The Atlantic reports:

In Loveland, Colorado—the nation’s self-proclaimed “Sweetheart City,” about an hour’s drive north of Denver—a young police officer paused earlier this month as he was arresting a pregnant woman who had outstanding warrants. Should he handcuff her, the officer asked his supervisors, or, under a new Colorado policing law, would that now be considered excessive force?

To officers like Rob Pride, a Loveland patrol sergeant who relayed that example to me last week, that kind of hesitation is the most worrisome part of the first-in-the-nation police-reform law that Colorado enacted on June 13. To the bill’s supporters, however, the young officer’s pause is precisely the goal.

Barely a month has passed since Colorado legislators raced to approve the Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act as protesters marched and chanted outside the state capitol in Denver. The demonstrators demanded justice for George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man killed by police in Minneapolis, and for Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man whose death at the hands of police nine months earlier in a Denver suburb attracted no national outcry at the time, but has received fresh attention this summer. Many of the new law’s provisions—banning choke holds, overhauling the use of force, and significantly expanding the use of body cameras—won’t formally take effect for months, or even years. But policing in Colorado is already changing.

The legislation is the first in the country that allows victims of police violence to sue officers under state law. “I’m worried for my guys,” Pride, a national trustee of Colorado’s Fraternal Order of Police, told me in a phone interview. They’ve been trained not to hesitate: “When we hesitate,” he said, “there’s a good chance that we don’t go home at the end of the day.” But, Pride suggested, if they’re saddled with the fear of potentially losing their life savings, in addition to their job, how can they not?

The authors of the new law in Colorado say this reaction from officers on the street—call it an extra note of caution or restraint, if not hesitation—is healthy. What if, for example, the officers who confronted Elijah McClain in Aurora had hesitated before they placed him in a carotid hold and cut off the blood flow to his brain, or before the paramedics they called to the scene injected him with the sedative ketamine, after which he went into cardiac arrest and later died?

“If officers are rethinking [their career] because of a law of integrity and accountability, then they shouldn’t be in the profession as a police officer,” Colorado State Representative Leslie Herod, who wrote the new law, told me. “Their duty is to serve and protect, not kill. It is very important that law-enforcement officers think before they act.” [Continue reading…]