Why Should Delaware Care?
Following high-profile cases of police misconduct in recent years, state legislators required the creation of police accountability boards for departments around the state. However, many departments have failed to create them or have largely made them ineffectual since their creation.
The current state laws, House Bills 205 and 206, expanded public access to police misconduct records and required every police department in Delaware to create accountability boards. But many departments have fallen short of those requirements, advocates say.
Eight municipalities still have not established oversight committees. Another 10 of the state’s 51 total departments list accountability boards on their websites, but those groups have only met once.
Other departments, like the combined city of Dover and Delaware State University accountability board, have not heard a single citizen complaint since it began operating, said Chris Asay, a member of the League of Women Voters of Delaware who attends many accountability board meetings around the state.
With this lack of activity in mind, advocates are calling for a “clean up bill” to impose more strict guidelines on how often the oversight groups should meet and who should serve on them. They also want to expand incident reporting requirements for when a school resource officer fires their gun – an incident that has occurred a handful of times in Delaware in recent years.
The advocates have drafted an updated bill, but they have yet to find a lawmaker to sponsor it. Some Democratic legislators expressed general support for increasing police oversight when asked about the advocates’ efforts. They fell short, however, of explicitly throwing their support behind the draft.
A growing group of residents has shown support for further police reform at a series of town hall discussions hosted by the Tide Shift Justice Project and Neighbors Organized for Credibility and Accountability in Policing (NOCAP) at the Dover Public Library this fall.
“A week doesn’t go by that you don’t see a news article about some officer involved in some problem. And that truly has to be the tip of the iceberg,” Delaware Chief Public Defender Kevin O’Connell, who has attended the town hall discussions, said after the Nov. 4 meeting.
Cleaning up the legislation
The state legislature passed HB 205 and HB 206 in June 2023, adjusting the Delaware Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, also known by its acronym LEOBOR, to expand access to police misconduct records and create police accountability boards.
At the time, however, legislators promised the bills would be just the first step toward greater police transparency in the state, said Kailyn Richards, the associate director of the Tide Shift Justice Project.
“We’ve given it two years,” said Richards, who is one of the writers of the clean up bill. “I think two years is more than enough time to make observations about gaps.”
The primary thrust of the proposal, Richards said, is to establish a deadline of October 2026 for all police departments to create an accountability board.
In addition, she said she would like the bill to prohibit police chiefs from acting as the chairs of the oversight groups, which is how some municipalities are currently operating.
Asay, who has been studying the accountability boards for the past two years, said the committees that do hold regular meetings still do not take action to address police transparency. The Dover advisory board, for example, spends the majority of its meetings discussing what its bylaws should be, he said.
“They’re not empowered to investigate,” Asay said. “Not even to discuss a matter that might be a police misconduct situation.”
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson said in September that he has had an informal “chief’s advisory committee” since 2020, but it has taken a substantial amount of time to review the new requirements since the group became a formal advisory committee in 2024.
Richards and Asay said they would like to see police accountability boards’ power expanded, but that would be a part of future legislation.
The second part of the proposal, Richards said, would extend incident reporting requirements for when officers fire their guns in public to include people like school resource officers.
She said reports of such occurrences are often in the news, but not written up in narrative reports by the police, which can be disconcerting for parents and other people seeking more context about what happened.
Richards said the group drafting the bill is in contact with a couple lawmakers who are potentially interested in sponsoring it, but she declined to say who.
Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow) said he has not been involved in discussions about the bill.
When contacted by Spotlight Delaware, House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown (D-New Castle), who sponsored HB 205 and 206, did not say specifically whether she would support the bill.
“I’m always open to looking at ways to strengthen and improve our laws and I welcome those conversations with advocates,” Minor-Brown wrote in a statement.
State Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear/New Castle), another sponsor of the original laws, said she would need to review the specific language of the clean up bill, but is generally supportive of continued police transparency legislation.
Hosting town halls
The Tide Shift Justice Project and NOCAP hosted the most recent installment of their police reform town hall series at the Dover Public Library on Nov. 4.
NOCAP coordinator Rob Vanella said the groups chose to hold the three town halls this fall in Dover because the city has been a particular hotspot for police controversy in recent months. Vanella’s group also launched a “pilot project” over the summer in Dover to collect citizen complaints of police misconduct in the city.
At the event, more than 25 residents from across Delaware’s three counties gathered to discuss their experiences with police misconduct and what they see as the need for better training and more accountability for officers’ bad behavior.
“It’s really hard to get rid of police officers,” Adam Windett, a Dover-based criminal defense attorney said at the meeting. “And when they do, they often pop up in another agency.”
Windett added that the amount of profane language he hears when he reviews body camera tapes for cases would be shocking if the public were able to view it.
O’Connell, the public defender, said he believes that body camera usage and re-training programs are inconsistent across different police departments in the state, making it harder to hold any one agency accountable.
Dover resident Mikahela Ray pointed to the different treatment of citizens accused of crimes and police officers accused of misconduct as one of her issues with the criminal justice system.
Ray said her mug shot has been included in police department press releases and the local newspapers, but it was never taken down, and no corrections were issued when the charges against her were dropped. Police officers, on the other hand, do not get their pictures displayed publicly when they are accused of misconduct, she said.
“Police are innocent until proven guilty,” Ray said. “We are guilty until proven innocent.”
Beyond the clean up bill, Richards said she and other organizers plan to continue holding police reform town halls, perhaps shifting between locations in New Castle and Sussex counties, as well, to have a broader reach.
The work, Richards said, is far from finished.
To James Nolan, a former city of Wilmington police officer who now studies police reform at West Virginia University, any legislative progress is positive, as Delaware is one of the least transparent states when it comes to police records, he said.
However, Nolan said more structural change than just an updated bill is necessary to see a shift in how police departments operate in Delaware.
“They’re set up to be overseeing communities,” he said. “Not helping communities become safe, but exerting control over places.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
