It was a dramatic development that highlighted the impact protest can have on policy. On Wednesday afternoon, citing George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, Gov. Charlie Baker filed legislation to create what’s known as a POST system in Massachusetts.
The acronym stands for “Peace Officer Standards and Training,” and refers to a statewide framework for certifying police officers — and de-certifying them, if they do their jobs poorly, or in a way that puts the public at risk.
Almost every other state already has a POST system in place. As he unveiled his bill, Baker said it’s past time for Massachusetts to follow suit.
“The [legislative] session ends on July 31,” he said at a press conference Wednesday. “It is critically important that by the time that session ends, we have a certification process that can stand up to the integrity, creativity, imagination and aspirations of the people here in Massachusetts.”
Among other things, Baker’s announcement was a victory for the state’s Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, which identified a POST system as one of four state-level priorities at a press conference earlier this month. The group has been discussing POST with Baker for months, and its members flanked the governor during Wednesday’s announcement.
With Baker, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Karen Spilka all signaling support for the idea, it’s hard to imagine POST not becoming a reality in the not-too-distant future. There’s a caveat, however: according to state representative Russell Holmes, who’s pushed for a POST system for years, the state’s various police unions still need some convincing.
“They feel like we’ve been having this conversation without them in the room,” Holmes said earlier this week, after he and other lawmakers met with police-union representatives. “And it’s unacceptable to them that we continue a conversation of this nature, particularly when you’re going to be impacting the lives of so many of the officers of the commonwealth."
“They should be in the room and they should be in every discussion,” he added. “And they should be at the front of those discussions, not at the end.”
What’s more, Holmes says, police want sufficient representation on any body that can de-certify an officer. Baker’s bill would place seven civilians and seven representatives from law enforcement on the POST board.
Still, Holmes adds, the fact that police are open to expanded oversight at all is a significant change in and of itself.
“For 10 years or so, the POST legislation has been something that they’ve been fundamentally against,” he said.
Right now, though, police in Massachusetts aren’t just being asked to accept greater oversight. They’re also being pushed to fundamentally alter their use of force.
“I believe that we have to demilitarize the police,” said State Rep. Liz Miranda (D-Boston), whose bill limiting police use of violent and deadly force is another Black and Latino Legislative Caucus priority.
Demilitarization, as Miranda describes it, means banning the use of things like tear gas, rubber bullets and attack dogs. Her bill would also ban choke holds, mandate the use of de-escalation techniques and require intervention if an officer sees a colleague acting dangerously.
“Officers should not be watching and doing nothing when they see bad actors on their forces do things that are inappropriate and illegal,” she said.
Miranda says her bill has been well received, and the governor actually included intervention and de-escalation components in his new legislation, though the details of his proposals differ from hers.
So far, though, Baker hasn’t backed the other changes Miranda is suggesting. He also has yet to explicitly endorse the two other state-level proposals on the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus’s wish list: a new commission to investigate how systemic racism shapes the criminal justice system, and major changes to the way police officers are hired.
“This has been a longstanding goal in communities of color,” said State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Boston), who chairs the Senate’s new advisory group on racial justice, “to have law enforcement agencies that look, speak, and are culturally competent for the communities that they are sworn to protect and serve.”
But changing civil-service practices could mean reducing or eliminating preferences for veterans, which may be politically unpalatable. Meanwhile, a deep dive into racism and criminal justice might strike some lawmakers as overly theoretical — or, perhaps, the sort big endeavor that’s easy to put off until later, when things settle down a bit.
And as Chang-Diaz notes, the longer it takes for Beacon Hill to act, the less likely action becomes.
“That is how, most often, proposals having to do with racial justice die,” she said. “It’s not that someone stands up and says, ‘I don’t support racial justice.’ It’s that other priorities take precedence.”
It’s a point worth pondering as we watch what gets done at the State House in the coming weeks — and what doesn’t.