The Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee announced on Friday that they will be hearing testimony on a slate of policing and criminal justice bills, including three bills on the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBoR) on Monday at 3:30pm. This gives advocates for criminal justice reform precious little time to submit written testimony or to sign up to provide the Judiciary Committee verbal testimony by telephone.

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TESTIMONY SUBMITTAL

Written testimony is encouraged and can be submitted to the committee by emailing it to:

[email protected]

Written Testimony must be submitted prior to 2pm on Monday, May 10, 2021, in order for it to be provided to the members of the committee at the hearing and to be included in the meeting records.

Members of the public can request to provide verbal testimony to the committee through the following link:

VERBAL TESTIMONY

Requests to provide verbal testimony must be submitted by 4:00 PM on Sunday,
May 9, 2021.

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The three LEOBoR bills under consideration are:

• S0773 from Senator Tiara Mack (Democrat, District 6, Providence) repeals LROBoR in its entirety.
• S0505 from Senator John Burke (Democrat, District 9, West Warwick) increases the number of committee members in LROBoR hearings from 3 to 5, mandates hearings be commenced within 15 days and mandates that officers charged with felony or imprisoned on misdemeanor have pay suspended while case is pending.
• S0865 from Senator Ana Quezada (Democrat, District 2, Providence) amends LEOBoR to provide greater accountability in the disciplinary process over law enforcement.

By far the simplest bill is S0773 from Senator Mack, which repeals LEOBoR in its entirety as happened in Maryland in April. Maryland is the first state to repeal LEOBoR. Most states don’t have LEOBoR, and Rhode Island is the only New England state with LEOBoR in state law.

“I want everyone to know that this is the people’s bill,” said Senator Mack at a rally on Thursday outside the Providence Public Safety Complex. “This was the bill that was brought to me by the community who last summer marched for names like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Auberry and countless other names of Black individuals who have been lost to police brutality in our nation.

“We don’t have to look as far as Minnesota in order to find names. We have Rishod Gore, we have Germain right here in Rhode Island, who are victims of police not being held accountable for the role that they play in our communities,” continued Senator Mack. “We need to make sure that we are not only holding [police] accountable but that we’re listening to the people who marched for an entire summer so that we would hear the calls to hold our entire system accountable…

“We’re not asking for defunding the police. We’re not asking to abolish the police right now. We’re asking for the bare minimum – the sub basement of policy – which is the full repeal of a bill that does not allow the community to hold these systems accountable.”

Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has called for the repeal of LEOBoR after his African American Advisory Group voted unanimously to recommend full repeal.

The bill from Senator Burke contains the very minor revisions to LEOBoR worked out by former Senator Harold Metts and his LEOBoR Task Force last year. During those hearings, the Task Force discussed recommending repealing LEOBoR in its entirety.

“We’ve been meeting since July of this year,” said Michael Évora, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Human Rights Commission at the final Task Force hearing, “and we’ve had a lot of thoughtful presentations and a lot of thoughtful commentary, but no one has managed to convince me why there is a need for a Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights in Rhode Island when when 19 out of 50 states have some version of this, which means 31 states do not. There hasn’t been any evidence presented to this task force to suggest that things are awry in those 31 states that do not have a LEOBoR. For me, I’m not sure I see why law enforcement officers should be treated any differently than any other municipal or state employee when it comes to due process rights. They are guaranteed by the constitution.

“There is no firefighter’s bill of rights,” said Évora. “There’s no city clerk’s bill of rights. I have not been convinced that there is even a need for this, which is not to say that I don’t believe that law enforcement officers are entitled to due process – they absolutely are. I just don’t see a need to have it codified separately from that which is guaranteed to every other municipal or state employee.”

Task Force member Cynthia Amour Coyne, who also chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted against full repeal, favoring the soft reforms of what ultimately became the Burke bill. Senator Amour Coyne is a former Rhode Island State Trooper.

Had the makeup of the LEOBoR Task Force been slightly different, the 7-4 vote against repealing LEOBoR would have been very different. Two members who may have voted in favor of repeal were absent for the final hearing, so the final vote could have been much closer. As it is, the Task Force was heavily weighted with law enforcement partisans.

The Senator Quezada bill goes further than the Burke bill, but still falls far short of full repeal.