It Is Beyond Time
Over the last seven years, communities and police departments have struggled over the difficult questions central to police reform efforts—when it is appropriate to use force, how should officers and agencies be held accountable, what should the community’s role be in police policy and oversight, and what roles must other agencies play in public safety.
In that time, we have had a presidential task force that looked specifically at policing; a presidential commission that examined the entire criminal justice system; multiple investigations, reports, and assistance programs from the Department of Justice; and numerous joint efforts by police and civil rights organizations that have worked together to advance reform of both policing and the criminal justice system as a whole.
However, during this same time, a time of profound national need, the United States Congress has done nothing.
Congressional failure to act on meaningful police reform legislation has impacted and continues to directly impact the safety of our citizens and officers. In the aftermath of the Chauvin trial, it is imperative that leaders from both parties come together now to pass meaningful police reform legislation that is thoughtful and evidence-based and considers wide-ranging community needs and expectations.
Understanding that these are complex topics with many diverse elements, Congress should focus on the big-ticket items where agreement exists and act now—and agree to work on the more complex topics going forward by debating the merits of potential approaches and seeking evidence-based solutions.
Unfortunately, this has not happened. Disagreement over a few provisions has derailed serious consideration of broader reform proposals that have widespread support from both social justice organizations and the policing profession. These proposals would help advance the policing profession and enhance the trust that must exist between communities and police.
In the absence of compromise, we will continue to see piecemeal, ill-informed, short-term solutions passed at the state and local level that lack the scale and scope to address what is clearly a national issue. Or, even worse, nothing will be passed at all. At a time that is calling out for bold national leadership, inaction and grandstanding from our elected officials is simply unacceptable.
Thankfully, it appears that at least a few congressional leaders, led by Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott, are finally working towards compromise solutions that will break the gridlock and help move the nation forward.
We are not naïve, and we understand that there are often sincere ideological and philosophical differences that drive the disagreements over these issues. The IACP, more than most, understands the complexities and competing equities involved in police reform discussion. We have spent decades working with community leaders, advocates, elected officials at all levels, and police leaders to develop programs, policies, and policing approaches to reform and improve policing and the critical community-police relationship.
That is why the IACP will gladly sit down with any Congressional leader at any time to talk through the complex foundational legislative components that can help today—via meaningful compromise legislation and a stroke of the President’s pen.
If members of Congress are looking for a starting point to forge consensus, for proposals that are supported by policing leaders and were built by engaging with those who hold different perspectives, the IACP offers the following framework of key policing reform proposals.
IACP Policing Reform Framework
- Adopt the National Consensus Policy on Use of Force. The National Consensus Policy on Use of Force makes it clear that it is the policy of law enforcement agencies to value and preserve human life and that they should develop policies and training practices that focus on de-escalation and the application of force only when necessary. This policy also makes clear that an officer has a duty to intervene to prevent or stop the use of excessive force by another officer and addresses the issue of chokeholds and vascular neck restraints.
- Mandate Participation in the National Use of Force Database. Mandatory participation in the National Use of Force Data Collection effort will help law enforcement, elected officials, and community members better identify and understand the totality of incidents, trends associated with use-of-force incidents, and other outlying factors.
- Develop National Standards for Discipline and Termination of Officers. There is a need to develop national standards and policies for the discipline and termination of officers so that there is uniformity and a gold standard of excellence and to prevent malevolent, incompetent, or dishonorable individuals from remaining in the police profession.
- Mandate Participation in the National Police Officer Decertification Database. A national police officer decertification database will aid law enforcement agencies in making informed hiring decisions and to prevent officers who have been terminated by an agency from being able to go to another state to be hired. An agency or official in each state would be required to submit data concerning officers employed, separated from employment, and whose certifications have been revoked in the state. Rather than create a new decertification database, the IACP supports funding for and mandatory participation by every state in the National Decertification Index managed by the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training (IADLEST).
- Enhance Police Leadership and Culture. Police leaders must prioritize diversity and create a culture of equity and inclusion by working to eliminate racial, ethnic, and gender bias in the workplace.
- Implement Improved Recruitment, Hiring, and Promotion Practices. This includes increased educational standards, background investigations, targeted recruitment efforts, review of hiring standards and practices, diversity, training, and recruit training programs.
- Enhance Ability of Police Agencies to Implement Effective Discipline. Contracts, labor agreements, and civil service rules often make it difficult for departments to swiftly remove problematic officers. Additionally, labor arbitrators routinely reinstate officers that have committed egregious acts, and police leaders are left with no option and are forced to be held accountable for officers they wanted removed from their agencies. While ensuring that the due process rights of officers are respected, the authority of management in disciplinary proceedings needs to be enhanced to allow agencies to expediently discipline and terminate officers.
It is beyond time to pass meaningful police reform.
It is beyond time to act.
