How Decades-Old Progressive Reforms Helped Usher in a Culture of Police Impunity

The last time Donald Trump was President, America engaged in a frequently painful national conversation about race and police brutality, with many arguing that we had a set of laws in place that allowed wayward officers to misbehave without consequence. The conventional wisdom on the left is that this state of affairs is the work of the country’s old Jim Crow laws, an institution that was itself a creature created by the nation’s darkest and most conservative impulses.

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But that doesn’t tell the full story. Some of the characteristics of our present system—that officers can abuse with impunity, that police chiefs refused to do more to rein in abuse, that bad cops can’t be fired—weren’t born entirely of a right-wing America. In many cases, it turns out, bad officers today are protected by progressive legislation enacted in the mid-20th century.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to the scene of the original crime.

Prior to the 1960s, many reformers saw chiefs as the bad actors. They presumed that the brass were forcing their street cops to do things that were unethical, or even criminal. There was almost nothing to stop a chief from throwing a wayward officer into an interrogation room and torturing him until he confessed to running a racket, or placating a mobster, or, for that matter, not running a racket or not doing favors for the local mob. Many officers presumed that the only way to advance up the ranks, or avoid a hazing, or even keep their jobs, was to be supplicant to the brass. Put simply: individual officers were powerless against the System. And so one question emerged: Who was going to protect the officers from the chiefs?

At the time, few would have been confused about the leaders who represented that system—in the popular imagination, they were all of a type. Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Birmingham, Alabama, public safety commissioner Bull Connor. General George Patton. In Baltimore, the System was personified by Donald Pomerleau, a former marine who would serve as the city’s police commissioner from 1966 to 1981. While Pomerleau was credited near the outset of his tenure for bringing order to a flailing department, his detractors came to view him as a kind of municipal dictator—and a racist one at that. When asked at one point if he’d directed his undercover officers to keep tabs on political figures, he’d brashly replied, “Just the Blacks. Just the Blacks. Just the Blacks.”

Read More: How Chicago Is Tackling Police Violence and Mental Health at Once

Early in his tenure, Pomerleau had been rumored to have assembled Baltimore’s entire command staff into a single room and dared anyone to deny that he was the “sole boss.” He’d instituted a practice of subjecting officers to lie detector tests—and firing them if they failed. Some claimed he had often taken to placing officers in a “sweatbox,” questioning them for hours until they finally admitted to a crime, real or contrived. And as the nation’s judges had begun clamping down on police abuse of ordinary citizens, the chasm between suspect rights and officer rights had only appeared to widen. Pomerleau was doing to his rank-and-file what the rank-and-file were precluded from doing to suspected perps (even if, in some cases, they did anyway). It didn’t seem fair.

In Baltimore, leaders of the local police union were quick to highlight the discrepancy. One complained that, while criminal suspects were sure to be released in the absence of being read their rights, “a policeman is never advised of his rights because he has no rights.” Officers argued that the city’s beat cops operated perpetually under a “black cloud,” fearful that they might at any time be subject to suspensions or ruined careers without even facing any incriminating evidence.

By the 1970s, inured in the culture of the moment, progressive reformers were driven to do something in Baltimore and across America that many of their peers would have considered anathema a decade earlier: rein in the authority of the purportedly wise men running powerful institutions. 

The solution wasn’t simply to replace one abusive chief with another. It was to impose checks that would prevent power from corrupting men and women of goodwill. Unions joined the calls for reform. Organized labor wanted to institute procedural reforms to ensure that officers were given opportunities to correct bad behavior before being let go—no more summary firings. To many, that just seemed fair: if tenured professors at public universities enjoyed job security, officers putting their lives on the line should too. And it just went from there. The details of the various state laws passed as Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights (LEOBRs) varied by jurisdiction: in some places, chiefs were prohibited from interrogating officers except under certain supervised circumstances; in others, the brass needed to warn officers before subjecting them to discipline. In some places, complaints had to be kept confidential, and in others disputes had to be settled by “neutral” arbiters. Across the board, however, the intent was largely the same: Pomerleau-like reigns of terror inside police departments would have to end.

The assumption was that line cops would be kinder and gentler if they were liberated from the nefarious influence of bad chiefs. Cops would be able to reject a chief’s demand that they beat up protestors, or plant evidence, or gratuitously pull over Black motorists. Decades later, however, these reforms had unintended consequences.

In the 2010s and 2020s, as Black Lives Matter demonstrators filled streets across America in protest of police killings, progressives derided LEOBRs. Arduous due process protections made it impossible, in many cases, to get wayward officers fired. Bad cops appeared free to wreak havoc without repercussion. Racist cops patrolled with impunity. Similarly frustrating, LEOBR-connected confidentiality provisions prevented chiefs from commenting on accusations of misconduct, giving communities the impression that their complaints were falling on deaf ears—and, in some cases, they certainly were.

Nationally publicized instances of police brutality—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and, most pointedly, George Floyd—have spurred a renewed interest in LEOBR reform. But more mundane episodes of impunity were born of the same dynamic. In 2021, the City of North Providence, Rhode Island, tried to fire Scott Feeley, a police sergeant charged with a whole rash of violations. He’d been insubordinate to his superiors. He’d lied in the course of an internal affairs investigation. He’d failed to call in traffic stops. In all, Chief Alfredo Ruggiero Jr. brought 97 different charges against him, and the LEOBR tribunal found him guilty of 79 of them. Yet Feeley kept his badge; he was simply demoted to patrolman after serving a mere 45-day suspension. North Providence’s mayor, Charles Lombardi, responded in outrage: “What do we do with this guy? He was found guilty of failing to obey, truthfulness. . . . This is insulting.” There was nothing the mayor could do to push him off the beat.

The stories differed from place to place, but the underlying dynamics were rarely distinct. Derek Chauvin, the officer eventually found guilty of murdering George Floyd, had previously been subject to 22 complaints and internal investigations as a Minneapolis police officer. Whatever his reputation for brutality, he’d remained on the force, protected in no small part by reforms often championed by progressives decades before.

Today, police chiefs are frequently joining with social justice activists to demand that officer protections be right-sized for the public interest. Already, several states, including Rhode Island, have enacted reforms designed to strike a balance—to make officers more responsive to community complaints without leaving them at the whims of their superiors in uniform. 

That is the only common-sense way forward. No one—not the chiefs, not the officers, not the ordinary citizen—should feel empowered to behave with impunity.

Adapted from Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Get it Back. Copyright © 2025 by Marc Dunkelman. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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