Derek Hale, a White Marine, was shot dead by Wilmington police after he was tased in November 2006. His widow was awarded $875,000, taxpayer-paid.
In 1999, Mexican worker Pedro Martinez, asleep in a car that Newark police refused to remove after stopping it on CSX railroad tracks, was killed by the midnight regular. His widow was paid an undisclosed amount.
Jeremy McDole, wheelchaired and Black, was shot and killed by Wilmington Police. The city paid his family $1.5 million.
In all these cases, a working-class resident was killed by police in our opinion for what we consider no good reason; none of those sworn to shield and serve were held accountable thanks to the Law-Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBOR), a law unknown in 35 states.
After decades of effort by everyday citizens and especially Black Lives Matter, a new team of legislators was poised to remedy this travesty with Senate Bill 149, which would reform LEOBOR, bring misconduct into the light and ensure accountability through community review boards.
Then along came the “Delaware Way,” that culture of corporate lawyers, cops and whipping-post politicians, systematically squashing challenges to the status quo, thus things like:
One of us, Phillip Bannowsky, knows from experience. In the late 1990s, he chaired a coalition of 40 organizations — unions, evangelical Christians, nonprofits — backing a constitutional amendment so former felons could vote. State Rep. Al Plant began these efforts 20 years before, but success in 2000 was spoiled by awful compromises that limited its scope and maintained poll tax-type rules about paying off fines. Efforts by Plant’s widow, Hazel, and state Rep. Helene Keeley finally cut five-year waits and financial bars in 2016 — 36 years to rid us of one Jim Crow relic. Meanwhile, prisons swelled, and killer cops roved, until smartphones exposed a reign of terror.
We certainly don’t fault those who worked long on ex-felons’ voting rights, and we understand the pressures on SB 149’s sponsors to fold.
But it’s a compromise too far for the working class.
Delaware Democratic Socialists of America seconds American Civil Liberties Union Delaware’s assessment that the substitute “takes community oversight out of the hands of the community by creating ... (a) statewide oversight board that is overseen by the state’s top law enforcement official, leaving local boards without any meaningful oversight power.” Note that the American Medical Association finds police encounters with Black males thrice as deadly as those with White males.
Furthermore, the substitute would keep police disciplinary records “shrouded in secrecy.” Also, it would destroy records of police who are separated three years after discharge. Dover Officer Thomas Webster was fired after he was video recorded kicking a Black man in the face, his 29th excessive-force complaint. He soon got work in Maryland, where he is now being sued for the 2018 death of 19-year-old Anton Black. How many bad cops will cross state lines or wait three years to get back on the beat? And boards can only review “serious” and “substantiated” complaints. The worst police misconduct can be declared unsubstantiated, allowing bad apples to resign.
Review boards under the substitute bill would serve at the pleasure of officials, and for the most egregious cases, all they can do is report the cop to his senior officer. They can make recommendations, as long as they don’t reveal why, specifically.
For families impacted by police violence, fake transparency is worse than in-your-face secrecy. How can folks say police are hiding something, when police respond, “But we’re under a lens”?
A lens cloaked in a con.
The working class is losing confidence in Democrats after decades of neoliberal deindustrialization and a failure to deliver. Dems can still win elections, however, if they stand in solidarity with their constituents (mostly multiracial working class), call out colleagues who equate surrender with compromise and demand real police accountability.
After all, widows and mothers would far prefer to have their loved ones back than a bag of cold cash.
Phillip Bannowsky and Jonathan Tate
Co-chairs, Delaware Democratic Socialists of America