Related Content
Hantavirus and Andes Virus: Law Enforcement Awareness Brief
Hantaviruses are rare but potentially severe rodent-borne viruses. In the United States, most cases are associated with exposure to infected rodent urine, droppings, saliva, or contaminated dust. Most hantaviruses in the United States do not spread person-to-person.
The major exception is the Andes virus, which has been documented to spread rarely through close, prolonged contact with a symptomatic person. Andes virus spread is usually limited to those with direct physical contact, prolonged time spent in close or enclosed spaces, and exposure to the sick person's body fluids.
Incubation of Andes Virus
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists the Andes virus incubation as 4 to 42 days, median 18 days.
Signs and Symptoms of the Andes Virus
Signs and symptoms of hantavirus appear 4 to 42 days after exposure. Early symptoms of the virus can include:
• fatigue
• fever
• muscle aches, especially in the large muscle groups like the thighs, hips, back, and sometimes shoulders
About half of all patients also experience:
• headaches
• dizziness
• chills
• abdominal problems, like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain
Avoid spread of the Andes virus between people by:
• washing hands frequently
• avoiding kissing and sexual contact with someone who may have Andes virus
• avoid sharing drinks, cigarettes, hookah, and vapes with someone who may have Andes virus
• avoid sharing eating utensils or eating food from the same plate or bowl as someone who may have Andes virus
• maintaining distance from someone who may have Andes virus
Protection for Law Enforcement Personnel Managing Andes Virus Patients
The Andes version of the hantavirus requires more precautions in use of personal protective equipment (PPE). When the Andes virus or similar are suspected, use an N95 or higher respirator, gown, gloves, and eye protection.
The Hansen PPE chart has been updated and included below.
Standard Precautions when Managing the Public
Use standard precautions for routine interactions. Consider hantavirus or Andes virus with exposed or infected patients, and upgrade scene safety. Use masks and full PPE early. If a person is suspected to be infected with the Andes virus, notify receiving facility and do not expose emergency medical services or hospital personnel or facilities unless they are protected.
How U.S. Hantavirus Typically Spreads
Hantaviruses that are not the Andes version are found in the United States., and most can cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), a potentially serious disease that can cause damage to the lungs. Non-HPS hantavirus infection can also occur, where patients experience non-specific viral symptoms, but no cardio-pulmonary symptoms. Early symptoms can look like the flu.
Each hantavirus has one primary rodent that carries the disease. The most common hantavirus in the United States is spread by the deer mouse. Cases most often occur in rural areas where forests, fields, and farms offer habitats for rodents. The animals can get into homes and barns, where they may leave urine or feces. Dogs and cats in the United States are not known to become infected with hantavirus, but pets may bring infected rodents to people or into homes.
People can contract hantavirus if they have contact with urine, feces or saliva of a rodent carrying the virus. This can occur when people:
• aerosolize contaminated dust
• breathe in hantavirus-contaminated air when cleaning up after rodents
• touch contaminated objects and then touch their nose, mouth, or eyes
• are bitten or scratched by an infected rodent
• eat food contaminated with hantavirus
Reducing Risk of Hantavirus
The overall risk to the U.S. public and travelers remains extremely low. If you think you had contact with a person with Andes virus and are experiencing symptoms, contact a medical professional or your state or local health department immediately. For those with facility responsibilities, take the following precautions:
• Keep police stations and corrections facilities free of rodents.
• Do not sweep, vacuum, or blow rodent droppings in stations.
• Where droppings are found, ventilate the area well; wet the droppings with disinfectant; and use gloves and respiratory protection when collecting and removing.
Disinfection Practices
Areas and materials exposed to the Andes virus should be disinfected using EPA-registered disinfectant products effective against enveloped viruses, such as products included on EPA List N. This includes Clorox Healthcare Hydrogen Peroxide Cleaner Disinfectant Wipes (EPA Reg. No. 67619-25). These wipes are EPA-registered health care disinfectants and are approved for safe use on law enforcement equipment and vehicles.
Testing for Suspected Hantavirus Illness
Persons who are suspected of having a hantavirus in the United Sates undergo specific testing of blood and other body fluids. Those who have symptoms and a known exposure to the Andes virus are tested in a similar way.
Treatment for Hantavirus Illness
There is no specific antiviral treatment or vaccine for the Andes virus currently available. Symptoms may develop rapidly. Early medical care is critical with care centered on managing symptoms.
Guidance may change as more knowledge of this virus is gained. Consult the CDC, local health departments, and medical personnel for timely updates.
Sponsored Content: More Cases Than Hours: Three Ways Multi-Agent AI Helps Investigations
Where agentic AI is doing real work for understaffed investigations units, and what to insist on before you buy.
