Study recommends more police transparency in Georgia
ATLANTA -- A Georgia public interest law center is looking for ways to improve relations between police and the communities they serve as well as drive down the number of incidents involving police officers' use of force.
The Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice is making recommendations that its leaders hope could start becoming law as early as this year.
"Like many of you, probably all of you, following the events in Ferguson (Missouri) in summer of 2014 and subsequent deaths, Georgia Appleseed began to think about what we could do to be helpful, to add value to the process," Rob Rhodes, the center's director of projects told a panel of state legislators.
On Aug. 9, 2014, a Ferguson police officer shot to death Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, sparking a national outcry.
The Appleseed report Rhodes presented to legislators makes several recommendations about bringing police data and rules into better public view.
Law enforcement agencies' rule books should conform to best practices and should be easily available on their websites, the report recommends.
And the state should make sure that officers get adequate training on those policies, the report says. It recommends officer training on use of force, conflict management and bias, among other things.
The center also would like to see easily accessible information about law enforcement agency demographics.
A wide discrepancy between a police department's diversity and the community it serves can generate mistrust, the report says.
Rhodes said he thinks there's enough time for some of the recommendations about data and transparency to become law this year. Whether any of them do depends on legislative opinions of the report, which also recommends that lawmakers require an independent, uninvolved law enforcement agency to investigate use-of-force incidents.
In practice, the GBI already handles all such investigations.
Statewide, the GBI starts about two use-of-force investigations each week, agency Director Vernon Keenan said at recent budget hearings. The investigations include officer-involved shootings and deaths in custody.
Most use-of-force cases in Georgia are found to be justified, such as cases of shootouts, Keenan said.
But the GBI is asking for 20 new agents to help deal with the workload. Right now, Keenan said he is pulling agents from cases of child sex-traffing, corruption and drug enforcement.
The number of use-of-force cases, Keenan said, indicates the level of violence directed against officers.
To contact writer Maggie Lee, e-mail mlee@macon.com.
This story was originally published January 25, 2016 at 9:27 PM with the headline "Study recommends more police transparency in Georgia ."