Local elected official Dorothy Krause reviews demands on petition

From the Solidarity with Ferguson rally in Madison, Wisconsin. 09/07/2014

 

Dorothy Krause is a progressive-minded Supervisor at Dane County Board of Supervisors and Common Council Alder at City of Fitchburg.

 

Here is a link to the petition:

www.change.org/p/joe-parisi-we-want-solidarity-with-fergu...

 

Here are the demands:

1. Diversity training - All common council members and All law enforcement departments within Dane county must participate in an ongoing, diversity training program approved by a diverse group of council members, officers and civilian experts on issues of diversity and policing such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Seema Kapani and David Couper.

•All law enforcement departments within Dane county must commission an annual poll to determine the success and needs for diversity training.

•The poll must be commissioned through an independent non-law enforcement institution approved by civilian experts on issues of diversity and policing. Examples of such civilians would be Gloria Ladson-Billings, Seema Kapani and David Couper.

 

2. Sensitivity training - All common council and all law enforcement departments within Dane county must participate in an ongoing sensitivity training program approved by a diverse group of officers and civilian experts on issues of diversity and policing. Examples of such civilians would be Gloria Ladson-Billings, Seema Kapani and David Couper.

•All law enforcement departments within Dane county must commission an annual poll to determine the success and needs for sensitivity training.

•The poll must be commissioned through an independent non-law enforcement institution approved by civilian experts on issues of diversity and policing. Examples of such civilians would be Gloria Ladson-Billings, Seema Kapani and David Couper.

•All law enforcement departments within Dane county must meet with Community Solutions Teams in each district to determine a plan for developing greater and more honest communication between themselves and their respective communities, particularly the communities of color.

 

3. Racially diverse employees who live in the city they police -All law enforcement departments within Dane county must strive to employ people whose race reflect that of the community they police most often and hire employees who are live or are willing to live in the city they police.

 

4. Independent CRIMINAL and INTERNAL investigations -for all injuries inflicted by law enforcement officers within Dane County to be performed by an agency that does not employ anyone from the department of the officer involved. It has become clear that police cannot be “objective” in their pursuit of “reasonableness.” Bias lays waste to justice. Let's prevent it as best we can.

•The race of the investigative leads must equally represent the race of those involved in the incident.

•The names of the investigative leads must be revealed to the public within 48 hours of the incident.

•Photographs of the civilians that are released to the media must be offered and approved by the civilian's next of kin.

•Civilians must have the right to redact information from police records before they are made public.

•If a department breaks this law and investigates itself as we are seeing in Milwaukee with the Dontre Hamilton investigation, the chief of police must be reprimanded with 6 months minimum jail time for misuse of confidential information and tampering with evidence.

 

5. Front facing cameras for all law enforcement officers - an investment in having the advantage of complete video footage of officer-involved incidents would save lives and money and it would restore some trust in the police.

•Everyone would think twice about behaving inappropriately, trust in that transparency would be inevitable and money in that far fewer days and hours would be spent piecing together multiple takes of a single incident. Cameras must not be turned off at the officer's discretion. To do so is tampering with and attempting to conceal evidence.

•The footage must not be altered in any way.

•Civilian and officer witnesses must be permitted to view the exact same footage, no more or less than one another, in the company of their attorneys, before giving their statements to anyone.

•Civilians must be allowed to redact elements of footage that if released to the public would cause further trauma or damage to their lives.

 

6. The District Attorney must not review or make the determination in criminal investigations. In the history of Wisconsin policing, there has been only 1 case when a D.A. charged an officer involved in a fatality. The D.A., who cannot win re-election if s/he loses the law enforcement vote and who depends on good rapport with officers to try and win cases, must no longer make the final determination in the criminal investigations of officers involved in potentially criminal activity - nor should they prosecute. To date, there is no greater conflict of interest built into the infrastructure of law enforcement.

•A diverse grand jury must make the determination for criminal investigations of officer-involved excessive force and fatal incidents.

•A special prosecutor must prosecute in these cases and be appointed by the grand jury or an ombudsman

 

7. The chief or sheriff must not review or make the determination in officer-involved injury or death investigation.

•In the past 129 years, not a single Wisconsin police chief, sheriff or police and fire commission has found an officer in the wrong for excessive force or taking a life. This proves that chiefs and sheriffs will not or feel that cannot find one of their own officers guilty of excessive force.

•All officer-involved injury and death investigations must be reviewed and determined by a diverse grand jury

8. If an officer is found to have used excessive force, they must be fired.

9. All law enforcement departments within Dane county must terminate every officer named in settled lawsuits - This seems like common sense, but the fact is that officers that cost millions in lawsuits are routinely allowed to keep their jobs. If a jurisdiction chooses to settle a lawsuit against an officer for excessive force, civil rights violations, or other abuses of power, the department must terminate the officer and the officer will be placed on the National Police Offender Registry.

 

10. Firing vs Resigning - As with the military, officers who are charged internally with policy violations that would have them fired should have to go before their commission and be fired. A firing and a resignation look different on a job or gun owner application, as they should. The former West Allis officer who went on to be a security guard before he killed two woman and put them in suitcases is one example of why officers must be held fully accountable, on paper, for their actions.

 

11. Early Warning System: There is no worse time and place for a chief or sheriff to find that they have a bigot or loose canon in their department than at the scene of an officer-involved injury or death. The development of early warning systems for all law enforcement departments within Dane county that tracks all complaints made against police officers and flags destructive patterns is needed. These systems should be reviewed by the police and fire commission.

