Contracts Show Police Misconduct Records Are Kept Hidden by Design
Why does it seem like so few cops are taken to task for various abuses of their power? Maybe because their contracts are written to ensure that they get away with it.
After a hacker breached the nation’s largest police union servers and leaked dozens of contracts between departments and their municipalities, the Guardian analyzed those contracts and found that many of them contain clauses apparently designed to protect officers from misconduct allegations. About a third of the leaked contracts from departments across the country allow or order that records of internal investigations, civilian complaints and the like be destroyed from officers’ files.
Here are two examples, via the Guardian:
Other deals contained provisions focused on blocking public access to records that were preserved. A 2006-2008 contract from Burlington Township, NJ, for example, required the police department’s Investigations Commander to keep formal complaints and internal investigation documents “in a locked file”, barring access to all except the department’s investigations commander and chief law enforcement officer.
Similarly, in Ralston, Nebraska, the 2009-2012 FOP contract created a “Police Officers’ Bill of Rights”, which said: “Unless agreed to by the Officer, the City shall not divulge the reason for any disciplinary action that is not appealed to the Civil Service Commission.” The city was also bound to “make every reasonable effort” to prevent a photograph of the officer from being released to the public or news media.
This all means that even if an officer were investigated by his own department for beating people up or being a little too trigger-happy, the press would not be allowed access to the records implicating him. Worse yet, in some states, like New York, the destruction or sealing of records by police departments is kind of a moot point. Even if a department’s contract did not order that records be destroyed, and it decided to make them available, a notorious exemption in our state’s Freedom of Information Law would legally bar them from doing so.
