Scaled-Back MA Police-Reform Bill Awaits Final Approval
Lily Bohlke – Commonwealth News Service
BOSTON — Massachusetts is on the verge of joining the 36 other states that have independent, civilian-led commissions in charge of decertifying police officers who violate conduct standards.
An updated police reform bill now is in the House of Representatives, after state senators last week agreed to a pair of amendments that Gov. Charlie Baker said would prevent a veto. One scales back a ban on law-enforcement use of facial-recognition software. Another removes regulatory power over “use of force” standards from a civilian-led commission.
Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights in Boston, said the changes could allow instances of police misconduct to continue unchecked.
“There’s a concern that Gov. Charlie Baker’s amendments are really designed to dilute key provisions in the police reform bill,” he said, “for example, the standards and definitions of what constitutes ‘use of force.’
Espinoza-Madrigal had hoped the General Court would put a veto-proof majority together to avoid the changes. He noted that police officers do hard work, and said that’s all the more reason to make sure they’re held accountable for conduct violations.
The reform bill, S-2963, has been in the works since the videotaped police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer, as many Bostonians demanded local cases of police brutality be reopened. Espinoza-Madrigal said Lawyers for Civil Rights has a case pending over the 2016 fatal shooting of Terrence Coleman, a young Black man with a disability who was killed while his mother was trying to get him the mental-health care he needed.
“We’ve been waiting for police reform in Boston since even before George Floyd’s murder,” he said, “and George Floyd’s murder highlights the urgency of these reforms.”
Regardless of what happens on Beacon Hill, he said, groups such as his will continue to take legal action on behalf of victims of police violence.