Baltimore County, Maryland, will equip all uniformed officers with body cameras within a year and review how officers respond to individuals with mental-health and drug-abuse issues, officials said Wednesday.
The reforms were announced 11 weeks after the death of Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old mother who was shot by police as she wielded a shotgun during a standoff in her apartment that she live-streamed on social media.
Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson, County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, D, and Health and Human Services Director Gregory William Branch also said the department is implementing stricter requirements for investigating sexual assaults and is creating a task force to consider options for training police to de-escalate situations.
Kamenetz declined to discuss specifics of the Gaines case, citing a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by her family. But he said the review of the police department’s policies and procedures for dealing with individuals who have behavioral-health issues “will lead to recommendations that will help us avoid these kinds of tragic incidents in the future.”
The nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center will lead the review, working with the police department and county health officials.
The body-camera order means virtually all of Baltimore County’s more than 1,400 uniformed police will wear the devices by September 2017, accelerating an earlier deadline of December 2018.
Since beginning its body-camera program in July, the department has outfitted 128 officers with cameras.
The officers involved in the Gaines incident, which drew national attention through social media, were not wearing body cameras. Police were attempting to serve warrants on both Gaines and her boyfriend, Kareem Kiean Courtney, 39. Gaines had been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest during a March traffic stop; Courtney was charged with second-degree assault in a domestic incident involving Gaines.
Prosecutors declined to press criminal charges against the officer who fired at Gaines, saying police shot only after Gaines raised the shotgun, and that she also returned fire. Her 5-year-old son, who was nearby, was wounded during the exchange.
Jim Bell, an attorney for the Gaines family, said the family is encouraged by the department’s reform efforts but feels the proposals don’t go far enough.
“These changes don’t address treating individuals like human beings,” he said. “They had a low level of respect for the lives of African Americans and African American children.
The police union in Baltimore County said officers there have largely embraced body cameras, and were consulted about the program before it was first implemented.
“They’re OK with it at this point,” said Cole Weston, president of the Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 4.
The District, which began equipping all of its officers with body cameras last year, now requires officers to confirm with dispatchers that the cameras are switched on before they respond to a call or interact with civilians.
Weston said rank-and-file Baltimore officers also welcome additional training on de-escalating confrontations and working with mentally unstable individuals.
“We don’t push back on that,” Weston said. “If it’s well thought out and presented in an academic setting that can be helpful to officers in the field, we have no issues with that.”
Maryland’s legislature made broad changes this year in how law-enforcement agencies hire, train and discipline police. The bill was based on recommendations from a work group that the General Assembly created after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered while in police custody, an incident that led to protests and riots in Baltimore.
Del. Shelly Hettleman, D-Baltimore County, who attended Wednesday’s announcement, praised local officials for taking the additional measures.
“I’m happy to see the county executive stepping up here … bringing some outside folks in and shedding some transparency on the police-accountability side as well as the sexual-assault and rape cases,” Hettleman said.
Law-enforcement officials nationwide have been grappling with tension and mistrust between police and minority groups in the wake of numerous high-profile civilian deaths, protests and, this summer, ambush killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
This week, the president of the nation’s largest law-enforcement association formally apologized on behalf of the group for “historical mistreatment of communities of color.”
Wellesley, Massachusetts, Police Chief Terrence Cunningham issued the statement at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in San Diego. About 23,000 law-enforcement officials in the United States are members of the organization.
Baltimore County’s Johnson, who attended the conference, said Wednesday that “there is ample evidence to indicate that there were past injustices,” adding that reforms have been “taking place in public safety nationwide for years.”
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(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Josh Hicks
