6 Places Where Police Reform Is Going Straight to the Voters

[brooklynite]

Politico

It took just days for the national anguish over the killing of George Floyd to generate calls for change in American policing — from broad slogans like “abolish the police” to detailed proposals about qualified immunity and funding structures — but it took months for those ideas to shape themselves into a clear political agenda.

Now, heading into November, a handful of cities and counties will be voting on police reform ballot measures that could pave the way for bigger changes across the country.

As public confidence in law enforcement has dipped to its lowest level since the 1990s, the environment for criminal justice reform seems particularly ripe. But reformers have collided with the tricky politics of law and order and familiar obstacles such as police unions, which have fought to stifle quick legislative action at the local level across the country. These ballot measures offer advocates for reform an opportunity to circumvent lawmakers and make changes to their police.

Nowhere is outright abolition of policing being considered this fall, although there have been a few serious attempts. A Cincinnati lawmaker tried and failed to get a measure before voters to replace their police department with a public safety department. In Minneapolis, the city council’s plan to dismantle its police department won’t be put before voters until at least 2021. And in Glynn County, Ga., where Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by a former police officer and his son in February, the state Legislature passed a series of bills to allow the county’s voters to decide whether or not to abolish their police department, only for a state judge to rule such a referendum unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Philadelphia, Akron and Seattle, voters will get to decide on some pioneering changes to the way their policing systems work. These six cities aren’t the only places with police reform on the ballot, but they are the most notable for their scale, boldness or their locations, some of which have been in the spotlight throughout the summer for ongoing unrest. A few proposed changes are big, such as one proposal to shift millions of dollars away from law enforcement and to community services and programs in the most populous county in the country; others are smaller, such as a symbolic rejection of stop-and-frisk policing on the street. But like all ballot measures, if passed, these reforms might be just the beginning; they can provide a potential model for legislation later and elsewhere.

[onetexan]

1. K&R