President Announces Police Task Force
With the exception of Sean Smoot, director of the PB & PA of Illinois, the panel is lacking representatives with real world experience doing law enforcement work or representing the people that are out on the street. This could be a problem down the road.
Yesterday the President signed an executive order formally establishing a task force to review police practices after recent controversies over the killing of unarmed black men by law enforcement officers. First announced last month, the panel will be required to deliver a set of concrete recommendations to Obama’s desk by March 2, according to the directive.
With the exception of Sean Smoot, the director and chief legal counsel for the PB & PA of Illinois, the panel is lacking people who are out on the streets doing police work or those that represent them. This could turn into a serious problem down the road gaining buy-in from this group of serious stakeholders when they had little input.
“The president made it very clear when he created this task force he wanted this to be on the fast track,” senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said Thursday, adding that Obama had a “personal commitment and determination to seek change, according to a report by Justin Sink appearing in TheHill.com ”
Obama announced the panel late last month after a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo.
That decision sparked a series of protests across the country, with demonstrators saying the case was emblematic of systematic racial issues within the criminal justice system. And pressure intensified after a similar decision in the case of Eric Garner, a black man who died after a white police officer placed him in a chokehold.
At the time, Obama said the panel would be co-chaired by Philadelphia Commissioner Charles Ramsey and former Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson. Ron Davis, director of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office, will serve as the group’s executive director.
The work of the group will be separate from a White House review on police militarization, which is looking to increase oversight of the distribution of military surplus materials to local police departments. White House officials say Obama is expected to unveil executive actions incorporating those recommendations in “early 2015.”
Other members of the policing panel will include civil rights activist Jose Lopez, Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, and Teach for America’s St. Louis Executive Director Brittany Packnett.
Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission Executive Director Susan Rahr, Yale law professor Tracey Meares, civil rights lawyer Constance Rice, and Tucson, Ariz., police Chief Roberto Villaseñor will also serve on the task force. Police labor leader Sean Smoot and former Transportation Security Administration Federal Security Director Cedric Alexander will round out the panel.
Ed. Note: Three people on the panel have been long time supporters of American Police Beat: co-chair Chuck Ramsey, the Philadelphia PD Commissioner and President of the Major Cities Chiefs; Constance Rice, a Los Angeles-based civil rights attorney who has collaborated with the LAPD, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, and several other law enforcement agencies on a variety of projects, and Sean Smoot, director and chief legal counsel of the Police Benevolent and Protective Association of Illinois.
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