Virginia Lawmakers Push For Police Review Boards With 'Teeth'

FREDERICKSBURG, VA — Members of a police consulting firm hired by the city of Fredericksburg completed their initial round of community engagement this week as they review the city's police department and its deployment of chemical agents and arrests of protesters between May 31 to June 2 in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The Fredericksburg City Council in July approved the hiring of Washington, D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum, or PERF, to conduct an independent review of the city's law enforcement practices. Members of PERF met privately this week with Fredericksburg officials, the city’s police department and community members, including protesters.

The consulting firm's late August fact-finding mission is coinciding with efforts by Fredericksburg's chief of police to expand the department's Citizens Advisory Panel to diversify the voices on the panel. The panel, which will now have nine members, was created in 2015 by the department to facilitate two-way communication between the police department and the community.

Under the expanded Fredericksburg police advisory panel, membership will include three to five members who come from historically underserved communities.

The changes in Fredericksburg are occurring at the same time that state lawmakers are working to push through criminal justice reforms, including efforts to increase police accountability. But police agencies and lawmakers are at odds over whether police departments should be held accountable by an independent board for their actions.

The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police strongly opposes a bill that will enable localities to create civilian review boards with the authority to investigate citizen complaints and discipline officers. Some jurisdictions in Virginia, such as Fairfax County, have civilian review boards, but lawmakers want jurisdictions to be able to create review boards that have greater powers.

At a public safety town hall hosted Monday night by Loudoun County Supervisor Juli Briskman (D-Algonkian), state Sen. Barbara Favola (D-31rd) warned residents not to expect rapid changes in how police departments operate.

“The culture of policing is not going to change overnight,” Favola said. “It’s been years in the making and it is going to take a little while to actually change the culture. But we’re really working on it.”

Favola also conceded that the few civilian police review boards that do exist in Virginia, including the one established in Fairfax County in 2017, "really don’t have any teeth."

“We are committed to empowering our localities to really come up with civilian review board that can do the adequate oversight and hold police to the accountability standards they should be held to,” she said.

In Fredericksburg, the Police Executive Research Forum's goal over the next several months is to find out what occurred in the city between May 31 and June 2 and identify what went well and what did not from the perspective of both the police and the protesters. Most important, the consulting firm will seek to determine if any policy changes should be made.

Whether PERF will recommend the city adopt a police review board with the power to hold the Fredericksburg police department accountable depends on what the researchers find during the months-long review.

Somil Trivedi, senior staff attorney with the Criminal Law Reform Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it is commendable that the Fredericksburg Police Department is trying to diversify the Citizens Advisory Panel. But he suggested the city needs to go beyond having an advisory panel that is hand-selected by the city's chief of police.

"It’s tough to have confidence in a panel that is overseen by the police department," Trivedi said.

During the protests in Fredericksburg, City Manager Timothy Baroody implemented a curfew in the city. Baroody said he made the decision after consulting with the city's police Citizens Advisory Panel at Fredericksburg Police Department headquarters. In a statement, Baroody said all the members of the panel agreed with his decision to implement the curfew.

At the time, the members of the Citizens Advisory Panel were the Rev. Jarvis Bailey, Meredith Beckett, the Rev. Hashmel Turner, Lafayette Upper Elementary School Assistant Principal P.J. Pcsolinski, Fredericksburg School Superintendent Marci Catlett and Fredericksburg Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw.

Along with supporting the curfew, members of the Citizens Advisory Panel did not issue a statement, as a group, about the police department's conduct during the protests.

"That highlights a problem with these rubber-stamp panels — they actually give police a veneer of credibility, which can be even worse than it not existing at all," Trivedi said. "They can hide behind the exoneration by the panel. That’s a pretty good example of why you need actual independence."

Trivedi is not surprised by the opposition of police chiefs in Virginia to the creation of independent review panels.

"Police departments have a pretty sketchy history of being able to police their own," he said. "You can just look at any time there is an officer-involved shooting. The police department and the police union typically come out in lockstep pushing some story that in many cases gets rebutted by body cam and eyewitnesses."

Trivedi, like state Sen. Favola, acknowledged that police culture is not going to change overnight. "To think that sort of police culture is now going to turn on a dime and be able to review its own misconduct at a systemic level just doesn’t make sense," he said.

Fredericksburg Mayor Greenlaw was one of the few city leaders in the country to apologize for the actions of her police department.

“I never thought I would hear the words ‘tear gas’ in the same sentence as Fredericksburg. I am personally sorry,” Greenlaw said in June at a City Council meeting. “The people in our streets on the night of May 31 were motivated to protest by righteous anger and genuine pain. I know that the use of tear gas shocked and frightened them. I apologize to those who went through this fearful experience.”

In late July, Fredericksburg Police Chief Brian Layton announced his department had adopted "8 Can't Wait," a national police reform campaign that highlights eight policy changes police departments can make to reduce the number of negative police incidents.

The eight polices are: ban chokeholds and strangleholds; require de-escalation; require warning before shooting; exhaust all alternatives before shooting; duty to intervene, ban shooting at moving vehicles; establish use of force continuum; and require all force be reported.

Layton also emphasized that the police department is committed to completing an internal review of the use-of-force incidents that occurred in response to demonstrations that took place in the city from May 31 through June 2.

Over the next six to eight months, members of PERF will conduct their own review of the police department's actions. A six-member team PERF selected for Fredericksburg includes two law enforcement professionals — including a certified training expert — and four civilian members specializing in criminology, use of force, research and data analysis, and public policy.

Trivedi is hoping more jurisdictions create review boards and that commonwealth's attorneys in Virginia and local prosecutors across the country continue to work with police on criminal cases but also establish independence from them and hold the police accountable when they find wrongdoing.

"Police have gone unchallenged by the entire political spectrum for so long that they are terrified of any level of accountability," Trivedi said.

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