This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. March 3, 2020, for additional information about the vote.
The Montgomery County Council was evenly split on Tuesday on whether to delay a landmark bill on guidelines and reporting requirements for community policing. The bill was put on hold and will come back before the council later.
The legislation, introduced in October, requires county police officers to increase their outreach to the community, ensure “cultural competency” within the department and provide training in “de-escalation tactics.” It also requires the police department to provide an annual report with statistics such as the number of times officers used force and how many times the use of force led to an injury.
The amended version of the bill leaves out a provision that would have expanded the county’s school resource officer program, in which sworn law enforcement officers work in Montgomery County Public Schools. The council’s Public Safety Committee voted 2-0 on Feb. 24 to proceed without that expansion.
Council Vice President Tom Hucker and Council Members Hans Riemer, Will Jawando and Evan Glass voted Tuesday to table the bill on the first motion and to do more work on it.
Council President Sidney Katz and Council Members Craig Rice, Gabe Albornoz and Andrew Friedson voted to oppose the delay and wanted to proceed. Council Member Nancy Navarro was not at the meeting.
After the 4-4 deadlock on the first motion, the council voted on a second motion to table and it passed 8-0.
Rice later explained that he made the second motion to table because only those who voted on the “victorious” side of a motion can bring it back for further consideration. He anticipates that Navarro will be present when the measure comes back to the council for more discussion.
Rice, a lead sponsor of the bill, said during the meeting that it represents what the “communities of color have been talking about for a very long time.”
“I find it offensive and objectionable when people who don’t look like me, who don’t have the same experience as me, want to tell me what I should do when it comes to shaping the relationship that I think I need to have between my community and my police officers,” he said.
Rice, who is black, said that when he was younger, police stopped him on his way home and questioned him for no reason. People who say there isn’t a need for the bill are wrong, he said.
“It is about turning the tide and making a difference so that we say our police work with us and for us,” he said. “So stop it, people who are trying to wedge a divide between police and people of color. We need them just as much as white people do.”
The community policing bill is the latest of the council’s police reform following controversies in the last few years, including the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Silver Spring in 2018 and the use of a racial slur by a white police officer toward four black men at a McDonald’s in White Oak last year.
In December, the council passed a bill that creates a police advisory commission with the power to propose new policies and programs, and to advise on police matters. Last May, the council passed legislation that would require a law enforcement agency outside Montgomery County to conduct an investigation into any officer-involved shooting.
Albornoz agreed that the bill is important for moving community policing in a positive direction.
Some council members wanted more details or time for other legislation to run its course.
Glass said the Law Enforcement Trust Act, Police Advisory Commission and Racial Equity and Social Justice Act, approved over the last 14 months, should be fully integrated before adding new legislation.
“I’d like to see the process work itself out. … We have a 13-person Police Advisory Commission that has not yet been established,” Glass said. “But for a Police Advisory Commission to not be a part of a community policing bill, I think, is a misstep.”
Jawando and Riemer also spoke in favor of postponing the bill.
Jawando said he requested several police data studies and would like to see the results first.
“At this point, in light of every single person who came to testify in the public hearing meeting against this bill, I think it would be prudent to pause and get some of this data and requests back before we move forward,” he said.
A number of social justice groups, including the NAACP, LGBTQ Democrats of Montgomery County and the Silver Spring Justice Coalition, opposed an earlier version that would have expanded the presence of police officers in schools. Individual parents also spoke against the expansion, citing bad experiences their children had with law enforcement.
During a public hearing in January, activists lobbied for the exclusion of the school resource officer clause, holding signs that said “Kids need counselors, not cops.” They cited a study from the American Civil Liberties Union that found dozens of times children were referred to school resource officers for misbehavior.
Other elements of the current version of the bill include:
- Having the police chief designate a “liaison” for each population that is “disproportionately impacted by inequities.”
- Providing more mental health and youth development programs
- Requiring the police department to report on demographics about the police department’s officers, as well as the county’s detainee population
- Requiring the department to report each year how many officers were suspended with and without pay.
- Requiring the department to report the number of complaints from residents about alleged discrimination, harassment and use of force
Briana Adhikusuma can be reached at briana.adhikusuma@moco360.media
Dan Schere can be reached at daniel.schere@moco360.media
