NC Republicans back 5 criminal justice bills. Police, BLM activists have mixed feelings

North Carolina state lawmakers are on the verge of passing five different criminal-justice bills, including some inspired by George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota.

Some top Republicans from both the House of Representatives and the Senate held a press conference alongside police officials and prosecutors Tuesday at the General Assembly. That indicates their bills have broad support on the right and are likely to pass the Republican-controlled legislature. They framed the proposals as striking a balance: supporting good cops by cracking down on the bad cops whose actions harm people’s faith in law enforcement.

“This legislation is aimed at not only protecting the public, but also helping good officers do their job better and screening out the few bad apples out there,” Fayetteville Republican Rep. John Szoka said.

Szoka is one of three House members who have taken the lead on criminal justice changes along with Republican Rep. Kristin Baker of Cabarrus County and Democratic Rep. Howard Hunter of Hertford County.

The bills they promoted Tuesday included three sponsored by Szoka, which the House has already passed and are now in the Senate. They include a “duty to intervene” rule to put more pressure on officers to stop fellow cops from abusing people, The News & Observer has reported, plus make it harder for officers who have been fired or seriously disciplined to bounce around from department to department, covering up their past history.

“It’s important to show the public that we are taking positive steps for resolving some of these things and making law enforcement better, and making the justice system better for everyone,” Szoka said.

A fourth bill, House Bill 436, sponsored by Baker, would require all new officers to pass a psychological screening before they could be hired. And it would require all current officers to take two hours of training on mental health and wellness practices every three years.

“Their duty to protect can become a really heavy burden to bear,” Baker said.

The fifth bill was Senate Bill 300, a multifaceted Senate proposal which The News & Observer reported Monday has a new provision to allow the families of victims of police violence to watch the body-camera footage in private. It would not change the rules around making the footage fully public.

That bill also has numerous other provisions, The N&O has previously reported, including the creation of a database that would track officers who have been disciplined or involved in shootings, and stricter penalties for protesters who the police say were involving in looting or rioting.

A standalone anti-rioting bill also passed the House on Monday.

Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood spoke at Tuesday’s press conference to support the bills, calling them “critically important.”

John Midgette, the executive director of the N.C. Police Benevolent Association, was also there. But afterward he said the PBA has concerns about some of the proposals, like the duty-to-intervene rules. He said if those are going to move forward they’d also like to see the General Assembly pass a different bill to protect government whistleblowers.

Critics have said that whistleblower bill could be misused by bad cops to prevent themselves from being fired by falsely claiming to be whistleblowers, The N&O has reported. But Midgette said that if officers don’t have protection from being retaliated against for intervening or reporting abuse, they might be hesitant to do so at all.

Concerns from BLM?

No Black Lives Matter activists came to the meeting Tuesday to support any of the bills.

And the bills don’t include some of the biggest changes that activists have been pushing for — like banning police chokeholds, making body-camera footage more accessible to the general public, legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana, or chipping away at “qualified immunity” laws that protect police officers who violate people’s constitutional rights.

Kerwin Pittman, a Raleigh activist and prominent leader in the Black Lives Matter movement who served on the criminal justice task force that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper created last year, said he wasn’t invited to Tuesday’s meeting.

But Pittman said he does like some of the provisions that the Republican legislators are backing. A statewide duty-to-intervene rule “would be great,” he said, as would the changes opening up body cam footage for the families of victims of police violence.

But he said he was disappointed that more reforms weren’t taken up. And he’s concerned that the anti-rioting rules being packaged with the reforms are purposefully written vaguely, to let police pick and choose which protesters to crack down on.

“The definition of rioting is unclear,” he said. “So what we are concerned about is it would put another law on the books to criminalize Black and brown people.”

Republicans did more than Democrats?

However, Republican lawmakers defended the proposals that they are putting forward now — as well as some of the other laws they have passed since taking away the majority at the legislature from the Democratic Party in 2011.

”I think that the Republican General Assembly, in the last 10 years, has done more for criminal justice reform than had been done in the 50 years prior,” said Republican Sen. Danny Britt of Lumberton on Tuesday.

Britt is a criminal defense attorney and one of the GOP’s main backers of criminal-justice measures in the last few years.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, passed by Democrats in 2009, which had allowed people on death row to be re-sentenced if they could prove their trial had been racially biased.

But Republican lawmakers have also passed laws ranging from the Justice Reinvestment Act of 2011, which cut down on the number of people in prison, to last year’s Second Chance Act that allows people to expunge their old criminal records if they haven’t committed more crimes for a certain number of years.

Their work will continue, Britt said Tuesday.

“Everything is not in this bill that we may end up doing down the road,” he said. “But this bill does make great steps forward.”