OUR SYSTEM OF government is built around trust. This is perhaps never more important than when it comes to the criminal justice system.

Yes, police have guns, which can be used to enforce laws where trust is lacking. But when the community stops believing that the police are looking out for the community and starts believing they are looking out for themselves, all the guns in the world will not make that a safe community built around the rule of law.

By and large, police in our state have done much to earn and to cultivate the public trust.

But it turns out that they have a blind spot, one that over time can erode that trust -- not to mention opening them up to civil liability and preventing them from making changes that are in the public interest.

As The State's Clif LeBlanc recently documented, police are routinely taking the narrowest interpretation possible of a state law that requires outside agencies to investigate when a police vehicle is "involved" in a traffic collision. That's what allowed the Forest Acres Police Department to investigate itself -- and conclude that no wrongdoing had occurred -- after a man being pursued by police at high speeds through a residential area ran into another vehicle and killed a passenger. The problem is that police say the only cars "involved" in a crash are the ones that physically collide.

That's not an entirely unreasonable conclusion -- for someone who is looking for loopholes. The Legislature should have done a better job of spelling out precisely what it meant. But anyone whose goal is to maintain public trust would interpret the word "involved" as broadly as possible. Such a reading would certainly include cases in which the car that causes the accident is being pursued at high speeds by police.

This is a sad commentary, suggesting that either a lack of integrity or an excess of arrogance permeates the police fraternity in South Carolina, rising all the way to the top, at the Department of Public Safety.

Local police couldn't get away with this without the Highway Patrol's acquiescence, since that is the agency required to investigate wrecks that "involve" police. But the narrow definition actually originated with the patrol, which has ignored attorney general's opinions to the contrary. It even stood its ground when the Greenville Police chief tried to take the larger view; the patrol refused his request to investigate when a vehicle being chased by one of his officers flipped over.

Apparently, there aren't a lot of police chiefs like the one in Greenville. If there were, they would have raised a stink years ago about the patrol's refusal to conduct the independent investigations that we would have assumed most police would want in such circumstances.

Police, perhaps more than the rest of us, have a great deal of disdain for the way lawyers look for loopholes in the law; after all, they have a better feel than most of us for how often the bad guys walk on what they consider technicalities. They, of all people, should not be adopting those practices themselves. But since they are, the Legislature needs to remove the temptation by making the law just as clear as it can be. An outside investigation should be required when police or other employees of police agencies are driving a vehicle that is in any way directly or indirectly involved in a collision. Here's a layman's guide: If the police report would include any reference to the actions of an employee of the police agency, that agency shouldn't investigate.