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Indianapolis Implements Plan to Curb Police Misconduct

By TChris

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has a plan to clean up its act. The plan is designed to make police officers obey the law. You wouldn't think that would be difficult, but this is what's been happening in the absence of meaningful oversight:

Narcotics detectives ripping off drug dealers. A police officer selling a gun to a felon informant. Another officer helping his wife run an illegal escort service.

Misconduct allegations against the officers have caused the dismissal of at least 20 criminal cases that the bad officers tainted. The question is how many other charges over the years have resulted from work done by officers who feel free to ignore the law. When police officers behave lawlessly, there's reason to wonder whether they have any qualms about planting evidence or committing perjury to advance their own careers.

Here's the plan, such as it is: [more ...]

The plan calls for increasing supervision, tightening oversight of evidence collection, reinstating more widespread polygraph testing of officers, creating a department recruiter position and instituting mandatory performance evaluations.

The value of polygraph testing is questionable. Mandatory performance evaluations should have been implemented long ago (despite the objections of the police union), but police "performance" is too often measured by the number of arrests made, not by honesty. A "requirement that supervisors write reports after searches" is useful, but many searches (stopping people on the street and patting them down, for instance) will never come to the attention of supervisors. The plan nonetheless has value by assuring that "a supervisor signs off on search warrants and is present whenever officers recover drugs or money."

Oversight is a key, but it's an easy word to use and a difficult concept to implement. Supervisors typically learn about bad officers only if other officers report them, an act often seen as a betrayal by their peers. The careful investigation of citizen complaints, coupled with strong, independent civilian oversight might be more productive in the long term.

If they aren't already there, putting security cameras in the property room might make it more difficult for property officers to steal money and drugs. Still, they wouldn't have prevented "narcotics detectives Robert B. Long and Jason P. Edwards [from] allegedly skimm[ing] portions of marijuana from intercepted packages before delivering them to IMPD’s property room."

Using "a recruiter and college visits to draw higher-quality applicants" is one of the best long-term solutions. Insisting that officers be well-educated and well-trained, coupled with psychological screening to weed out the authoritarians who want power in order to abuse it, will lead to a better breed of cop. That plan needs to be coupled with an attractive salary and rigorous training about the important role that police have in protecting civil rights.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 18, 2008 (boomark / email).