Simple laws could help protect public from bad cops

FEW PROBLEMS ARE more dangerous to society than a cop gone bad. Yet in South Carolina, our system for ferreting out bad cops and making sure they can’t threaten the public is so inadequate that it practically invites abuse.

As The Post and Courier of Charleston found earlier this year, the system for investigating police is so porous that some officers easily — and routinely — jump from department to department despite histories of professional, and even criminal, misconduct. The system is so inadequate that the newspaper wasn’t able to even speculate as to how large the problem was, but its horror stories filled three days worth of newspapers this spring.

Bad cops are able to reincarnate themselves in new departments largely because police agencies don’t take seriously their obligation to make sure their bad apples don’t become someone else’s. Some are so happy to rid themselves of a bad officer without a messy (and public) fight that they even send them off with glowing recommendations — thereby endangering the public trust, and the public, in another part of the state. It is frightening to contemplate how much worse the situation would be were it not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of police officers are honest, dedicated professionals.

A panel appointed by Gov. Mark Sanford in response to the newspaper’s series is working through the summer to recommend ways to fix the problem. That’s a positive move; while the General Assembly did restore funding for a state program that provides much-needed psychological testing for would-be police, it otherwise ignored the systemic problems during this past legislative session.

We have no doubt that the panel will find many ways to improve our policing system, but a few simple steps would clean up most of the problems. Among those changes, some of which were outlined by Florida officials meeting with the governor’s review panel last month, are:

• Requiring police to investigate all allegations of police misconduct and questions about officers’ character, and to report those findings to the state. Now, each department decides which allegations to investigate, agencies often keep the findings to themselves, and it’s common for investigations to be dropped, uncompleted, if an officer agrees to resign.

• Passing a law that will let law enforcement agencies freely share information about applicants without fear of lawsuits. State law already protects information police give the state Criminal Justice Academy, but many believe this is inadequate.

• Creating an online reporting system for police who leave under a cloud. That would replace a paper system that often lags so far behind that bad cops are hired by another agency before anyone even realizes they were in trouble.

Of course, better reporting won’t solve the problem as long as cash-strapped police agencies are willing to hire officers with shady pasts, simply because they can afford them — a problem the newspaper also found. But making sure that police agencies are able to get the information they need to keep from hiring people who shouldn’t wear badges is a first, essential step in cleaning up the system. If some police agencies still refuse to use that information responsibly, then perhaps the state will need to consider setting tougher standards for who can and can’t be a police officer.