After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, lawmakers in Massachusetts took an action that advocates had been pushing since at least 2010: creating a system to certify — and decertify — police officers. For decades, Massachusetts had been part of a small outlier of states that had no mechanism to prevent a police officer, once trained, from getting hired after they’d been fired or forced out of another agency for misconduct.
“This bill will allow police departments to make better-informed recruitment and hiring choices while improving accountability,” said then Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito when the bill was filed.
The new agency that oversees that system, the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission, has been going through the process of recertifying thousands of existing officers throughout Massachusetts, collecting some disciplinary data about them, and publishing that information on its website. An early peer-reviewed study, using the historical and newly-collected data to look at the impacts of the law, found that it resulted in a reduction of certain kinds of sustained complaints, including about use of force, and suggested that the reforms could be having a “deterrent” effect on misconduct.
“We know that our mandate is about transparency,” POST director Enrique Zuniga said in an interview last year.