By Lauren Young, Midwest Daily News
The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Mass.
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — Massachusetts police chiefs say state legislators are threatening the safety of police officers and the public after years of all but ignoring pubic safety officials.
“Law enforcement in Massachusetts is under attack by a liberal element that wants to bring shame (to police officers) that none of us understand,” Hampden Police Chief Jeff Farnsworth, president of the Police Chief’s Association, said on Tuesday.
Massachusetts police have led the way in model policing standards in the United States for years – but those efforts haven’t been acknowledged by legislators. In fact, police feel they’ve been ignored, said Farnsworth.
“As leaders, we can stand here today and tell you, ‘the legislation will not make us safer,’” he said. Farnsworth was joined by nearly 100 of Massachusetts’ 351 police chiefs on Tuesday morning in Framingham to criticize two police reform bills that were recently moved forward by the Senate and House. The chiefs appealed to Gov. Charlie Baker and state legislators to ask they work with police on the legislation, instead of cutting them out of the conversation.
“Let’s look at Massachusetts and not be overshadowed by the stories and issues going on 200, 500, 1,000 miles away,” said Farnsworth. “Let’s look at what we do here.”
On July 14, the Massachusetts senate introduced a police reform bill limiting use of force tactics, which includes banning chokeholds and limiting tear gas use. It also includes licensing all police officers and developing a new independent commission - the Police Officer Standards and Accreditation Committee - to certify all law enforcement officers and renew, revoke or modify those licenses.
Massachusetts is one of few states that does not have a statewide law enforcement certification program.
On Sunday, the Massachusetts House released its own police reform bill, which includes the state’s first-ever police certification process and makes training more uniform across the state. It also proposed to link qualified immunity for police to the licensing process and revoke immunity in a case that leads to an officer being de-certified.
The bills come weeks after nationwide public protests were ignited by police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. Legislators are aiming to pass these reforms before the end of the legislative session on July 31, and chiefs say the bills are being rushed.
Police in Massachusetts haven’t been trained to use chokeholds in years, said Farnsworth. Qualified immunity, which protects police officers from civil lawsuits in misconduct cases, is a complicated process and is mostly misunderstood, he said.
“But what I can tell you, is if an officer acts egregiously outside the bounds of law and operates recklessly, qualified immunity is not protecting him,” he said. “Try to find two lawyers right now who will agree on what qualified immunity is, but our legislature thinks they’re going to fix qualified immunity in 10 days?”
The bills could also be extremely costly to municipalities, said Farnsworth, and will abolish current police training standards."Police equals safety – these (Senate and House) bills will reduce our ability to effectively police and protect our commonwealth,” he said
Instead, he said police chiefs support the Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) system put forth by Gov. Baker, and ask that this legislation be brought to the forefront instead of what is being proposed by the Senate and House."We in law enforcement in Massachusetts have led the way – everything being talked about now has been going (on) since 2013, before any place in the country had done it. But yet, we get no credit for that. At all,” said Natick Police Chief James Hicks, the chair of the Municipal Police Training Committee.
Hicks said the voices of officers have been neglected for years by legislators, and was frustrated that they were, again, not consulted before the legislation was written.
Since 2010, de-escalation and community policing has been taught to new recruits, and in 2015, they started training officers on procedural justice and handling those with mental illness or under emotional distress, Hicks said.
This was well before the incidents of police brutality in Ferguson and Minneapolis, he said.
“What I’ve seen in this bill is very disappointing,” he said, noting his confusion over how training for officers will look in September. He said he is unsure about what to do with training plans police already have in place.
“It’s ridiculous what’s taking place,” said Yarmouth Chief of Police Frank Frederickson, citing the years of negativity toward police. “Who’s writing all this stuff, I don’t know. It’s like they took a bunch of garbage and threw it in one bill. They’re trying to make some sense of it and seem to think that’s going to solve every problem in our country, starting with police officers. We all know what that is. It’s pandering, and it’s not right.”
He’s sick of being hold a “hard conversation” needs to be had with police officers, Frederickson said, because they all deal with hard decisions every day.
“Wanna know about a difficult conversation? Why don’t you go at 2 o’clock in the morning behind some business with some naked man with a knife that’s out of his mind! Talk about a hard conversation,” he said. “That’s hard, and you make the right decision. Our men and women do that every day and you never hear about it because it ends successfully."Police officers are the professionals when it comes to law enforcement, Franklin Police Chief Lynch told the Daily News, and said it’s frustrating when their voices are being silenced over those who aren’t.
“This whole thing has been extremely rushed,” he said. “We want to be part of the process, but that’s not what’s going on right now.”
©2020 The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Mass.