By Paul Kiefer
Three years after state lawmakers celebrated the passage of the Maryland Police Accountability Act, the rollout of new police oversight systems has proven slow, inconsistent and plagued by disagreements over how to implement implementing the new oversight process – challenges that frustrate critics and administrators.
But the Maryland General Assembly has been reluctant to revisit the law, leaving many of the unresolved questions about new police oversight systems in the hands of local governments.
A Capital News Service investigation found that about a quarter of Maryland jurisdictions did not have their police monitoring systems in place by the July 2022 deadlines set by state lawmakers. The new oversight bodies for Baltimore City, as well as Dorchester, Cecil and Kent counties, did not meet until 2023.
Even in jurisdictions that met the deadline, some administrators struggled to navigate the law’s ambiguities. In one county, three people who filed misconduct complaints later had to defend themselves in court against countercharges that they submitted false reports and wasted police resources.
The 2021 Maryland Police Accountability Act described three-tier police surveillance system which theoretically overhauled the state’s longstanding rules for investigating police misconduct and gave civilian agencies the power to receive complaints of misconduct, review internal police investigations and impose disciplinary measures. The reforms are Maryland lawmakers’ most significant contribution to a nationwide wave of police oversight reforms following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a year earlier.
Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon (D-Montgomery) was a member of the Maryland General Assembly. task force on police reform and accountability and one main supporting voice for the Police Accountability Act in 2021. He says state lawmakers generally expect local governments to be proactive in making new police oversight systems work, though he doesn’t endorse not always this approach.
“If there are real problems, of course the state can step in to get clarification, but we are only in the early stages of implementation by local governments,” Moon said.
Police Accountability Boards, or PABs, are the foundation of the new system. The commissions are responsible for receiving civilian complaints and forwarding them to the appropriate law enforcement agency for internal investigation.
State lawmakers set an unenforced timeline for creating new county-level police oversight agencies: Each of the state’s 24 jurisdictions, including Baltimore City, would establish a PAB by July 2022, and each PAB would publish an annual report on its activities that year. .
But a half-dozen counties have struggled to enforce their PABs and return complaints for investigation before that deadline, usually due to administrative hurdles, and…
