Council members, lawmakers, stiffen your spines. You can make police more accountable.
Protesters have marched. Council members have met. Residents have testified. The bigots have made their views known as well.
It’s enough. We know that police forces everywhere need reforms, and the Lexington Police are no exception. We need to be able to better hold them accountable. It’s fine to say the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd happened in other cities. We have Donovan Stewart and Daezon Morgan and the Lexington police who brutally treated two innocent teenagers at Chase Bank.
Now it’s time for our leaders — council members and state lawmakers — to straighten their spines and get things done.
Yes, a ban, more or less, on no-knock warrants, the practice that allowed Louisville police to enter Breonna Taylor’s apartment without knocking, is a good first step.
But it’s time to delve deeper into the byzantine ways that police officers are disciplined. Yes, it’s complicated, a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of rules and laws that could only have been crafted over many years with the evil genius of government technocrats, elected officials and union bosses.
That has to change.
It started out simple. In 1974, when the charter for merged county government was written, police and all other employees were put under the Civil Service Commission, which would rule over all disciplinary actions of city employees. But a few months later, the Lexington legislative delegation persuaded the legislature to pass a law that exempted police and fire from the new rules and put them back under internal discipline measures used by second-class cities.
By 1980, the legislature had passed the Officers’ Bill of Rights, which has been updated and expanded throughout the years. It deals with numerous angles of police discipline, and contains several of the measures that Lexington protesters want changed, and rightly so, because they hurt the public’s right to know. Then in 2004, the legislature approved collective bargaining, which led to the current contract between the Bluegrass FOP and the city.
As council member Angela Evans said in the marathon city council meeting on Tuesday, the FOP has spent time and money lobbying state legislators to get changes they want.
“The problem is that the disciplinary process that the FOP lobbies for makes it more difficult to get rid of those bad officers,” Evans said. “The way this disciplinary process works is more of a protectionary process than to root out bad officers.”
The people most affected by police brutality don’t have that kind of political clout.
Here’s what has to happen.
The Lexington Urban County Council needs to study (quickly) the issue of no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and stop them altogether. On Friday, Mayor Linda Gorton announced an after-action review of critical incidents after discipline measures are passed by Council, which could lead to better rules and policies. This is a good early step, but not one that provides more transparency to discipline itself. Then they need to persuade the FOP to sit down for contract negotiations, even if there’s no money for police raises, and make changes that people are demanding, such as no longer removing the more minor infraction records out of personnel files after one year and changing the makeup of the internal review board. Council members need to stop worrying about their FOP endorsements, or if the FOP will put up a candidate to oppose them.
That’s also true for lawmakers. The Lexington delegation has done a lot for police over the years but now is not the time to be cowed. Yes, it will be dull and difficult to make changes in the Police Bill of Rights, especially depending on how the November elections go, but it’s time.
“It is absolutely a new day,” said state Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington. “We have to change how we’re doing this because the death toll is too great, the suffering too long and our complicity at this point going forward, untenable.
“The moment rarely comes when there are enough pressures on issues that are systemic ... the particularities with our own police force is facing now have to be answered.”
State Sen. Reggie Thomas, another Lexington Democrat, also said he’s interested in looking at changes to the statute that governs police discipline, such as the requirement that keep cities from commenting on police discipline cases until they are closed.
Most of the time, people who want to reform the police are Democrats who hold very little power in the statehouse. But this time around, the problems that have always been there are so glaring, so terrible, that Republicans are ready to jump in. Sen. Whitney Westerfield, R-Hopkinsville, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said no-knock warrants, body cameras and use of force policies will certainly be up first, including discussions with police themselves.
“I’m not sure that anything is off the table,” he said. “Police officers may not like it, but there’s a lot of evidence and cause for talking about these issues.”
We can’t erase hatred in people’s hearts but we can change laws and rules to make it harder to act on. There are plenty of ways to make progress, so long as we keep pushing our elected officials. It took many years and iPhones for people to recognize that police violence was real and prevalent. Now that it’s recognized, the least we can do is try to stop it.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 10:08 AM.
