With an overwhelming vote in favor of amendments to the existing Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights legislation, the state of Rhode Island has finally taken an important step towards more accountability for police officers accused of wrongdoing, while still protecting their Constitutional rights.

The law dictating how police chiefs can respond to officers who are accused of minor and more severe infractions had been broken for some time — granting way too much leeway to the accused by allowing them to directly choose a member of the three-person panel who would decide on their fate. Since another of the three would be the officer’s chief, the potential for departments to “protect their own” over protecting the integrity of the department and the trust held in them by the community was simply too high.

The new legislation will create a neutral, five-person panel to decide on punitive measures, and allow chiefs to publicly discuss the circumstances that led to the suspension of a uniformed officer: granting them the ability to be more transparent with the media and members of the public, who have a right to know facts of cases involving the people charged with keeping them safe, and policing their activities on a day-to-day basis.

Of course, when discussing such a hotly debated and emotional issue, it is no surprise to see that not all members of the Rhode Island legislature think the changes go far enough. As has become a common trend with the Democrat’s more progressive wing, unrealistic expectations of a few members of the House of Representatives (and in our view, a somewhat grave misunderstanding of the importance of due process in this situation) nearly sank the efforts to improve the bill.

Incremental improvement of a broken system should not be seen as failure, and should certainly not be seen as a reason to try and discard the valuable improvements put forth in this case. Such is an attitude that leads to a complete stagnation of progress; which the progressive wing should ironically understand more than any other.

This is certainly not to say that officers don’t still enjoy more rights than regular citizens when it comes to navigating a situation where they’ve potentially done wrong — they absolutely do. See if your company goes through the efforts of hiring a neutral panel and suspending you with pay after they receive good reason to believe you’re stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of office supplies.

However, as a first step to create more accountability, give police chiefs more leeway to discuss the matters openly at hand, and work towards a more just process overall, this amendment is a worthwhile endeavor, and one we can happily endorse.