Take Decision to Prosecute Cops in Fatal Shootings From Local DAs and Give it to the AG, Says Local Mo. Rep

Two
months after Michael Brown
was shot and killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, and as protests
in the St. Louis area
continue, a state legislator, Rep. Jay Barnes (R-District 60),
wants to submit legislation that would remove the responsibility to
decide whether to charge cops after shootings from local
prosecutors and transfer it to the state attorney general’s office.

KMBC reports:

State Rep. Jay Barnes said he plans to file legislation during
2015 session that would give the state attorney general’s office
the responsibility for determining whether charges should be filed
against law enforcement officers who fatally shoot people.

“There’s an inevitable appearance of bias in a case where a
prosecutor has to decide whether to take action against an officer
who works for an agency that prosecutor works hand-in-hand with
every single day,” Barnes, a Republican attorney from Jefferson
City, said Monday.

Handing fatal police shootings over to the attorney general’s
office won’t eliminate the problem of law enforcement bias, but it
does create some distance between the members of the law
enforcement community being investigated and the members of the law
enforcement community doing the investigating.

It also brings up the question of whether the decision to
prosecute cops for non-fatal but questionable incidents should also
be removed from local prosecutors (yes).

The Michael Brown also drew attention to the need for
independent agencies to investigate cops, and not just non-local
agencies . A piece in Politico by Michael Brown, a retired
Air Force lieutenant colonel whose son was fatally shot by cops,
described his
long and arduous campaign to get an independent review
commission for police shootings in Wisconsin, something the state
never had before. Bell used his portion of a settlement by police
(a tactic often used to remove questionable incidents from judicial
scrutiny, at the taxpayers expense) to help get a law passed.

Like other reforms aimed at improving policing as it impacts
people every day, they can benefit residents, who receive some
measure of protection from unchecked police brutality, and cops,
whose image can improve on whose bad apples can be removed.

Check out more police reform issues here.

Update: Here’s Barnes’
column on the proposal, which ran last week.