Out of 100 police departments surveyed on five reform measures, only KCPD met none
Demonstrators protesting the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers have held various positions — some have called for reforms of policing methods, some want police budgets to be slashed and still others prefer to see law enforcement abolished altogether.
Whatever the demand may be, the protests seem to have finally pushed police departments to make substantial changes to policing protocols, at least in the big cities, after years of stone-walling.
An exclusive McClatchy survey of the police departments in the 100 biggest American cities found that 40 police forces have made at least one change to their use of force policy, including the use of deadly or lethal force, in June — after protests rocked the nation.
The Kansas City Police Department is the only one among the 100 McClatchy reviewed that did not meet any of the five criteria put forth by the nonprofit Campaign Zero on rules surrounding the reporting of use of force and shooting at moving vehicles, the application of all kinds of neck restraints, the issuance of warnings before officers resorted to deadly force and the exhaustion of all other options before using deadly force.
“I think there are political dynamics here in Kansas City which continue to shield the KCPD from the kind of pressure and the kind of accountability that is necessary in order to bring the changes and reform that we here at SCLC have been demanding for years,” said the Rev. Vernon P. Howard Jr., senior pastor at St. Mark Union Church and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City.
“We do not feel that there is sufficient pressure from city government, sufficient pressure from the Police Board of Commissioners to hold KCPD accountable and to hold the Chief [of police Rick Smith] accountable.”
Kansas City police have previously argued that they implemented some of the measures in different forms, though their policies do not match the criteria laid out by Campaign Zero. For example, officers are not authorized to use chokeholds but the department uses the Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint, a different hold invented in Kansas City.
Sgt. Jake Becchina, a spokesman for the department, said Campaign Zero is free to interpret how any department adheres to their criteria.
“We can’t make them count us as adhering or not adhering, but we are happy to share what we do when it comes to those things,” he said.
At the Board of Police Commissioners meeting last month, Maj. Greg Dull said some of the disagreement arose with the campaign’s “absolute language, the ‘all or never’ verbiage.”
Tampa, Hialeah and Orlando police departments are the Florida agencies which have announced changes to their use of force protocols, including the controversial carotid hold which cuts off blood supply to the brain. The City of Miami Police Department had already prohibited it earlier this year.
Fresno and Sacramento police departments are among 11 departments in California which have made changes to their policies. Law enforcement agencies in the state have rushed to make revisions after Gov. Gavin Newsom came out in support of a bill aimed at tightening restrictions around uses of force and decertified the carotid hold — making departments still using it vulnerable to litigation. The Los Angeles Police Department had already prohibited neck restraints.
Raleigh and Winston-Salem in North Carolina, Lincoln and Omaha in Nebraska and Oakland, California have announced that their entire use of force policies were being reviewed.
Police departments in two cities — Columbus, Ohio and Aurora, Colorado — acknowledged, when asked by McClatchy, that the protests had at least some role to play in the revisions to their protocols.
The New York Police Department, recently under fire for its aggressive approach in cracking down on Black Lives Matter protesters and with its history of excessive use of force, did not respond to McClatchy’s requests for information. Nor does it post its policies online.
Kara Gross, the legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Florida chapter, said that police departments are finally waking up and “listening to their communities” but more concrete measures need to be enacted to ensure officers are held accountable for their actions.
“If people aren’t held accountable for their actions, then this is nothing more than lip service,” she said.
McClatchy’s findings come on the back of Democrats passing a sweeping police reform bill in the House last week. The bill, which now heads to the Senate — and is expected to be blocked by the GOP — bans chokeholds, no-knock warrants in drug raids, mandates data collection on police encounters, and makes it easier to pursue legal claims against law enforcement officers.
“For far too long, Black Americans have endured systemic racism and discrimination — especially from police,” said Rep. Karen Bass (D-California), who had introduced the bill with her colleagues of the Democratic Black Caucus, in a public statement after its passage.
“Congress may have written this bill, but the people own it.”
