Fraternal Order Of Police Hacked Files: Disciplinary Hearings Will Be Kept Secret Or Destroyed
A hacker known only as “Cthulhu” released files obtained when an unknown source hacked into the servers of the Federal Order of Police (FOP) – the largest police union in America – last week, according to a report from The Guardian. Since then, they have been analyzing the documents, and have discovered some very interesting language contained in contracts between police and cities. The FOP represents over 330,000 law enforcement officers.
Specifically, analysis of police contracts indicates that more than a third contain clauses which allow, and in some cases actually mandate, destruction of all records of civilian complaints, departmental investigations and disciplinary actions, after a period of time. A further 30 percent of contracts included provisions barring public access to same.
67 contracts between the FOP and cities across America were examined – about 2.5GB of data was leaked in total. The documents also included, among other things, archived threads from the FOP’s members-only forum, in which members allegedly railed against President Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and “illegals.” One member, from Virginia, called Obama an “antipolice, antilaw and order President,” while another from Indiana berated the FOP for endorsing the nomination of a “radical socialist.” Another member from Tennessee suggested that the FOP leadership “follow [Sotomayor’s] lead, step down and give their seats to a minority or smart latina.”
Meanwhile, while FOP president Chuck Canterbury defends the various contract provisions as necessary to protect officers’ right to due process, legal experts find them questionable at best.
“Disciplinary files are removed because they affect career advancement. People make mistakes and if they learn from them, they should be removed. This is standard HR practice.”
One suspects that Mr. Canterbury could use a refresher on what “standard HR practice” means in America; take as an example the Ellen Pao v Kleiner Perkins trial earlier in 2015, in which (as reported by Forbes) decade-old employee evaluations were produced, in their defense, by a company she hadn’t worked for in three years.
Aside from the provisions mandating destruction of disciplinary data and preventing its release to the public, the contracts also include numerous recurring clauses blatantly intended to slow down misconduct investigations – an accusation that has previously been leveled at the FOP by Black Lives Matter activists, particularly that of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.
“The public has a right to know. If there was a controversial beating, we ought to know what action was actually taken. Was it a reprimand? A suspension?”
While conceding that an officer’s entire personnel file should not be readily available to the public, Walker felt that disciplinary records were a different story.
The leaked documents date back almost two decades, and reveal some startling language and legal maneuvering. In a contract with police in Independence, Missouri, as recently as 2007, officers involved in a shooting could neither be interrogated for at least 12 hours after, nor “treated as a suspect” without reasonable suspicion or probable cause – as defined by their fellow officers, of course.
Other contracts required disciplinary information to be kept only in a locked file, barred to all but two high-ranking officers; still others, in states where such clauses would violate state open record laws, contained language which seemed designed to allow police to dodge public records requests.
One contract even bound the city of Ralston, Nebraska to “make every reasonable effort” to prevent the release of a photograph of an officer to the public or the media.
“It’s mostly the false or unsustained complaints that officers feel unduly hurt their careers. Nobody expunges guilty adjudicated use-of-forces, so if these acts are found unsustained in the first place, why should they continue to have any bearing on officers?”
The data belies his claims, however; a 2008-2009 Jacksonville, Florida FOP contract requires any record of an officer receiving a written reprimand with suspension or loss of pay to be expunged after five years. Not most substantiated use-of-force complaints don’t receive even a reprimand of that degree – and most misconduct investigations are conducted in-house by the police.
As more information continues to be culled from the FOP leak, many are asking themselves: qui custodiet ipsos custodes?
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
