By Chris Powell
Maybe Connecticut’s recent police accountability legislation went too far with its provision limiting the “qualified immunity” of officers against civil lawsuits, but this month’s investigative report by the state’s Hearst newspapers about misconduct in the state police showed accountability is long overdue.
The Hearst report, facilitated by the new law, reviewed 900 complaints of misconduct filed against troopers between 2015 and 2020. It found that dozens of cases involved criminality, with troopers disciplined for, among other things, falsifying reports, mishandling evidence, using excessive force, failing to investigate crimes, improper searches, driving while intoxicated, violating protective orders, and threatening and fighting with colleagues.
But according to the Hearst report, on the whole discipline was light.
Records of the cases, the Hearst report said, were maintained by the state police Internal Affairs Unit, signifying that long ago the General Assembly itself could have investigated police misconduct. The legislature once had a Program Review and Investigations Committee but it seldom did anything important and was eliminated in 2017, purportedly for budget reasons, as if government no longer needed scrutiny.
Instead the legislature and the governor enacted a law empowering state employee union contracts to nullify the state right-to-know law and approved a state police contract allowing complaints to be concealed.
The murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in 2020 prompted Connecticut’s Black state legislators to shame their colleagues into nullifying that contract provision via the new accountability law.
News coverage of state government, increasingly erratic as the finances of news organizations worsen, occasionally reports cases suggesting that discipline throughout state government, not just in the state police, is often too light as well, when it is attempted at all, and is frequently undone by appeals to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration.
School systems everywhere long have been notorious for their inability to fire incompetent but tenured teachers. Just as Connecticut until recently was keeping secret the misconduct complaints against troopers, state law still exempts teacher evaluations from the disclosure requirement applying to the evaluations of all other state and municipal government employees.
That is, the effectiveness of discipline in government employment remains ripe for legislative investigation. Of course it will never happen. Why?
It’s because the clamor in Connecticut for greater accountability in police work was led by a mobilized ethnic minority with a strong moral claim and plenty of proof of injurious misconduct, a minority whose state legislators are safe for re-election in their heavily minority districts. The target of the clamor, police officers, while politically organized, are not so numerous.
But misconduct and malfeasance elsewhere in government are seldom physically injurious and the beneficiaries of impairing discipline are not just politically organized but numerous indeed. They constitute the most influential special interest everywhere even as there is no organized constituency for more efficient and effective government.
In the old days journalism might have led such a crusade, but investigative reporting is expensive while journalism is struggling to survive amid society’s declining literacy and civic engagement. So Connecticut will be lucky just to get more accountability from police.
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DUMP THEM BOTH: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are running what seems like a third attempt to impeach former President Donald Trump over his instigation of the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. It’s hard to imagine how Trump’s reputation can be worsened, but worsening it might be a service not just to the country but also to the Republican Party.
For maybe then Republicans might see that Trump, unstable and sometimes vile, is the weakest candidate they could nominate for president in 2024 and might look elsewhere.
Fortunately many Democrats already are hoping to prevent President Biden’s renomination. But the Democrats still may have to answer for live-birth abortion, prosecutors who won’t prosecute, “social-emotional learning” that is displacing education, and transgenderism and drag queen story hours.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 