Criminal Justice Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I appear here tonight to talk
about police and community relations throughout our country. The
purpose of this Special Order is to talk about how the relationship
between police and local communities can be repaired.

Over the last year, we have witnessed tensions rise between local law
enforcement officers and local communities. The events we have
witnessed across the country have highlighted the need for mending the
strained relationships between police and communities across the
country.

This week, the Judiciary Committee in the House held a hearing
entitled, Policing Strategies for the 21st Century. The purpose of this
hearing was to look at how law enforcement is trained and how it is
received in our communities across the country.

The Senate also held a hearing this week. Their focus was on the use
of body cameras.

I applaud my colleagues for holding hearings on criminal justice
reform this week, but I hope that this is just the beginning and not
the end of the hearings that need to be held on so many different and
very important and fundamental issues on the topic of
criminal justice reform. All of these issues scream out for public
attention and for new solutions by this Congress.

There are many conversations that need to be had about the best ways
to improve policing practices, including ways to curb the use of
excessive force, the use of body cameras, and mental health evaluations
for law enforcement. The list goes on and on.

I would like to start out by talking about three of my bills: the
Grand Jury Reform Act, the Police Accountability Act, and the Stop
Militarizing Law Enforcement Act.

Police militarization is an important subject that President Obama
even weighed in on yesterday with the issuance of an executive order
that incorporates my Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act. Both my
bill and the President's executive order call for a ban on the transfer
of certain surplus military-grade weaponry and both impose strict
oversight and transparency measures to ensure that the equipment that
is transferred is used properly.

President Obama's Law Enforcement Equipment Working Group called for
law enforcement agencies to ``embrace a guardian--rather than a
warrior--mindset'' to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies
and with the public.

This statement is at the very core of what we need to change in our
country. Military-grade weapons are made for one purpose, and that is
to conduct war.

When we see tanks and grenade launchers and this type of equipment
being used by police, it enforces a message that we are at war in the
streets of our very own country, the same way that we are at war in the
streets of other countries. This has to change because our streets are
not war zones, and we should not allow the unbridled proliferation of
military weaponry onto our streets.

When we allow our streets to be flooded with surplus weaponry from
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we set the stage for a military
mindset to take hold throughout the law enforcement community. We
should not allow things to get twisted. There is a big difference
between the law enforcement mentality and the military mindset.

The creed of an Army soldier is to ``deploy, engage, and destroy the
enemies of the United States of America in close combat.''

Conversely, the classic police motto is ``to protect and serve.''

So when we start flooding our streets with military-grade weaponry,
we start to allow the creeping in of a different mindset. And when we
factor in the fact that many of our law enforcement officers have
actually had to be deployed to war zones during the last 12 or 13 years
because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by a
volunteer Army, with a healthy dose of deployment of Reserve and
National Guard units to the battle--when we consider that, we consider
the fact that many law enforcement officers are also reservists or
National Guardsmen or -women, and they have been deployed to war zones.
Then they come back to their jobs in the Nation, and sometimes they
could get it twisted in terms of what their actual goal and mission
should be.

On the streets of America, the mission is not to deploy and to engage
the enemy and destroy the enemy in close combat. That is not what law
enforcement officers should be about. And we don't need to let that
mindset creep into law enforcement.

When you have the experience and when you have the equipment and when
you have inherent biases and prejudices that exist in the mindset of
all Americans, regardless of whether or not it is law enforcement or
civilian, then you get a situation where your minority communities can
then be at severe risk. And that, I am afraid, is what has occurred in
this country because so many of our young people have lost confidence
in our police departments and in our law enforcement community. And
that, ladies and gentlemen, is definitely unhealthy. It is not good for
our democracy. We need to try to do something to change it. And we
can't make effective changes without understanding the problem.

Now some would say that we need a military solution on the streets of
America because the streets have become so lawless, but I would beg to
differ. I would beg to differ strongly, as a matter of fact. We are
dealing with citizens who still need to be protected.

By the way, most people in America are law-abiding citizens. There
are some who become criminals, who stray and commit criminal acts.
Sometimes those criminal acts actually place people's lives at risk.
And police and law enforcement are there to make sure that we keep
people safe.

All people want to be safe and secure in their homes and walking down
the streets and in doing their business, in their life, work, and play
pursuits. All of us want to be safe, and all of us realize that we must
have law enforcement enforce the laws. All of us should have a
responsibility to each other to stay within the boundaries of the law,
and we are partners in that regard. We, the citizens, partner among
ourselves; and then we must partner with our law enforcement community
to enable law enforcement to do the job that we need them to do.

So it is a relationship that is built on trust, and it is built on
communication because law enforcement can only be as effective in
enforcing the law as it is with respect to the relationships that it
has among people in the community.

That is why community-oriented policing is so important, to get
police officers involved in the communities within which they serve;
for them to get out of the car, go meet people, go develop
relationships, and start the flow of dialogue. The citizens are who
enable law enforcement to be most effective because that is where they
get most of their information.

I will admit that people don't communicate with law enforcement as
much as they should, and it hurts us all. The reasons for that are this
breakdown in trust, which is exacerbated by the military equipment and
by the military mindset, both of those going hand in hand.

Now, how do we stop it?

First, by stopping the flow of that free military equipment onto our
streets. We must cap that. I am not here to say that law enforcement
should not have what it needs in order to do what it is supposed to do,
and that is to protect and serve, but it should not have a pipeline
directly between the Department of Defense and law enforcement which
supplies equipment to law enforcement, leaving out the civilian
authority to make the determination of whether or not the equipment is
needed.

