Terry Cowgill

Really? I’ll Look Into It!

In case you missed it, there was a very troubling story in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant on a scathing report issued by state and outside authorities on the internal affairs division of the Connecticut State Police.

Simply put, the 168-page report completed by Attorney General Dick Blumenthal’s office and the New York State Police paints a picture of an IA unit that was out of control and not doing its job. Authorities in whom we had invested our trust to police the police were either looking the other way or failed to follow-up on obvious leads. And there is strong evidence that they were directed to do so by superiors.

At one troop, The Courant reported yesterday, “an ‘open competition‘ existed among some troopers over who could make the most drunken-driving arrests on the midnight shift” — with little care given as to whether the arrests were legitimate or not. Of course, IA failed to properly investigate this matter as well.

This just drives home a point I like to make regularly (though not yet on this blog, if I’m not mistaken). You can’t trust any organization to investigate itself properly and fairly. The police have an obvious conflict of interest in having their IA divisions look into allegations of misbehavior. And not only because investigators are reluctant to report unflattering truths to their superiors.

I have a relative (one of the good guys) who worked a relatively short stint in IA for a big-city police department. He said good, honest IA investigators are typically detested by the rank-and-file. When IA officers walk into a roomful of cops, silence is the order of the day, often followed by baleful glances.

It stands to reason that the best way to avoid being treated as a pariah by crooked fellow cops is for the IA officer to gain a reputation as someone who won’t look seriously into allegations and complaints. Case in point: it took an outside investigative agency (in this case, troopers from neighboring New York) to expose the appalling chicanery in Connecticut.

For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to attract talented officers into IA. My relative was offered a generous pay raise and the use of a city car to commute to and from his home. But it wasn’t enough. When he left IA and was promoted to lieutenant, he lost the car until he made captain a few years later.

Some big cities have civilian review boards that look into allegations of police misconduct. But that’s not a perfect situation either, as board members are tempted to politicize the process in an attempt to make a name for themselves. Or they are insufficiently informed about police procedures.

This problem goes way beyond the police, of course. Remember when Paul Christopher, then the head of Berkshire School in nearby Sheffield, Mass., faced multiple accusations of sexual harassment? The school hired a Manhattan law firm to look into the complaints. They concluded the charges were without merit. And we all know what happened there. State investigators concluded otherwise and Christopher was finally forced to resign.

I’m not comfortable, for that matter, with journalists policing themselves. Yet if we fall down often enough on the job, eventually we have no credibility left and the public will abandon us for another media outlet. But whom exactly are the police accountable to? Not the voters, not the marketplace, and surely, not to themselves. Connecticut’s experience shows the status quo is woefully inadequate.