A
Municipal Vote in Providence for Police Reform Carries National Implications
By Shahid Buttar for Deeplinks Blog
Reflecting an understanding of how many different communities
endure parallel—but seemingly separate—violations of civil rights and civil
liberties, the CSA aims to address surveillance alongside racial and other
dimensions of discriminatory profiling.
The ordinance imposes crucial limits on
police powers at a time when local police have become the leading edge of mass surveillance, as well as
longstanding abuses of civil rights and digital liberties rooted in the war on
drugs.
The most notable facet of the CSA is its sheer breadth. It addresses a wide-ranging set of issues in a single reform measure.
For instance, the Act requires that targeted electronic surveillance be supported by reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
On the
one hand, that requirement should be implicit given the history of
politicized domestic surveillance within the United States.
On the other hand,
relative to the prevailing practice of ubiquitous intelligence collection, the Act’s
requirements represent a monumental legal shift.
In addition, the CSA protects the right of residents to observe
and record police activities. That right has been vital to sparking a sustained debate across
the country about police accountability, but has come under fire.
Just this
month, a federal appellate court heard oral argument in an appeal seeking
to vindicate the right to record police in the wake of trial court decisions in multiple cases perversely holding that residents gain
a right to record only after announcing their hostility to police, effectively
inviting retaliation or even violence.
The bill also protects
Due Process rights threatened by the otherwise arbitrary and secretive inclusion
of individuals in government gang databases.
In California, for instance, state auditors discovered that
the state’s program received “no state oversight” and operated “without
transparency or meaningful opportunities for public input,” prompting the state
legislature to intervene by
passing a new law providing notice of inclusion and an
opportunity to contest it.
At the same time,
responding to controversy about traffic stops and pedestrian stop and frisks
rooted in bias rather than observed behavior, the Act requires that police
change their processes for searching subjects.
In particular, when seeking to
search subjects without either a judicial warrant or probable cause to suspect
criminal activity, the Act requires police to inform the subjects that they
have the right to decline consent to the requested search.
That represents a
sea change in policing, given the practice among some police departments to train officers
to use deception to induce a subject's consent, ensuring that
it is neither informed nor voluntary.
Similarly, the Act's
restrictions on racial profiling and intelligence collection absent reasonable
suspicion of criminal activity offer important bulwarks to reinforce our
Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, as
well as 14th Amendment protections to be free from racial and other forms
of discrimination.
Beyond the CSA’s
substantive breath lies a novel theory of change informing its construction.
Rather than a discrete reform proposed by advocates, the CSA represents a
concerted attempt to address the intersectional concerns of several communities
responding to a common challenge: discriminatory or otherwise unconstitutional
police practices.
While Providence has
distinguished itself in the remarkably
diverse coalition of community groups that have come together
to pursue common cause, the issues to which Providence activists are responding
are hardly unique to their city. Ultimately, grassroots groups in every major
city across the country might learn something from the coalition to pass the
Providence Community Safety Act.
Author Shahid
Buttar is a civil rights lawyer, hip-hop MC, grassroots community organizer,
and independent journalist. His commentary has appeared in various print and
broadcast outlets, including The Washington Post; The New York Times;
Bloomberg; Hannity & Colmes on FOX News; The Laura Flanders Show on Air
America; TomPaine.com; Common Dreams; and Democracy Now! on NPR, which named
one of his public addresses among "The Best of 2004."