WASHINGTON - Long before police brutality emerged as a dominant public issue in the United States, Cynthia Lee, a George Washington University professor and an expert on race and self-defense, devoted much of her research to deadly police shootings of unarmed Black men and women.
In a , she concluded that stereotypes about African Americans, often working at a subconscious level, influenced a police officer's split-second decision about whether to use deadly force, accounting for the disproportionately large number of Black victims in police shootings.
In 2018, she authored a groundbreaking on reforming laws governing police use of deadly force. Most states, she learned, allowed police officers to use deadly force as long as they had a "reasonable belief" in the need for such action.
This standard, however, allowed juries to believe that an officer's use of force was justified even if it wasn't necessary or proportional. Lee's solution: changing the law to make it equally important to assess whether an officer's actions leading up to a shooting were reasonable, and requiring the use of force to be necessary, proportionate and based on an immediate need.
At the time she wrote the article, Lee thought the chances of states adopting her model were "fairly slim." But her work began to attract attention in the wake of incidents in which police officers killed African Americans while attempting to take them into custody, including the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis nearly a year ago, which touched off international protests and a push for police reform.
In the year since Floyd's death, one city and two states — Washington, D.C., Virginia and Connecticut — have used Lee's model to adopt stringent use of deadly force statutes. The measures were adopted as part of comprehensive police reform legislation.
In Delaware, members of the Law Enforcement Accountability Task Force have also expressed interest in her model, Lee said.
While Washington, Virginia and Connecticut account for only a handful of the more than 1,000 deadly police shootings a year in the U.S., reform advocates hope that these changes will help rein in police use of excessive force.
The controversy over police use of force is front and center on Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats and Republicans are fighting over House-passed legislation that would end qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects individual police officers from lawsuits for misconduct. In March, the House approved the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would, among other things, ban the use of chokeholds, strengthen federal civil rights laws and end qualified immunity.
Lee is hoping that her model statute finds its way into the national debate.
"It's the kind of change we need because we need to make sure the police officers are treating people fairly and with respect and that people are not getting unnecessarily hurt or killed by the use of force," said Democratic Virginia state Senator John Bell, an early supporter of Lee's proposal.
Critics say the changes force juries to second-guess police officers' split-second decisions on the use of deadly force, whether to fire a gun or wrestle a suspect to the ground or subdue him or her in some other life-threatening hold.
"They changed the law to say, 'What would a civilian who looks at the use of force say about whether it was reasonable or not,'" said John Krupinsky, president of the Connecticut State Fraternal Order of Police.
Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor who has argued that a dearth of laws has left police to police themselves, praised Lee's proposed reform.
"We need to pass statutes to tell the police specifically how it is that they should police, and her statute is an effort to do that," he said.
While other states such as California, Colorado and Maryland, spurred by the Black Lives Matter protest movement, have enacted strict police use-of-force standards in the past couple of years, none stemmed from the work of Lee.
"Of course, you always hope that your research will have real-world impact," Lee told VOA. "I wanted to inform discussions about policing, but I never imagined that my work would actually become law in any state, let alone two states and the District of Columbia."
Given that juries largely remain sympathetic to police officers, Lee's model statute is unlikely to lead to a sharp increase in convictions. Lee said it could have a deterrent effect, however, encouraging police officers to "act with more care" before using deadly force.