Name: Opinion | Virginia Democrats must play catch-up on criminal justice reform
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Opinion | Virginia Democrats must play catch-up on criminal justice reform

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This article was published more than&nbsp;2 years agoCommentGift ShareMark J. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University where he holds the Ruth D. and John T. Hazel Chair in Public Policy. He is co-author of “.” Had new Democratic majorities in Virginia’s House of Delegates and Senate made good on a seminal 2019 campaign pledge — criminal justice reform — in 2020’s winter General Assembly session, they’d appear as prescient as Nostradamus.Instead, they are playing catch-up before an Aug. 18 special session, facing thorny new demands from their own party’s left flank amid widespread outrage following the police killings of African Americans George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks.The 2019 blue-wave election gave Democrats control of both legislative chambers to go along with the governor’s office for the first time in a quarter century. The victory was fueled, in part, by .AdvertisementThe underlying issues simmered long before Floyd’s ghastly viral-video death on a Minneapolis street detonated into protests, clashes with police and the toppling of monuments in cities nationwide, particularly Richmond.The disparities show up in incarceration rates. Forty percent of the 2.26 million adults in U.S. correctional facilities in the were Black, though African Americans are only 13 percent of the population compared with 73 percent for Whites. Expressed another way, Whites are jailed at a rate of 450 per 100,000 population compared with Blacks at a rate of 2,306 per 100,000 population — almost five times the incarceration rate of Whites.Black people are also more likely to experience violence — including lethal force — in encounters with law enforcement. A of fatal police shootings nationwide shows that 999 people died of law-enforcement gunshot wounds in calendar 2019. Twenty-five percent of those killed were Black, nearly double their share of the populace. Among unarmed subjects, the numbers are equally disproportionate. Of the 354 unarmed people fatally shot by police since 2015, 124 (35 percent) were Black and 146 (41 percent) were White. (The newspaper data do not include police-caused deaths by means other than firearms.)AdvertisementLawmakers know the damning math. They also know how decades of stricter crime laws and longer prison terms mandated over two decades of GOP legislative control exacerbated the disparities, particularly for lesser drug offenses.Reinstating parole (abolished in 1995), legalizing marijuana, expungement of criminal records for those who have paid their debt and seek employment, ending the right of police to search a vehicle or property based on an officer’s sense of smell, compassionate release of terminally ill inmates and boosting pay for public defenders were among the proposals Democrats had queued up last January. Of them, only the pot measure passed, and it was watered down from legalization to decriminalization.Most of it languished as Democratic leaders juggled the demands of progressives, who wanted prompt action on law-enforcement reforms and punishment equity issues, and the moderates’ fear of being labeled “soft on crime.” In the end, procrastination won out and the measures were deferred to 2021 for additional study — usually legislative code for slow death.AdvertisementNow all those proposals are back and will share the session with new legislation responsive to the Black Lives Matter movement.Legislation to establish citizen commissions on policing and civil rights () and a ban on police use of choke holds () are already filed. Expect new bills that would create databases of police misconduct complaints and all police stops, reduce certain minor or incidental assaults on officers from felonies to misdemeanors, require decertification of cops convicted of felonies and some misdemeanors or don’t comply with training requirements. The latter would effectively prevent bad cops fired for willful misconduct in one jurisdiction from finding law-enforcement work elsewhere, a fairly common phenomenon now.All of this comes amid the persistent echo from the left to “defund the police,” a politically poisonous slogan for Democrats in their suburban strongholds. Never mind that it rarely means actually dismantling police departments but, rather, reorganizing them. In politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.AdvertisementDemocratic leaders face stratospheric expectations to pass far-reaching reforms as they navigate a minefield of difficult votes on volatile issues that Republicans will gladly spotlight in the 2021 statewide and legislative races.And to think, much of this could have been done by March.Read more:​​Full coverage: Demographic changes: Newsletter: George Floyd’s America: Resources: CommentsGift ArticleTOP STORIESClimate ChangeReporting on Earth’s changing climate and the people trying to find solutions to one of the biggest challenges of our era.Try a different topic or to save your preferences

This article was published more than&nbsp;2 years agoCommentGift ShareMark J. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University where he holds the Ruth D. and John T. Hazel Chair in Public Policy. He is co-author of “.” Had new Democratic majorities in Virginia’s House of Delegates and Senate made good on a seminal 2019 campaign pledge — criminal justice reform — in 2020’s winter General Assembly session, they’d appear as prescient as Nostradamus.Instead, they are playing catch-up before an Aug. 18 special session, facing thorny new demands from...

Opinion | Virginia Democrats must play catch-up on criminal justice reform

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