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Add teeth to new police reporting requirements
WHEN THE CHARLESTON Police Department fired an officer for killing a suspect with his bare hands in the 1980s, officials left that detail off the form they sent to the state Criminal Justice Academy explaining the officer’s termination. They said merely that he “failed to meet the standards of the department during his probationary status.”
That kind of mealy-mouthed reporting, which too often leads to other police departments unwittingly hiring bad cops, soon should be a thing of the past, thanks to the work of a task force Gov. Mark Sanford set up in response to a series of articles by The (Charleston) Post and Courier that unmasked such practices.
The task force finished its review last month, and already the academy is redesigning its forms to require more specific information about why officers leave their jobs. In addition to requiring more detailed reasons for firing officers, the new forms would require departments to note when an officer resigned while under internal investigation. And the academy is working to create an Internet-based reporting system, to eliminate the lag time that sometimes allows bad cops to be hired elsewhere before reports detailing their misconduct are processed and available for police to review.
In addition, the state Public Safety Department, which houses the academy, is finalizing a 20-page set of guidelines that police agencies should follow when conducting background checks of potential hires.
These are all smart changes, but make no mistake: This is not a cure.
Making these changes administratively will do nothing to ensure that they are complied with. The newspaper’s series uncovered plenty of instances of police agencies — particularly smaller ones — simply ignoring the reporting laws that are already on the books. These latest changes can be implemented immediately because they don’t require a change to state law — which means they are not a part of the statutes.
We’re glad to see Public Safety Director James Schweitzer taking such an aggressive role in moving forward on these reforms; now he and the governor will need to continue that push in the Legislature. The new reporting requirements — along with the existing ones — need teeth. And they probably need the extra shield from litigation that some police say stops them from providing complete information to the state.
In addition, we need laws that require police to investigate all allegations of police misconduct and questions about officers’ character, and to report their findings to the state. Now, each department decides which allegations to investigate, agencies often keep the findings to themselves, and it’s not uncommon for investigations to be dropped, uncompleted, if an officer agrees to resign.
The overwhelming majority of police officers in South Carolina are dedicated professionals who serve the public well. But as long as some police departments ignore or cover up the misdeeds of a few, they endanger the safety of the public by making it easier for those bad apples to get a law enforcement job elsewhere. And that invites public mistrust of police statewide.
There is probably no way to force all police officials to be completely truthful always about the cops they’re happy to get rid of; but certainly our laws should not encourage such irresponsibility, and the penalties for violating those laws should be steep enough to give officials the incentive they need to comply.
