he Guardian: Leaked police files contain guarantees disciplinary records will be kept secret

The Guardian: Leaked police files contain guarantees disciplinary records will be kept secret

According to George Joseph of The Guardian, contracts between police and city authorities have been leaked after hackers breached the website of the country’s biggest law enforcement union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), exposing guarantees that disciplinary records and complaints made against officers are kept secret are destroyed. 2.5 GB worth of files from the FOP became publicly accessible last week, providing insight into the influence of police unions on public policy, which activists have accused of impeding misconduct investigations.

A Guardian analysis of dozens of contracts taken from the FOP servers found that more than a third contained clauses or mandates allowing the destruction of records of civilian complaints, departmental investigations, or disciplinary actions after negotiated periods of time (The Guardian). The contracts also included provisions preventing the public access to these records. Dating back nearly two decades, the documents include agreements from the FOP and other police unions that purposely slow down misconduct investigations, prevent public access to disciplinary records, and enable the destruction of civilian complaints (The Guardian).

For example, the contracts taken from Independence, Missouri, disallow an officer “involved in a shooting incident” to be interrogated for at least 12 hours or treated as a suspect unless authorities thought there was reasonable suspicion (The Guardian). In other U.S. cities, “expungement” clauses allow records of investigations or reprimands to be destroyed after a certain period of time, or to be housed in “locked files” that only those in positions of authority could access (The Guardian).

Devin M Jacob, a civil rights attorney and former police officer, said: “These are public employees, so their performance should be available to the public. There’s no reason matters of waste or wrongdoing should be kept away from the public.”

The new information will undoubtedly be part of the ongoing dialogue about police conduct in the U.S., and there are differing opinions about how police officers accused of committing a crime should be investigated. According to the contracts, police misconduct is often led by officer’s supervisors or investigators within the department, which Black Lives Matter activists argue presents a conflict of interest.

Alex Vitale, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, suggests that investigation of police officers be conducted by a third party, but is skeptical about law enforcement’s receptiveness to the idea: “You could pass a law to create a civilian oversight commission, but that law can’t supersede what’s in [the union contracts]… The police think ‘no one understands what we do. It’s all part of this ‘us against the world’ mentality that dominates police thinking.”

Police conduct in the U.S. is a controversial matter, and the FOP’s leaked contracts with the nation’s police departments have added fuel to an already heated conversation. As police receive more and more scrutiny, discussions about police misconduct will only increase in number. Though the number of well-meaning police officers far outweighs those who have been accused of wrongdoing, citizens who have been arrested in overly aggressive or unlawful ways feel they have been cheated by the system.

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