Indiana took a step toward statewide police reform last week when it passed a widely-supported Statehouse bill, and local law enforcement officials in the county welcomed the changes with open arms.
Gov. Eric Holcomb signed House Enrolled Act 1006 into law after it passed through the Republican-led Statehouse with wide unanimous support. The law covers a lot of areas in regards to police reform, including requiring de-escalation training for all officers in the state, and devoting $70 million to update the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy training facility.
The legislation also prohibits chokeholds under certain circumstances, criminalizes an officer turning off a body camera to hide criminal behavior and establishes a state procedure allowing the Indiana Law Enforcement Training Board to decertify an officer who commits misconduct.
Johnson County Sheriff Duane Burgess sits on the legislative committee for the Indiana Sheriff’s Association, so he had been involved with the bill from the start.
“We’re working constantly to try to come up with new ideas to make things better because we can’t always keep doing things the same way,” Burgess said.
Training has always been a priority at the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies have been going through de-escalation and crisis intervention training for years already, he said.
“We’ve had body cameras, we’ve had all that. I’m good with what happened with this law,” Burgess said.
In Greenwood, Jim Ison, chief of the Greenwood Police Department, also supports HEA 1006.
“Change that is going to improve the relationship between the police and those we serve to help us operate as best we can, I’m in favor of,” Ison said.
Greenwood has also been practicing de-escalation for years as part of in-service defensive tactics training, and the department recently updated its use-of-force policy to ban chokeholds, he said.
“We preach and we preach and we preach de-escalation training,” Ison said.
Another part of the bill requires that police agencies request a prospective officer’s employment record from previous employers during the hiring process. This is a tool commonly used in the hiring process, but the law will make it easier to get access to prospective officers’ backgrounds, he said.
This provision would keep potential “bad apples” from jumping from agency to agency. In Ison’s experience, many police agencies are reluctant to share past employment history due to local government policies.
“If they have information that would help us make an educated decision on whether this person has the integrity and moral capacity to be a police officer and they don’t share it, it has the potential to give our profession as a whole a black eye,” he said.
Though he fully supports the law, Ison said the idea of police reform in the state should not be perceived as a negative reaction or punishment for the general police force being corrupt. Most officers are not bad, and they take just as much offense as the public does when there are incidents of misconduct or excessive brutality.
“This law isn’t meant to cause any damage or imply that officers are corrupt or bad people,” he said. “Anything that helps us become better, I’m all for, but sometimes it can be perceived as we’re out here running amuck, and we basically need the choke chain pulled. That’s not the case.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Pull Quote” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
“This law isn’t meant to cause any damage or imply that officers are corrupt or bad people. Anything that helps us become better, I’m all for, but sometimes it can be perceived as we’re out here running amuck, and we basically need the choke chain pulled. That’s not the case.”
— Jim Ison, Greenwood police chief
[sc:pullout-text-end]