 

12. MDC Screening: As we learned from Rodney King's beating and the 2012 forced resignation of former Madison Police Officer Heimsness, it is essential for all police communication systems for all law enforcement departments within Dane county to be screened.

 

13. Screening for drugs and mental fitness: All law enforcement departments within Dane county must conduct random drug and mental fitness screening. The program used for screening for and supporting mental fitness must be developed by an impartial institution. For example: "Force Science" is is not an impartial institution. The UW Center For Investigating Healthy Minds is.

 

14. STATS: All law enforcement departments within Dane countymust report to the FBI's UCR (uniform crime reporting) program for more accurate data. Additionally, they must release all statistics involving their employees and complaints made against them for all injuries afflicted on civilians to a database housed by an independent location that is easily accessible to the public.

15. National Police Offender Registry: All law enforcement officers within Dane county that violate the public’s trust should not be treated differently than sex offenders. "If an officer is found to have used excessive force, violated a citizen’s civil rights, or abused the power of their office, they should be added to the registry and be barred from holding a law enforcement related position for life. " - Justin King

16. No death penalty by WI Police: Fatal shooting is too often employed in circumstances when public safety could have been secured with far less drastic measures. All law enforcement departments within Dane county must commit to researching and developing non-deadly and non-injurious methods for stopping a threat, to codifying the precedence of these methods in procedural policy, and to employing them in practice.

 

17. Shifts for law enforcement employees with the sole purpose of decompressing and restoration: Traumatic events occur in the everyday lives of officers. It would benefit everyone if the resulting trauma were taken seriously. When an officer commits a crime, we often hear from his/her co-workers that "we saw no signs." All law enforcement departments within Dane county must be required to go before psychologists on a regular basis in order that those signs be detected. Additionally, officers should have shifts that include scientifically-supported decompression and restoration techniques. UW Center for Investigating Healthy Minds would be a good resource for compiling these techniques.

 

18. Rate Leadership: All law officers with in Dane county must be polled anonymously by an independent and impartial group to gauge whether their needs are being met by their leadership and whether or not they feel comfortable upholding justice at the expense of their department's reputation.

 

19. Dash cameras must not be turned off at the officer's discretion.

 

20. Two-way radios should stay on throughout officer interactions with civilians for backup evidence.

 

21. Ask for help when needed: Develop an interface through which the police can solicit community assistance and collaboration, ideas and programs that foster better communication, transparency and relations with the community.

 

22. Stop accepting and maintaining military equipment. Dane County, there is no war but the one you are waging with yourselves!

 

23. Re-examination of Graham Vs Connor and the Objective Reasonableness Standard: In the past 129 years, not a single police chief or sheriff has found an officer in the wrong for taking a life. That means in 129 years, WI officers have never made a mistake when taking a life. Impossible. This statistic represents a systemic failure of oversight and malpractice on the part of those supposedly keeping watch. How does this happen?

 

The Objective Reasonableness Standard is used as a guide for deadly force policy by a chief or sheriff to determine whether or not the amount of force used against a civilian was reasonable. Chiefs and sheriffs look to past cases to determine what a "reasonable officer" would have done and so the criteria for such a decision can essentially be determined after the fact.

 

The highly flexible ways in which the Standard has been interpreted have only served the interests of the police force and, in fact, no officer has been found to have taken a “wrong" action in any of these investigations by a chief, sheriff or commission. This irresponsible looseness is legally, systemically supported at every level of law enforcement, from the statutes to the rulings of District Attorneys. This fact serves virtually to eliminate accountability in policing and, placing little value on the lives of civilians.

 

Though serving our community poorly, the looseness of this Standard serves well the elected officials who make determinations on controversial Officer-involved injuries and fatalities etc. in that sheriffs and D.A.s can stay elected and appointed chiefs are allowed to keep their records of “perfection” intact.

The general public has no idea how little value this standard places on all of our lives. Currently, if an officer has a civilian within reach of their weapon, s/he can at any time claim the civilian went for his/her gun, that s/he feared for his/her life, and that s/he therefore shot to kill.

•Because all of this is true, Dane County and its cities must commission a poll through an independent institution approved by impartial civilian experts on deadly force such as Michael Scott at the center of Problem Oriented Policing and former Madison Chief of Police, David Couper. The purpose of this poll would be to determine how comfortable Dane County civilians are with both current and historical applications of the Objective Reasonableness Standard, use of force policies and Wisconsin's 129 year record of perfect policing in all officer-involved fatalities.

•The Objective Reasonableness Standard allows officers to be conveniently selective as to what information coming from the suspect or witnesses can be interpreted as "fact". This flexibility allows officers to get away with intentional recklessness and negligence as we saw in the in the 1989 case of Graham vs Connor, the 2012 shooting death of unarmed Madison resident Paul Heenan, the 2004 shooting death of handcuffed Kenosha resident, Michael Bell and the 2012 suffocation death of Milwaukee resident, Derek Williams.

•The Objective Reasonableness Standard must be re-examined and changed to better protect civilians and to place value where it belongs: on human life.

•The exoneration of an officer must be supported by proof of prior and current mental fitness and drug screening of that police officer.

 

Without an agreed upon definition of justice, there can be no peace. These changes represent a justice that protects all human life no matter what color we are or badge we wear. I ask that you to take this stand and act as if the lives of all who live in Dane County are invaluable and irreplaceable.

Done