New Hampshire will move forward on an expansive package of state police reforms in the wake of the death of George Floyd and a string of demonstrations over injustice in policing this summer, Gov. Chris Sununu announced at a press conference last week.
The reforms, which were cobbled together by a task force of law enforcement representatives, state agencies and organizations such as the NAACP, would in some cases represent a major change to the state if implemented.
One action item, for instance, would make the “Laurie List” public through legislation. That’s the colloquial name for the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule – a powerful list kept by the Attorney General’s office of local law enforcement officers who have incurred “sustained” findings of misconduct from their superiors.
For decades, that list of currently 275 officers with credible accusations of misconduct has been kept from the public eye. As recently as June of this year – even after the death of Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, during a police arrest – Sununu said he was still opposed to making New Hampshire’s list public.
“You want to be transparent but at the same time … you gotta make sure that you’re not inadvertently releasing a name for someone that didn’t need to be on the list in the first place,” Sununu said in June.
Under Sununu, the New Hampshire Department of Justice is presently fighting an effort by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and a group of Granite State newspapers – including the Monitor – to make the list immediately public under public records requests. That challenge received a hearing this week in the state Supreme Court.
Three months later, the governor’s position on releasing the Laurie List appears to have changed. The range of recommendations includes an action item to make the list public through a three part process: First, allowing the Attorney General to contact those officers who are on the list to inform them of it; second, allowing those officers six months to request a hearing in Superior Court to attempt to remove themselves from the list; and third, releasing the names of anyone on the list after six months except those who have pending actions in Superior Court to remove their names.
Sununu says he’s on board.
“Today we’re announcing that frankly we’re endorsing every single recommendation from all three parts of the report,” Sununu said Thursday.
The Laurie List release – which must be enacted through legislation – addresses what had been a major difference between New Hampshire and Minneapolis, the site of Floyd’s arrest and death: officer misconduct reports. In Minneapolis, open records laws revealed that Derek Chauvin, the officer who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck shortly before his death, had 17 prior misconduct reports; in New Hampshire, the Department of Justice policy would have prevented that information from becoming public.
But the change is one of a range of action items endorsed by Sununu that go beyond the Laurie list.
Among them: creating a new, statewide entity to receive and store police misconduct complaints, creating and paying for a statewide database to store officers’ sustained findings of misconduct, creating a public integrity unit in the Attorney General’s office as a watchdog over police with full-time attorneys, potential providing state funding for body cameras and dashboard cameras for local police departments, and creating an opt-out choice for residents to include their race on their driver’s license.
“As we’ve long said, New Hampshire has some of the best law enforcement in the country, but there’s always room to improve, grow, and make sure that our practices are really up to speed,” Sununu said.
All of those recommendations would require legislation to properly enact.
But other recommendations can be carried out by the governor himself, whether through an executive order, or through the Police Standards and Training Council, which trains all new police recruits for every police department.
Some of the recommendations include increased annual training for police officers already on the job. The recommended package requires a minimum 24 hours a year by 2024.
Those trainings will have to include at least two hours of implicit bias training as well as two hours of de-escalation tactics training.
The report also recommends tracking officers’ conduct, which could be done by creating a “robust database management system.” Such a system could keep a record of a police officer’s whole career, including sustained reports of misconduct and their record of moving from agency to agency.
That database may require work by the Legislature to provide funding, likely through the next tw0-year budget in 2021.
There are also recommendation for the Council to set new guidelines set forward on use of force, the duty to report misconduct, and “procedures to guard against positional asphysxia” – in other words, preventing situations where a person arrested can’t breathe.
The Training Council should also factor in a new state Supreme Court ruling – the State of New Hampshire vs. Jones – into its trainings, the report recommended. That ruling creates a new requirement for police officers to factor in someone’s race in determining whether they are “free to leave” when confronted by police.
The decision, issued Jan. 10, updates the reasonable person standard – “would a reasonable person feel free to leave or feel ‘seized’ and unable to leave” – to include the person’s race. People of color often feel less able to walk away from officers than white people do, the court held.
Among the list of recommendations that Sununu pledged to implement by executive order is one that requires background investigations into prospective officers to factor in their past behavior.
All background investigations of a potential recruit should look into whether he or she “demonstrated outward bias toward a protected group by way of past history, behavior, affiliation with a subversive group, social media posts and other objective sources,” the recommendations state.
The task force was initially provided a 30-day deadline to complete its work; that deadline was later extended to 60 days.
Sununu reviewed each of the 48 recommendations in person with the taskforce this week, he said, ultimately approving each of them.
But the bigger challenge could be political. While Sununu says he’s directed Attorney General Gordon MacDonald to begin drafting an omnibus, and has called for legislative leaders in both the state House and Senate to sponsor it, it is unclear the extent to which Republican and Democratic leadership will throw their support behind it – and the extent to which they will seek to change it along the way.
“There should be nothing political about these recommendations here,” Sununu said. “They were agreed to and done in conjunction with law enforcement and done in a bipartisan way, and therefore having a bipartisan piece of legislation for what will ultimately be the most comprehensive reforms in law enforcement the state has ever seen, I think is the absolute appropriate approach.”
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at 369-3307, edewitt@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)