So that is what the 1033 program does. That is what President Obama's
executive order, which tracks the language of the Stop Militarizing Law
Enforcement Act, does, and that is to stop that flow and return control
of the process of acquisition of law enforcement equipment back to the
hands of the civilian authority. So that is the first thing that we
need to do.

Mr. Speaker, the second thing we need to do is to ensure good
analysis of the personnel that we have doing the law enforcement,
because as I said, if you have been to a war zone, the statistics show
that many of those who return from the battle suffer from post-
traumatic stress and other illnesses that affect the mental health of
the people. So we must take better care of the mental health of our law
enforcement personnel, having been deployed or not. Being involved in
law enforcement is very stressful, and sometimes that mental health can
break down and people start making bad decisions. So we really must get
a handle on that in this country.

Then once we get a handle on the militarization, there are some
structural issues that need to be dealt with. One is the loss of
confidence in the criminal justice process, i.e., the grand jury, the
secret grand jury process as it relates to law enforcement officers,
because what has become clear is that whenever there has been a killing
of a civilian by law enforcement officer, it often results--or it most
often results--in a finding of justifiable homicide. Indeed, most
killings by law enforcement are justifiable; there is no question about
that. But there is also no question about the fact that some of the
killings are unjustifiable. When they are unjustifiable, they need to
be dealt with in accordance with the law, which means prosecution.

The problem that we get with law enforcement officers who have acted
outside of the law and have committed a
killing, what we get is a finding that the killing was justified
despite the clear evidence to the contrary. I am not going to cite any
specific cases, but I will say that these cases are well-known to the
public. They appear on video. Even if your eyes deceive you and the
killing was justified, you are certainly justified in not having
confidence in the process by which the finding that the killing was
justified was rendered through. Basically I am talking about a secret
grand jury process. That is why I filed the Grand Jury Reform Act, to
get at this secret grand jury process and to bring transparency into
the process.

Now, what usually happens, or what is the course of conduct in a
police killing case, is that the killing itself will be investigated
first, and oftentimes only by the very law enforcement agency that
employed the officer involved in the incident. So what you have are
friends and coworkers investigating each other.

So when that happens, it tends to not be impartial. It tends to be
biased in favor of the accused. What usually happens is, despite what
may be clear about the facts, the decision always comes down as a
justifiable homicide by the law enforcement agency that is rendering
the decision against its own.

Then the case goes to the local grand jury or to the local
prosecutor, who is well-known and knows well the law enforcement agents
involved who may be the subject of the investigation. They know each
other. They work together regularly to bring cases before the grand
jury.

So when an officer is brought before the grand jury, often that
officer is known to and by the district attorney. And even if not
known, the fact that they are law enforcement gives them an inherent
benefit; it gives them credibility; it gives them an edge, a positive
edge, with the prosecution.

So the prosecutor then takes the investigation by the law enforcement
agency that knows and loves the officer, takes that investigation
before a grand jury in a secret proceeding. No one is in there from the
public to understand the quality of the evidence being presented,
whether or not there is any evidence being presented. We have to just
simply rely on the result that comes out of the grand jury proceeding
because the grand jury proceedings are secret by law. Nothing that
happens inside can be revealed.

So it is a process that usually results in what we all are awaiting,
and that is an exoneration of the police officer despite the clear
evidence to the contrary. Once you have that determination, it is
a closed case. So when you have that happening repeatedly over and over
again over the course of time, it erodes public confidence in the
criminal justice process.

So my legislation, the Grand Jury Reform Act, would simply mandate
that whenever there is a killing during the course of a policeman's use
of his or her authority in the line of work, in the line of duty,
whenever there is a killing, then there would have to be appointed an
independent law enforcement agency, the top law enforcement agency of
that particular State, to take over the investigation and to perform
the investigation. That would give it a little more sense of being
impartial.

Once that impartial investigation has concluded, then the matter
would be presented to a judge in open court by a special prosecutor
appointed by the Governor, who would then be charged with presenting
that independent investigation to a judge in a probable cause hearing
in open court. And that judge could then make a determination of
whether or not probable cause existed; and if it did or if it did not,
that judge would then issue a written finding of fact and deliver the
case back to the local prosecutor who would then, in accordance with
existing State law, proceed through the secret grand jury process or
whatever other process was available to that district attorney--who is
elected by the people, by the way.

So this probable cause hearing would enable there to be some
transparency so that the public would understand, hear the evidence and
see the evidence. Then there would be accountability that would be
established on behalf of the people based on what the elected
prosecutor decided to do with the case.

So it is hard to hold a local prosecutor accountable after a secret
grand jury process, and the only thing you can rely upon is the earnest
presentation in a press conference by the prosecutor that we did our
best, we presented the evidence, and the grand jury came back finding
that the killing was justified.

We need more than that. We saw that in the case of Michael Brown in
Ferguson where they did release the grand jury transcripts, and you
could see where the evidence, a boatload or a truckload, a dump truck
of evidence was just dumped on the confused grand jury members who were
charged on a law that was not even applicable, given bad law upon which
to decide the case.

So we saw what happened in the grand jury proceeding in that case,
and that, ladies and gentlemen, is not the only time I am sure that
there has been abuse within the grand jury room. But we will never know
because it is secret.

Lastly, I have filed a bill which is called the Police Accountability
Act. What it would do would be to provide another tool for Federal
prosecutors to be able to prosecute law enforcement officers for the
offense of murder and all of the lesser included offenses should it
appear that the process within the State did not work.

So those three bills I have discussed.

Now I see my colleague has arrived, Sheila Jackson Lee, who, out of
Houston, Texas, has ascended to the top spot, the ranking membership on
the Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations
Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, upon which I also serve along
with her. So with that, I will yield to the gentlewoman from Houston.

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