The Monitor’s Report documents the overall progress the Department has made in transformation and reform. It details progress made in each section and provides a scoring breakdown by paragraph.
In that report, there are various ratings of progress given, but overall the BPD has been able to successfully implement reforms on 83% of all paragraphs in the Consent Decree. These are the paragraphs that have either demonstrated initial compliance or are on track to doing so.
The reform process generally progresses through the following stages:
BPD must develop a required policy or plan to provide members the necessary written guidance to implement the reforms. Then, BPD must develop training on the new policy and deliver the training to required members. BPD then must implement the policy and training and prove that the Department is carrying out the reforms in practice consistently – to ultimately achieve compliance with the consent decree.
Policy and Training Phases
When BPD is developing policy and training to implement the reforms, it follows a rigorous process with intensive collaboration with the Monitoring Team and the DOJ and opportunities for public comment before finalizing directives. This process includes the following steps::
Collaboration: BPD actively collaborates with the Monitoring Team and the DOJ on its draft of the required policy/plan/training.
Public Comment: After collaboration with the Monitoring Team and the DOJ on the required policy/plan/training, BPD posts the policy/plan/training for the public to review and provide feedback to the Department.
Approved: The Monitoring Team and the DOJ then approve the policy/plan/training after collaboration, public comment, and final revisions.
Delivery (only applies to training): BPD delivers the approved training to all required members.
After BPD delivers any required training on an approved policy, BPD then implements the policy, requiring members to follow the new directives in practice. The last column in the graphic above, entitled “Implementation Status,” shows whether BPD has entered the implementation phase. Simply activating a new policy for implementation, however, does not mean BPD has complied with the requirements of the Consent Decree; rather, BPD must perform according to policy requirements to achieve compliance.
The Monitoring Team will provide detailed status assessments of the quality of BPD’s implementation of the mandated reforms in continual public reports. BPD will update this graphic in the future to demonstrate where BPD is in the process of achieving compliance, reflecting the Monitoring Team’s assessments of BPD’s progress.
If you have any questions or comments regarding this graphic, please contact: Policy@BaltimorePolice.org.