Ask a working investigator how many open cases they're carrying and the answer is usually somewhere around twenty. The rhythm is familiar to anyone who's done the job: work a case until you hit a wall (a subpoena in flight, lab results pending, a witness who won't call back), then shelve it and pick up the next one. The walls aren't the problem. The context-switching tax is. Every time an investigator picks a case back up, they re-read their notes and try to remember where they left off.
Meanwhile, digital evidence volumes keep climbing, and the pattern-level insights that clear cases stay locked inside data silos no one has time to stitch together. The problem isn't access. It involves reconciling a suspect's alias across systems, walking their associates out two degrees, and cross-referencing communications. And cases go cold not because investigators missed something, but because they ran out of hours.
AI isn't going to hire anyone. But a particular kind of AI, often called "agentic" or "multi-agent," can do real work on behalf of the investigators you already have, precisely in the gaps where cases go cold waiting for attention.
What "multi-agent" actually means
Rather than one general-purpose chatbot, a multi-agent system is a team of specialized AI components working under an orchestrator. Picture your most capable analyst who can delegate to an army of equally capable analysts: one sub-agent pulls records, another monitors open sources, another reads through case files. The orchestrator synthesizes what comes back into a structured, cited briefing. Humans stay in the loop at every consequential step. Done right, the output doesn't look like a magic answer. It looks like the work product of a careful analyst: sourced, graded for confidence, and ready for an investigator to verify and act on.
Here are three places this pattern is starting to earn its keep in law enforcement.
1. Connecting the dots across siloed systems
Most of what an investigator needs is scattered across the agency's own systems: RMS, CAD, jail bookings, field interviews, CCTV and other video, regional intel platforms, plus a subject's open-source footprint. Increasingly, the dominant category of evidence isn't physical. Warrant-based digital evidence (call detail records, tower dumps, phone extractions, etc.) has overtaken traditional forensics in importance, and it arrives with enough noise that the problem isn't finding a needle in a haystack. It's finding that needle while buried underneath the haystack.
The bottleneck isn't access. It's time. Reconciling an alias across five systems, cross-referencing communications across a dozen devices, walking a suspect's associates out two or three degrees is hours of work per subject, which is why pattern-level insight so often arrives after the arrest rather than before.
A multi-agent setup handles this in parallel. Specialized sub-agents query each source simultaneously. An orchestrator reconciles entities (same person, different spellings; same vehicle, different plates), and a human reviews a consolidated picture with every claim cited back to its source. The use cases that benefit most:
- Gang and organized-crime intelligence, where relationships matter more than any single incident
- Prolific-offender tracking, where patterns across low-level contacts often predict escalation
- Serial and pattern crimes, where the signal is in the aggregation
The investigator's job shifts from assembly to judgment, where it belongs.
2. Cases that keep moving. Knowledge that doesn't walk out the door.
Agencies are losing senior officers to retirement faster than they can replace them. A brief handoff, a few hours with a case file, a conversation over coffee, can't transfer what a veteran detective carries in their head: the mental library of what-to-do-when, built over twenty years, almost none of it written down.
This is the quieter crisis. And some would argue it matters more than throughput.
A system trained not just on investigative practice but on continued interaction with your own senior investigators converts that expertise into something a junior investigator can actually use: a partner that surfaces the next logical step, flags what the veteran would have noticed, and explains why. The rookie doesn't become an expert overnight. But they operate closer to one from day one.
The productivity argument for AI gets made constantly. The workforce continuity argument doesn't get made nearly enough. For agencies watching their most experienced people walk out the door, tools that help junior investigators operate closer to their senior colleagues aren't just a productivity gain. They're a hedge against a workforce crisis.
3. Building the case file, not just finding leads
The volume of material attached to any given case has exploded: body-camera transcripts, interview recordings, warrant returns, phone extractions, and corroborating open-source material. Sub-agents can extract entities and events from each source type, reconcile timelines, surface contradictions between statements, and produce a structured summary with every claim cited and confidence-graded. A human investigator reviews and owns the output.
Strong applications:
- First-pass case-file summaries to orient a supervisor or a new investigator picking up a case
- Cold-case revisit, where running new tools and open-source corroboration against old files regularly surfaces new connections
- Prosecutable-package preparation, where the discipline of citation and confidence grading pays dividends under discovery
The goal isn't speed for its own sake. It's moving investigator time from reading to interviewing.
The Non-Negotiables
Any chief evaluating tools in this space should insist on four things:
- Every claim cited. If the system can't tell you where a fact came from, it shouldn't be in the brief.
- Confidence grading at the claim level. Investigators already think in degrees of certainty. The tool should too.
- Human in the loop on every consequential decision. Agents assemble; humans decide.
- An audit trail that survives discovery. If the workflow can't be defended in court, it doesn't belong in an investigation.
At Rilian, we've spent years building multi-agent systems for national-security work, where these four properties aren't optional. The mission is different. The standards are the same.
Mike Joy is a retired NYPD Captain and leads the Product team at Rilian.
