SC police leaders want standards, reform but will lawmakers pass bill to enact change?
South Carolina police agencies have no required, minimum standards and can have as few policies as they want. That means across the state, a county sheriff’s office might have hundreds of pages of rules that say what its deputies can and can’t do while a local town’s police department has ten officers who have never seen a policy manual.
Having no statewide standards means any rules about high profile policing issues like chokeholds and no knock warrants are up to each police agency.
For S.C. police leaders like Jarrod Bruder, executive director of the South Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, this lack of state standards is dated and beyond due for fixing.
South Carolina police agencies that have refused to come along have to be pulled into the 21st century, he said.
“We’ve got to make our profession more professional,” he said. “We’re going to move everybody forward with these minimum standards.”
Leaders hope that a proposed law will force the police agencies, particularly small town departments, to have minimum standards. But a key legislative deadline has already passed and making the bill law this year would take some heavy lifting by the state’s lawmakers.
The bill, H. 3050, was approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week and seeks sweeping police reforms for South Carolina. It would require police departments to:
▪ eliminate chokeholds except in life or death situations
▪ create standards for “no knock” warrants
▪ require body cameras
▪ add a ”duty to intervene” when another officer is breaking the law or policy
▪ establish when officers can use force and how much force they can use
▪ require field training after basic police training
▪ establish when officers can pursue a vehicle and when they can shoot at a moving vehicle
▪ create hiring and firing practices
The bill seeks to a create a statewide “Compliance Division” that will ensure departments have these minimum standards. The divisions would be part of the Law Enforcement Training Council, which is a tribunal of police leaders for South Carolina.. Departments that don’t create these policies can be punished with fines. In more drastic cases, all the police officers working for a department without the minimum standards could be stripped of their state police certification, meaning they can’t be officers.
Under H 3050, an officer could be fired for misconduct not intervening “when observing another officer physically or psychologically abusing members of the public or prisoners.”
Bruder said some may see these standards as knee-jerk reactions to the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin, who was convicted by a jury last week. But these standards are not reactionary, he said. Some new standards were created through lessons from recent moments but most have been supported by state police leaders for a decade or more.
Another problem in South Carolina policing is departments firing officers for misconduct but the department’s sheriff, chief or ranking officer not attending administrative hearings to prosecute those officers. The bill ends this by requiring that a agency leader show up at the hearings.
The bill started out as a fix for another issue — untrained officers working alone. Currently, a police officer can be hired by a department and start working with only gun training. That’s because under current law a department has a year before the officer has to go through basic police training. The bill would require untrained, uncertified officers work with a trained, certified officer at all times.
“Law enforcement officers have to be able make split second decisions that involve life and death — for not only the officer but a citizen,” said Rep. Seth Rose, D-Columbia. “They need to be properly trained for the safety of everyone.”
From the required minimum standards to rules about untrained officers, many of the more than 300 police agencies in South Carolina have such polices. Others have policies, but they aren’t up to today’s standards, according to Bruder. About 120 police agencies have less than 10 officers and those agencies typically have policy issues, which results in bad policing.
“The ideas in this bill came from leaders in law enforcement because they want the entire profession to meet the expectations and standards most of them have already been operating with. Nobody hates a bad cop as much as a good cop,” said Rep. Micah Caskey, R-Lexington, whose amendments shaped the bill into its current form.
“Contrary to the toxic narrative flung about by intellectually lazy activists, cops want the bar raised for their profession,” Caskey said.
Last year, House lawmakers asked police leaders to present at an ad hoc legislative committee on criminal justice reform in South Carolina. In August 2020, four South Carolina police groups representing sheriffs, police chiefs, and officers offered their suggestions to improve policing in the state.
A bill called the Police and Community Together, or PACT, Act — which is separate from H 3050 — was also introduced in the House by Rep. Chris Wooten, R-Lexington. That bill would include many of the police policy changes included in H 3050. But it also calls for the legislature to fully fund certain police improvements, such as body cameras, PTSD counseling and the South Carolina police training academy, which now depends on fines, fees and assessments.
The PACT Act is expected to cost $20 million, a price tag that has stalled its progress. Instead, the House is moving forward with H 3050, which requires body cameras but doesn’t pay for them. The House added some of the policy initiatives in the PACT Act to H 3050.
Rep. Dennis Moss, R-Cherokee, introduced H 3050 in January.
Wooten signed on as sponsor of the amended H 3050 as did Republicans Sandy McGarry of Lancaster and Bill Hixon of Aiken. The bipartisan House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill.
The bill is scheduled to be debated on the House floor Wednesday. But the deadline for the Senate to consider the bill this year under the Legislature’s normal rules has passed. Having missed that deadline, H 3050 will be up against a much harder legislative process to become law this year.
Lawmakers could take the bill up in January. But if the H 3050 doesn’t get approved next year, police in South Carolina will go at least another year without uniformed, minimum standards.
Bruder doesn’t want this moment in which police reform is front and center to be to be missed.
“We keep running into the same issues again and again,” he said. Someone has to come along and force police agencies’ hands and say do policing “the right way or don’t do it.”