By Dayvon Love
The tragic death of Bilal Abdullah at the hands of law enforcement presents an important test of the police accountability reforms of 2021, as to whether the mechanisms are sufficient to hold police accountable. It is important that the public utilizes all of the mechanisms available to ensure maximum accountability and justice for Bilal.
The reforms of 2021 established Police Accountability Boards (PAB) in every jurisdiction. In Baltimore, each member of the city council nominates someone to serve on that board. They can receive complaints from the public regarding police misconduct, and also have representation on the Administrative Charging Committee (ACC). The ACC will receive all of the information from the formal investigation of the incident and will make a determination of discipline that the police chief must either accept, or can offer harsher punishment. But the police commissioner, by law, cannot issue discipline that is less serious than what is offered by the ACC.
Additionally, because Mr. Abdullah was killed by police, the Attorney General of Maryland has jurisdiction to investigate this incident, instead of the local state’s attorney. This policy comes as a result of recent state legislative action.
I generally have mixed feelings about this policy. On one hand, it presents a challenge to have a local state’s attorney investigate police officers who work for an agency that they are highly reliant on to do the work that the office needs. Having the attorney general do the investigation makes sense because there is more distance between the AG and the Baltimore City Police Department than there is between the BPD and the Baltimore state’s attorney.
We are fortunate to have an AG that is generally progressive on criminal justice and I think is likely to handle the investigation in a way that will seek justice. My challenge with this policy is that in a situation where the AG is more conservative on criminal justice and – because they are elected statewide – does not feel susceptible to political pressure from the community the way that a state’s attorney elected locally would feel. But, as I stated earlier, I think with this AG, the community is more likely to get an investigation that will seek justice.
At Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, we believe that the pinnacle of police accountability work is the pursuit of community control of law enforcement. The community having a mechanism to fire and penalize police officers that violates our people is the most effective deterrent to police brutality. One of the shortcomings of the 2021 reforms on police accountability is that it expanded community participation in the process of police discipline, but did not go far enough to give community control of the process to discipline police. Having a member of the Police Accountability Board on the ACC will be an important voice to press the maximum amount of accountability for the officers responsible for killing Mr. Abdullah.
One of the biggest challenges to making sure that the officers responsible for killing Mr. Abdullah are held accountable is the fact that the only entity that is legally authorized to conduct the formal investigation that will be the basis for the decision made by the ACC will be done by the Police Integrity Bureau (PIB), which is another name for internal affairs. This means that the PIB can do things to slant the investigation in a way that would be helpful for the officers involved. One of the items we fought for in 2021 and that we continue to fight for today is having an entity that is accountable to the community that can be authorized to conduct independent investigations of allegations of misconduct. Without independent investigation, we are still in a situation where police still have an opportunity to keep their colleagues from being held accountable for killing Mr. Abdullah.
To fully utilize the existing police accountability framework to ensure that police are held accountable for killing Mr. Abdullah here are a few things that folks can do:
-If there is anyone who was an eyewitness to the incident, file a complaint with the PAB. This will help the PAB to advocate more effectively to ensure justice is done.
-Public pressure on the Scott administration to ensure that the PIB will not do a biased investigation in favor of protecting police from being held accountable.
In terms of legislative reforms, there needs to be statewide legislation that would allow for local justifications to establish mechanisms of independent investigation of law enforcement. This would allow the mayor and city council to do things like require that incidents of police misconduct be investigated by the PAB to ensure a just investigation.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.