"What I’d like to see is police not just taking a knee but standing in support of systemic, sustainable police reform," a policing consultant said.
He’s seen it happen as the police chief in Long Beach, California, then in Oakland, California, and finally in Baltimore, when his efforts to reform the city’s police department ended with a 2015 uprising triggered by the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a neck injury while in police custody.
Story continuesBut in recent days, departments have responded in ways that jeopardized that limited progress on reform. That includes clashes in which officers may have violated protesters’ — and journalists’ — constitutional rights; Amnesty International USA has accused police of using excessive force against some protesters, endangering their lives and restricting free speech.
These circumstances call for a nuanced approach by police, a strategy that has been embraced by authorities in Europe, policing experts said. It involves viewing a demonstration not as a homogenous crowd but as a mix of different types of people who require different responses: maintaining dialogue with the peaceful ones, and targeting the destructive ones with arrests. The multilayered approach requires officers in plainclothes, ordinary uniform and riot gear.
Baltimore police followed that advice at the start of the protests against Gray’s death in April 2015, sending officers into the streets without riot gear and with orders not to use tear gas or rubber bullets. Batts, who’d been recruited for the Baltimore job after a rocky tenure trying to fix the scandal-plagued Oakland Police Department, cast himself as an enlightened reformer.
The more measured responses in some cities, he said, reflect new thinking about community policing that spread in the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore.
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