Following two grand jury decisions – in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York – not to indict police officers who were involved in the killing of unarmed black men – and the ensuing public protests – President Obama signed an Executive Order establishing a Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
The Task Force, chaired by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, former Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs, will seek to identify best practices and make recommendations to the President on how policing practices can promote effective crime reduction while building public trust.
The Anti-Defamation League submitted recommendations to the Task Force last week. As a leading civil rights and advocacy organization, with vast experience in working with law enforcement, we are uniquely positioned to assist in addressing issues affecting the relationship and trust of law enforcement and the people and communities they serve. Recommendations include:
- Starting a national conversation about racism, the nature of bias and implicit bias, about building trust in police-community relations.
- Expanding ADL’s Law Enforcement and Society (LEAS) training program, which has already reached 95,000 law enforcement professionals, to additional jurisdictions. LEAS was started in 1998, when Task Force chair Charles H. Ramsey, then the newly-appointed Chief of Police of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department, asked ADL and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create a training program for his recruits using the history of the Holocaust as a foundation for increasing officers’ understanding of their relationship to the people they serve and their role as protectors of individual rights and the Constitution.
- Promoting the Department of Justice’s updated federal profiling guidance for law enforcement, which expands protection on the basis of gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
- Supporting the Department of Justice and Department of Education’s efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline to close the achievement gap in schools.
- Encouraging an inclusive and diverse police force that better reflects the racial, ethnic, and religious communities it serves.
- Incentivizing police participation in the FBI’s hate crimes date collection program.
- And many other research- and experience-based policy changes…