As summer draws to a close, we at the Policing Project are wrapping up our 2023 legislative engagements, taking stock of our achievements, and lessons learned from this year and turning our sights toward the 2024 legislative session.
During this year’s legislative session, we identified more than 350 bills related to police reform introduced across 43 states and D.C., with dozens making it through the legislative process to become law. The most popular topics were use of force, officer decertification, and data collection and transparency, but legislators also sought to address a wide range of others, from warrant reform to police use of robots, and more.
The Policing Project provided input and drafting support on 36 pieces of legislation or regulations across 12 states. Notably, in a sign of growing national demand for our expertise on policing legislation, 22 of these engagements came at the express invitation of state or local partners, including both advocates and lawmakers. Much of our work occurred behind the scenes advising and providing research support to policymakers and advocates. In New Jersey, for example, we worked with the Attorney General to shape new regulations to implement an officer decertification statute that we supported in 2022.
We also gave public testimony on 20 different occasions. We testified on a bill on pretext stops in Washington State, use-of-force legislation in Maryland and New Mexico, a possible use-of-force registry in Alaska, and bills relating to warrant reform, use of force, and police settlement and judgment data in California. Perhaps most notably, our legislative testimony in Hawai’i influenced amendments to the recently enacted S.B. 151 on use of force.
The Policing Project’s increasing number of pragmatic, research-backed model statutes have been at the heart of this work. In concert with our local allies, we used our statutes to help produce state-specific legislation, including bills on traffic stop data in Pennsylvania and officer decertification in Rhode Island. Further, our work has resonated with officials seeking guidance on local approaches to police reform. The San Francisco Police Commission, for example, adopted a new policy based on our model pretext statute and designed to limit the amount of time that officers spend on low-level traffic enforcement.
Our policy solutions have also drawn federal interest. The Policing Project was one of only a handful of organizations at a roundtable hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on improving policing data collection. We also submitted a public comment to OSTP on the same subject. And we offered guidance to federal legislators on a previously introduced police misconduct settlement and judgment data collection bill that is being revised for re-introduction. In addition, we provided official comment to the Federal Trade Commission on proposed rulemaking regarding commercial surveillance.
The Policing Project has sought to further educate interested legislators and other leaders even before legislation takes shape. This year, we presented on trends in discipline and decertification to the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training (IADLEST), on use-of-force policies to Michigan’s Senate Democratic Caucus, on police technology to the Virginia Caucus on Technology and Innovation, and on reasons to limit low-level traffic stops to local policymakers in Wisconsin. We were also invited to attend the National Conference of Legislatures’ Policing Legislator Academy as policy experts.
We’re looking forward to a 2024 legislative session that builds on the progress we made in 2023.
If you can use our support in passing police reform legislation in your jurisdiction – whether in research, drafting, analysis, or public engagement – please reach out to legislation@policingproject.org.