Changes in policy
In its survey of 100 police departments, McClatchy found:
Police forces in 30 cities had already banned or restricted the use of neck restraints — including chokeholds, strangleholds, vascular neck restraints and carotid holds — to only situations where deadly force was permitted. After the protests, departments in 23 more cities, including in Hialeah, Florida and Sacramento, California, joined them. The policies of 12 more are being reviewed.
Five police departments — Durham, North Carolina, Houston, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, Tampa, Florida and Omaha, Nebraska — joined 43 others in explicitly stating that officers must exhaust all other options before resorting to deadly force.
Twelve police departments changed their policy and now require officers to issue a verbal warning before resorting to deadly force. Eight of them, including those of Tampa, Florida and Durham, North Carolina, have an officer-linked fatality rate higher than the national average, according to data on police-linked homicides compiled by Campaign Zero.
Police forces in 18 cities had policies that restricted officers from shooting at moving vehicles unless the suspect was threatening to cause harm with means other than the vehicle itself. Five departments — among them Fresno, California — have enacted the same policy since the protests and six more, including Raleigh, North Carolina are reviewing their protocols regarding shooting at vehicles.
Thirty-one police departments have rules that include the mere pointing of a firearm or less lethal weapon like a TASER as a reportable use of force. Tampa Police Department and four other departments have introduced rules to adopt the same policy. Three other departments are reviewing their policies.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREHow we did this story
Roughly three weeks after demonstrations protesting George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths at the hands of police officers erupted across the United States, McClatchy asked the police departments in the 100 biggest American cities for information regarding their operating procedures. The aim: to see whether recent public outcry had any impact on the policies and regulations surrounding police uses of force.
McClatchy gave the departments six days to respond. Fifty-four of the departments responded to McClatchy’s request for information. Thirty-three did not respond but McClatchy reviewed the latest version of their policy manuals or press releases posted online on their website or latest news reports about them. The remaining 13 either did not respond at all and do not post policies online or they upgraded the media request to a public records request and asked for more time — those were excluded from the analysis.
What were the criteria used in the survey?
To carry out a uniform analysis across the different police departments, McClatchy set a stringent baseline first put forth by the nonprofit, Campaign Zero. The questions McClatchy evaluated were:
Are all types of neck restraints including, chokeholds, strangleholds and carotid restraints, explicitly prohibited, except in situations where deadly force is authorized?
Are officers required to give a verbal warning, when possible, before resorting to deadly force?
Are officers prohibited from shooting at occupants of moving vehicles unless the subject presents a separate deadly threat other than the vehicle itself?
Are all uses of force required to be reported, including the mere pointing of a firearm?
Are officers explicitly required to exhaust all other reasonable alternatives before resorting to deadly force?
If the latest policy of any police department did not meet any of these requirements, they were noted as not having made any substantial change.
Police unions
The political clout law enforcement unions enjoy and use to stonewall reforms has been the subject of controversy time and again.
A McClatchy analysis of campaign finance data compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics and MapLight, shows that at the federal level, police unions and their employees have contributed roughly $1.9 million from the 2010 to 2018 election cycles with roughly equal shares going to both parties.
The unions also spent around $9.1 million lobbying Capitol Hill, the White House, the Justice Department and other agencies from 2010 to present day.
Police unions in Florida spent at least $3.8 million in campaign contributions for state election candidates while those in California spent roughly $11 million from 2010 to 2019.
The Rev. Bryson White, faith leadership coordinator with Faith in the Valley, a faith-based community organization, said that while Fresno’s recent ban on the chokehold and other changes by other police departments are welcome, it is not a victory since it “doesn’t get to the root cause of police violence.”
White said that a major victory for him would be for politicians to renounce and send back campaign contributions they receive from the police unions. According to White, accepting those contributions, once elected, “will limit their ability to hold the police department accountable.”
“Why do they believe that it’s OK for officers to kill people who are mostly predominantly black and brown people?” White asked. “They need to be held accountable for that.”
Like White, ACLU Florida’s Kara Gross said that “cracking down on law enforcement’s excessive use of force tactics is only as effective as the accountability measures in place.”
“It is not a case of a few bad apples, the current system is rotten at its core.”
The Star’s Katie Bernard, Katie Moore and Anna Spoerre contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
