KENNEDY FOR CONGRESS issued the following announcement on July 14.
A landmark police reform bill aimed at transforming policing across the state by banning chokeholds, limiting qualified immunity and holding bad cops accountable, cleared its first major hurdle in the state Senate on Tuesday.
The bill answers the calls for increased police accountability sweeping the nation, but lawmakers face an encroaching July 31 deadline to pass the bill in the House and get it on the governor’s desk before the end of the Legislative session.
Provisions that would create a statewide certification system for officers, a mechanism to decertify problem cops, limit uses of face surveillance technology and ban types of deadly force like chokeholds are widely supported by both police and reform groups.
The sticking point comes with a bid to limit qualified immunity for police, except in cases where “no reasonable defendant could have had reason to believe that such conduct would violate the law,” according to the bill language.
It’s a shift one of the bill’s architects, state Sen. William Brownsberger, D-Belmont, described as “narrow” and something that would only affect police officers who commit the most “egregious” of civil rights violations.
The concept of qualified immunity is a complex, decades-old legal precedent that state Sen. Becca Rausch said, “over the years … has been stretched well past its original intent.”
Police advocates and their attorneys argue it’s a legal doctrine that protects officers and taxpayers in the communities they serve from frivolous lawsuits, but Brownsberger said it has been warped in the courts to “protect bad actors.”
If the provision makes it through in the House, Massachusetts would become the second state in the nation after Colorado to place limits on qualified immunity.
Original source here.
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