The bill was introduced as a response to last year’s court ruling which directed the state to turn over names and employment dates of thousands of law enforcement officials to The Virginian-Pilot, which is researching whether officers who are fired are winding up with jobs at another agency, The Associated Press reports.
Those who support the bill say the release and publication of names potentially places officers in danger during a time when there’s plenty of public scrutiny of law enforcement. However, opponents say the measure was too extreme and would prevent the public from examining inappropriate behavior.
“This is a check on patronage abuses. It’s a check on favoritism. It’s a check on discrimination against people who are in protected classes,” said Craig Merritt, who represented the Virginia Press Association. He was specifically referring to the public’s ability to obtain officers’ names via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The bill, introduced by Republican Sen. John Cosgrove, would exempt the names and training records of officers from the FOIA. Earlier this month it passed the GOP-controlled Senate by a 25-15 vote margin.
How the bill came about
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) notes there is an interesting backstory to this bill.
CJR’s article was written before the bill was shot down, and it noted that under the measure as written, if a private citizen or journalist asked a local police department for a list of officers on staff, the department could simply reject the request. Understandably concerned, journalists in the state hopped on the story.
The bill was proposed because reporter Gary Harki was doing his job.
Harki, a reporter with the Viriginian-Pilot was trying to check on tips he’d received that some officers fired from one department were rejoining a police force elsewhere, The Washington Post reports. Similar reporting was conducted by the Boston Globe on the reassignment of pedophilic Catholic priests in Massachusetts.
The Virginian-Pilot negotiated with the state and an agreement was formed to obtain the names of current officers, but not to publish the entire database or share it with anyone. The agreement also indemnified the state from legal claims.
It isn’t uncommon to read about officers being rehired in neighboring departments, or the same department for that matter, after exhibiting problematic behavior, TakePart notes. But tracking employment records can be difficult. Also, law enforcement unions and arbitration processes can protect officers from being fired, and there are some unions that have provisions allowing for the destruction of officers’ disciplinary records, or for making those records exempt from FOIA requests.
And even in states that revoke law enforcement licenses after misconduct, the process in doing so is very slow, meaning that officers are able to work in other departments in the meantime, an investigation by The Associated Press found, per TakePart. Even if law enforcement authorities examine the disciplinary records of potential employees and find past incidences of serious misconduct, that doesn’t guarantee the officer won’t be hired.
In a separate investigation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in 2013,The Los Angeles Times found that 280 officers had records of accidentally firing their weapons, soliciting prostitutes, and having sex on the job were hired by the department. Revelatory investigations like this rely on the transparency that public records requests can provide.
A number of states have or are in the process of investigating laws aimed at preventing the names of officers involved in shootings from being released, The Associated Press reports. Dan Bevarly, interim executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, said he doesn’t know of another state that would allow agencies to prevent the release of all officers names under any circumstance.
Law enforcement groups complained that opponents mischaracterized the bill as creating a “secret police” force and rejected concerns that agencies would be able to shield the names of officers on arrest warrants or traffic summons.
Those who supported the measure acknowledged it was a bold step, but said it was necessary to ensure officers’ safety.
“When you put the officer’s name out there on the Internet now — with the ability that people have to find people — they’re going to find out where they live and they’re going to have the opportunity to kill them and do other bad things to their family,” said Kevin Carroll, president of the Virginia chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police.”All I’m trying to do … is protect my people.”
But the public has the right to know who their police officers are, Harki told The Washington post. It’s a fundamental principle of democracy to know who these officials are, he said.
Delegate Joseph Yost, (R-Blacksburg) said he didn’t see having an officer’s name out there as being a threat. A House subcommittee voted unanimously to drop the measure Thursday, killing it for the year, the AP notes. Legislators on the panel said they agree that officer safety is important, but don’t think it’s necessary to make their names secret.
