Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, along with the Baton Rouge Police Department, took a step this week toward changing law enforcement policies to prevent deadly use of force and bolster accountability measures for the department.
Broome says she worked with BRPD officials to develop the rules, which include de-escalation tactics, preventing chokeholds, reducing the use of deadly force unless it’s necessary and barring officers from firing at moving vehicles unless a deadly threat is posed, among other things. She outlined the new policies during a press conference Thursday.
The move addresses a major talking point in the city following the police killing of Alton Sterling last summer and the subsequent killing of three police officers by a lone gunman from Missouri. Racial fissures exposed by the summer’s events became intertwined with calls for police reform proposals, which ultimately died at the feet of the Metro Council, largely along party and racial lines.
Together Baton Rouge, a vocal nonprofit that has been an integral part of police reform discussions, lauded the move as being aligned with “national best practices.” The group recently issued a report that said people in low-income zip codes are arrested at much higher rates for drug possession crimes in Baton Rouge, even though drug usage is relatively flat across zip codes.
Since the campaign, Broome has said she will replace Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr., and continues to say so. It is unclear how those talks are progressing, as Dabadie has some protection from civil service rules if he does not voluntarily step down. Metro Councilman Scott Wilson has publicly vented his frustration with the new mayor’s plans to replace Dabadie.
Currently, Councilwoman Tara Wicker, along with academics and community leaders, are poring through police reform ideas to bring a new set of proposals to the Metro Council. Still, the council’s Republican majority has not seemed particularly willing to make any sweeping changes to the way the police department operates.
That’s where Broome apparently saw an opportunity—by working with the department police to write practices officers are trained on directly into the department’s policy books.
Whether having those rules in writing will fundamentally help relationships between police and the community—or prevent unneeded killings by officers—remains to be seen.
—Sam Karlin
