FBI statistics as the closest measure. FBI data from 2012 shows that Maryland was the sixth highest for police-involved homicides among the 39 states reporting. But, Kumar and Washington warn, the statistics include only justifiable homicides and do not include all law enforcement agencies.
“Having a large searchable database will give us a better understanding of these encounters, result in better training and consequently,” Washington said, “fewer dead people and police.”
It is too late for Gray-Hopkins’s son.
Gary Hopkins, 19, was at a party in 1999 when a fight started. Shortly after, a police cruiser arrived, blocking a vehicle Hopkins was riding in. Hopkins climbed out of the car’s window and was shot. Witness were divided as to whether an officer put a gun to the college student’s head during the fracas or whether there was a struggle for the officer’s gun. The officer was acquitted after a bench trial, but Gray-Hopkins won a $200,000 settlement from the county four years later.
“It is important to see these numbers,” Gray-Hopkins said about House Bill 954, “because until people see something in black and white, they can assume it is not an issue.”
Source: The Washington Post
Author: Lynh Bui
Date: April 1, 2015