Kenney’s order claims “openness and transparency”… Almost

ACLU of Pennsylvania
6 min readAug 4, 2017

By Midge Carter, ACLU-PA Criminal Justice Intern

The decision to release information about complaints made against Philadelphia police officers is a step in the right direction. Photo via Time.

Starting in November, the City of Philadelphia will make all civilian complaints alleging police misconduct available online. Or at least parts of them.

The executive order signed by Mayor James Kenney follows The Philadelphia Declaration’s Philadelphia Police Accountability Project — a venture designed to accomplish two goals: 1) to come up with $5,000 in copying fees that the city asked for to provide information about police complaints, and 2) to build “a truly independent, publicly accessible database of civilian complaints lodged against the Philadelphia Police Department.” Kenney’s order deflects attention away from the former goal and moves gradually in the direction of the latter.

Kenney’s order, which was signed, it claims, “to ensure openness and transparency,” requires the city to post a monthly list of complaints filed against Philadelphia police officers. The list will include complaint summaries, incident locations, and investigative findings within 90 days of the complaint being filed. The lists will begin rolling out on November 1, and data from the last three years will be uploaded by early 2018.

That’s progress! Revealing complaint summaries and locations is good. That information will allow journalists, citizens, and lawmakers to identify trends and address potential problems.

However, the lists won’t identify officer names, and the city is permitted to withhold “any portion of the investigative file that the Police Commissioner determines must be kept confidential.”

That’s called secrecy. That’s the opposite of openness and transparency.

A further concern is that the information offered online will become the only information available. There is no indication if individuals will be able to receive physical copies of complaints. If not, then the only misconduct complaint information available would be the heavily redacted online information.

Nationally, online police complaint data is becoming more available, largely as a result of civilian pressure. The Los Angeles Police Department has an app for viewing Office of Investigation reports and filing complaints, though the complaints themselves are not available. In Chicago, the police offer little information, but two initiatives, The Citizen’s Police Data Project and Open Oversight have been working to make complaint information available.

Cincinnati makes all complaints available online but without any information that would make identifying an officer possible. NYC’s Data Transparency Initiativemakes complaints public and also offers visual summary reports. However, the information released from individual complaints is extremely limited. It provides only basic location, giving no insight into who filed the complaint or which officer the complaint was filed against. Philly’s online misconduct complaint release will potentially look very similar to New York’s.

Other cities are setting a precedent for more transparency. Baltimore and Indianapolis go a step further than Philadelphia. Both cities’ police departments participate in Project Comport, an online database of complaints. Though Project Comport does not list officer names, it does list “unique identifiers,” allowing civilians to track patterns of officer misconduct. We think Philadelphia should set a higher standard than all of these systems; it should release names.

Mayor Kenney said in a statement on Wednesday, “Everyone who works for the city of Philadelphia is a public servant, and the public deserves to know we will take their complaints about any city service seriously.” How is the public to know if complaints are being taken seriously if they do not know who the complaint is against?

Being unable to identify the public servants involved in complaints cripples the public’s ability to hold them accountable.

If police officers are to be effective public servants, then their misconduct and the complaints lodged against them need to be public as well.

IN OTHER NEWS

(Criminal justice news deserving of an in-depth look.)

Juvenile lifers are being resentenced following the Supreme Court’s mandate, but justice looks different across state lines. Photo from AP.
  • Associated Press: “AP Exclusive: Parole for young lifers inconsistent across US”

“For years, officials in states with the most juvenile life cases were united in arguing that the Supreme Court’s ban on life without parole did not apply retroactively to inmates already serving such sentences. Now, states are heading in decidedly different directions. Pennsylvania, which long resisted reopening the old cases, has resentenced more than 1 in 5 of its 517 juvenile lifers and released 58 so far. Attorneys there talk about working their way through all the cases in the next three years. Just two Pennsylvania inmates have been resentenced to life without parole, which the nation’s highest court said should be uncommon and reserved for the rare offender who ‘exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.’”

  • Juvenile Law Center: “Unlocking Youth: Legal Strategies to End Solitary Confinement in Juvenile Facilities”

“Despite a growing consensus that solitary confinement harms youth and undermines the rehabilitative goals of the juvenile justice system, the practice remains all too common. At the same time, the field lacks sufficient information on the prevalence of the practice, the alternatives, and the perspectives of affected youth and families. This report uses surveys of public defenders, conversations with youth and families, interviews with correctional administrators, and legal and psychological research to fill these gaps and set forth recommendations for reform.”

“The use of money bonds to hold people who are arrested is falling out of favor in an increasing number of courts across the U.S., and Allegheny County is among them. The reasons include concerns about mass incarceration, as well as jail costs, civil lawsuits and studies that find jail time increases the chances of being arrested again. Such concerns have led to efforts to reform the way courts manage defendants before their trial. And the result has been the rise of a more evidence-​based approach for deciding who should and shouldn’t be locked up that takes money out of the equation. ‘Recommending monetary bail was one of the things we did because that’s just how you did things,’ said Janice Dean, director of Allegheny County Pretrial Services, which manages how people arrested are handled before their cases are resolved. ‘But you have people who aren’t dangerous staying in jail because they don’t have the money. And if I have $500,000 to post, no matter how dangerous I am, I’m getting out. Money doesn’t make us any safer.’”

  • Washington Post: “Fired and Rehired: Police chiefs are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets”

“Since 2006, the nation’s largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct that betrayed the public’s trust, from cheating on overtime to unjustified shootings. But The Washington Post has found that departments have been forced to reinstate more than 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts.

Most of the officers regained their jobs when police chiefs were overruled by arbitrators, typically lawyers hired to review the process. In many cases, the underlying misconduct was undisputed, but arbitrators often concluded that the firings were unjustified because departments had been too harsh, missed deadlines, lacked sufficient evidence or failed to interview witnesses.”

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Originally published at blog.aclupa.org on August 4, 2017.

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ACLU of Pennsylvania

We are the ACLU’s Pennsylvania affiliate, defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights through litigation, advocacy, and community education and outreach.