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A couple of police departments in the country have made a commitment in light of the demonstrations that have been going on from coast to coast in the form of a new policy. This policy states if you witness something illegal being done by your co-workers, you have to report it, or “you see it, you own it.”

“I think this is a new trend, because what they’re doing is creating an affirmative duty to intervene,” said , former state attorney general. “I think in Chattanooga, for example, this goes beyond reporting or seeing something being done wrong. This is a requirement that you actively intervene if you’re an officer and you see another officer doing something illegal or harming someone.”

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The ability to impose this kind of policy on an existing contract, McKenna says would depend on the contract.

“For example, where failure to intervene when you’re supposed to is documented and there’s discipline that comes with that, could the discipline be subject to the collective bargaining agreement? It might,” he said. “But I assume that in these departments that are now enacting these policies that they will be codified by their respective city governments, and then there will be a requirement that you can’t negotiate around in a collective bargaining agreement.”

McKenna thinks one of the most important reasons for enacting policies like this is to provide protection for the officers who report the wrongdoing.

“Then you’ll be able to say, ‘look, if I had not intervened or at least reported what I saw, I would have been disciplined. I’m required to do it,'” McKenna said. “So I actually do think it helps, at a practical level, every individual officer. And I think at a cultural level within a department, it does a lot to change the attitude about the so called ‘blue wall’ to remind everyone that they’re accountable for their fellow officers, not just for their own behavior.”

There are some professions that already have similar requirements, falling into the category of “mandatory reporters.”

“A pediatrician that becomes aware of a patient being abused is obligated to report,” McKenna said, as an example. “There are several types of mandatory reporters, which reminds us that you can write into statute this obligation that at least certain professions have to report what they’re seeing. What’s striking about this trend we’re seeing in police departments now is that it’s not just a duty to report, but a duty to intervene at the time.”

While there could be a possibility of conflict with the police officers themselves, for example if two officers agree that force is justified and two don’t, McKenna says we’ll have to rely on the professional judgement of the officers.

“I’m comfortable with that as the rule because we rely on our law enforcement officers to exercise their judgement every single day,” he said. “There are many, many incidents, of course, the vast majority of incidents that don’t result in violence, they’re de-escalated.”

“There are many incidents where officers disarm someone who’s about to harm them without anyone getting hurt. We don’t tend to hear about those stories any more than we hear that all the planes landed safely at Sea-Tac today. That’s not news,” he added.

Using the case in Minneapolis as an example, McKenna does not believe there would have been chaos if the officers who stood by as Officer Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck had instead spoken up.

“I think it would have saved Mr. Floyd’s life.”

McKenna also sees this policy as a change in expectation for police officers.

“If you’re the officer committing the apparent harm and you know the other officers around you are going to intervene or are required to intervene, you might think twice before committing that harm,” he said. “In other words, Officer Chauvin might have not done what he did with Mr. Floyd lying there, begging for his life if he had known those other officers would intervene. But he evidently was confident they would not intervene, which says a lot about why we need these these new rules.”

McKenna thinks this idea is catching on and that it’s a part of a broader trend of re-examining how we police our communities.

“I think that more and more law enforcement officers and police chiefs recognize that they need to be seen as community partners,” he said. “I mean, that’s always been a goal and an ideal, but too often they haven’t been achieving it. In the post 9/11 world where we saw a considerable militarization of the police forces in our country, I think we got away from that. We need to get back to it so that officers can again be seen by everyone as protectors and allies, not as a threat.”

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