With pressure mounting in the city, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has moved swiftly to enact police reform.
She said that the new rules were supposed to be devised by a new task force that convened to address many of the problems recent events in the city have spotlighted. But she said the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks moved her to act immediately.
Atlanta Police Reform: Here Are The New Rules For Use Of Force
“I am often reminded by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and that is that ‘There is a fierce urgency of now,'” she said. “It is clear that we do not have another day, another minute, another hour to waste.”
With that Bottoms introduced an Executive Order, which directs the Interim Chief of Police to immediately adopt and implement changes to the standard operating procedures and work rules of the Atlanta Police Department concerning their use of force.
According to the administrative order released by the city, here are what the immediate reforms include:
- Intervening in unreasonable use of deadly force: requiring officers to intervene when seeing another officer using force that is beyond what is reasonable under the circumstances, and reporting deadly use of force to the on-duty supervisor;
- Shooting at moving vehicles: provide lawful restrictions on when an officer may use deadly force at a suspect who is in a moving motor vehicle;
- Addressing officers’ response to resistance: apply de-escalation techniques to gain voluntary compliance and use only the amount of objectively reasonable force necessary to successfully protect themselves or others during an arrest or to bring an incident under control when dealing with members of the community, suspects, and detainees; and
- Reporting deadly use of force: require the reporting of all uses of deadly force by a police officer to the Citizens Review Board.
The new rules come as Bottoms faces criticism for her handling of the protests, which have been mostly peaceful expect for some looting that took place in Buckhead.
But the public pressure has taken a toll. Bottoms announced last week that Police Chief Ericka Shields would resign so that the police force could start to rebuild with a fresh face at the helm.
Bottoms also called for and received the immediate termination of the officer who killed Brooks.
And as the spotlight continues to shine, Bottoms is among the women being vetted as a potential vice president contender with the Joe Biden presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, a sheriff in Burke County, Georgia, says that the officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks did nothing wrong.
“There’s nothing malicious or sadistic in the way these law officers behaved,” Sheriff Alonzo Williams told CNN.
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