Colorado passes major police reform bill.

[DetlefK]

This is Leonard French, a copyright-lawyer. He regularly comments on interesting cases of all sorts.


The bill:

- Body-cams become mandatory in Colorado by July 2023.

- If the body-cam has not been switched on during a situation, witness-testimony by the police-officer related to that time-period of the situation is considered inadmissible as evidence in court, unless the officer can provide arguments for why it shouldn't be inadmissible.

- Tampering with the body-cam leads to 1-year suspension up to permanent termination.

- If a complaint of police-misconduct is lodged, the full unedited footage of all cameras, including body-cams, must be released within 3 weeks.

- It becomes mandatory for the PDs to write an annual report: all instances of death or serious injury caused by police-officers, including :
* time and location, race of the involved, names of the police-officers involved and of those at the scene but uninvolved, details of the injury...
* A statistical read-out of all cop-citizen interactions

- If a police-officer loses his certification due to misconduct, he may not be reinstated until exonerated in court.

- Do's and Don'ts for how to deal with a protest.
* No shooting indiscriminately into a crowd.
* No tear-gas until the protesters got forewarned and were given time to disperse.

- Qualified Immunity is no longer shielding police-officers from the consequences of depriving people of their legal and constitutional rights.

- When a court awards damages because of deprivation of rights, the police-officers will now be PERSONALLY held financially responsible for a fraction of the damages awarded.



And there's more. It's a long bill.