Lawmakers of color demand more police reform

Following the slaying in Brooklyn Center of another Black man in police custody Sunday, Democratic lawmakers of color are demanding tough new police-accountability laws that, in 2021, the GOP-led Senate has held at bay.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, responded coolly to demands from House Judiciary Chair Jamie Becker-Finn, DFL-Roseville, and others for hearings to pass police reforms that go further than those lawmakers passed in 2020.

Gazelka pledged Tuesday that the Senate would hold hearings, which House Public Safety Vice Chair Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, cautiously considered a good sign. “That’s welcome news,” he said. “We’re glad to hear that, and we’re glad to engage in a conversation.”

Speaking at a Tuesday press conference, Gazelka noted that the double whammy of the ongoing Derek Chauvin trial and Daunte Wright’s death during a Sunday traffic stop have tensions again boiling over. “It feels like it’s a powder keg out there,” he said. “And we have to figure out how to get through it.”

But he would not commit to passing any new legislation, at least not during the current legislative session. The top priority right now, he said, is passage of the constitutionally mandated two-year state budget. Failure to pass one could lead to a government shutdown, he said.

On Tuesday, Senate DFL members of the People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus confronted that possibility head on. They called for the immediate suspension of all budget negotiations until both the House and Senate have adopted police accountability legislation.

‘Fact-finding’ hearings

While Gazelka said Senate hearings will be held in the next two weeks by Senate Transportation Chair Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, and Senate Judiciary Chair Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, he described them more as listening sessions than bill hearings.

“The hearings are for fact-finding at this point,” he said. “We want to listen to where people are on these issues.”

Gazelka went out of his way Tuesday to tamp down expectations for new police-accountability legislation in the near future. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he said. “I’m just saying we’re in the last five weeks and we just started passing the budget bills and that makes things very, very difficult in the short timeframe.”

The selection of Newman and Limmer as leaders of those hearings likely will irritate progressives.

Though Gazelka said the new round of hearings will be held in each chair’s committee, last summer they co-chaired several joint Transportation/Public Safety riot oversight hearings, ostensibly to trace the roots of the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd.

Democrats condemned the process and the report derived from it as political theater. The oversight committee engaged police and political leaders, but heard from few affected community members. It even limited DFL senators’ testimony. What resulted, critics contended, was little more than campaign material for the 2020 elections.

Speaking by phone late Tuesday, House Public Safety Chair Carlos Mariani, DFL-St. Paul, expressed concern that the dynamic that played out through last summer’s oversight hearings could repeat during the upcoming Senate hearings.

“Their dominant posture has been to do nothing, to ask no questions, to not engage in the full conversation,” Mariani said. “Their history tells me that it’s going to be a pretty shallow engagement.”

Frazier said Tuesday that it shouldn’t be necessary for senators to hold new hearings, anyway—if what they are interested in is legislation to protect Black men and other people of color from dangerous police encounters. All they need to do, he said, is consider those proposals, which are in DFL House omnibus bills, in upcoming Public Safety/Judiciary conference committee hearings.

“They have the ability to do that,” Frazier said. “I mean, they need to have the will to do that. But they absolutely have the ability to do that procedurally.”

‘A good kid’

The POCI Caucus and the United Black Legislative Caucus (UBLC) held their own press conference Tuesday to express anger and frustration over Wright’s death, and to demand reform.

“He was a good kid, he did not deserve any of what happened to him,” Rep. Samantha Vang, DFL-Brooklyn Center, chair of the POCI Caucus, said of the 20-year-old Wright. “We will fight for justice for Daunte to change our broken system, which continuously puts Black men in danger.”

Frazier, a freshman legislator and attorney, pointed at Limmer and Gazelka as twin roadblocks to substantive reform. Limmer, in particular, weakened last year’s reforms, Frazier said, and has refused to take up DFL proposals included in this year’s House Public Safety omnibus.

“Let me say this plainly,” Frazier said. “We have to insist that Black lives matter, because after another life was lost, we heard from Senator Limmer—the legislator who worked to weaken reforms last year—that those weakened reforms were enough. They’re not enough.”

Gazelka suggested that those reforms actually were enough. When asked whether it would be necessary to pass substantive laws to avoid re-igniting the powder keg he referenced earlier, Gazelka said, “Absolutely not. I think people need to know the work that has been done.”

At one level, Mariani agreed. It is important, he said, for citizens to understand that the Legislature achieved important strides last summer when it banned chokeholds, required officers to report excessive use of force and made other changes to police policy and practices.

“I’m not sure he [Gazelka] understands what we’ve already done,” Mariani said. “And I’m not sure that the Senate is an authority on telling the public that they’ve done enough.”

During Tuesday’s POCI/UBLC press conference—which Mariani didn’t attend because he was ill—lawmakers called for several key pieces of legislation to be immediately passed.

Among changes not included in existing omnibus bills are:

• Traffic-stop policy. Becker-Finn said her Judiciary committee would hold an April 14 informational hearing on new regulations involving moving violations that don’t impact public safety but nevertheless result in police encounters. Such low-level infractions “are often used as a reason to instigate police interacting with drivers,” Becker-Finn said. She also plans to introduce the bill as an amendment to the forthcoming joint House Public Safety-Judiciary omnibus.
• Traffic cameras. Frazier is pressing legislation that reintroduces traffic enforcement cameras. Those were declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in 2007, though lawmakers occasionally have tried to bring them back. Traffic-enforcement cameras would allow police to focus on matters that actually impact public safety, he said.
• Early warning systems. This Frazier-sponsored legislation would require chief law enforcement officers to report, in real time, certain private data about cops to the Peace Officer Standards and Training Board. The data could help “identify patterns of behavior that suggest an officer is in crisis or is likely to violate a board-mandated model policy,” according to a House Research bill summary.
• Qualified immunity. Rep. John Thompson, DFL-St. Paul, has a bill that would prohibit police officers from invoking qualified immunity in civil proceedings, in some cases. It was not included in the House Public Safety omnibus, but Frazier said it is important legislation that needs to be considered.
• Liability insurance. The omnibus bill contains no measure requiring police to purchase liability insurance—a requirement that could put them out of business if an officer’s conduct makes them an uninsurable risk. However, a late amendment to the House Public Safety omnibus appropriates $100,000 to the Department of Public Safety, to fund a study on the effects to public safety of requiring peace officers to carry liability insurance.

Other POCI Caucus priority measures include:

• Allowing local governments to establish civilian oversight councils.
• Banning the alteration, erasure or destruction of police body-camera recordings and requiring footage be retained.
• Prohibiting peace officers from affiliating with white supremacist groups.
• Providing funding for community crime-prevention organizations.

Asked Tuesday whether he could rule in or out any DFL police-accountability legislation, Gazelka was non-committal.

“We’re going to take a look at that,” he said. “That’s part of the reason I’m saying we want to do some hearings.”