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LA Voice is paying attention to one of those little things that could mean a lot:
The Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission is considering an effort to seal from public view the investigative records of law enforcement officials accused of dishonesty, excessive force and other misconduct.
We know just a teeny bit about the history of law enforcement in LA, and it's not pretty. Recently there was the complex Rampart scandal, in which dirty cops were found to have been involved in framing people and dealing drugs. Before that we had the Christopher Commission, formed to investigate the LAPD's use of force after the Rodney King beating, which found "There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the department regarding force." For years, the ACLU has tussled with the LAPD and won in repeated efforts to bring reform to the department.
Local law enforcement has never been very good at policing itself; it takes external efforts to bring about change. And continued reform is predicated on having access to records about the bad apples.
We know that most police officers and sheriff's deputies aren't corrupt. But we don't understand what good sealing the records will do for them; to us, it sounds like it will just make Training Day-style cops a whole lot more likely.
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the LA County Civil Service Commission has nothing to do with LAPD -- LAPD is the City of LA's police force.
Perhaps it's because those Investigative Records can contain such personal identifying information as social security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, etc. There are two reasons why some information about police officers should remain private: 1) Because criminals have been known to retaliate against cops and THEIR FAMILIES, and 2) because Identity Theft is the number one growing crime in America. Perhaps the effort would be better served if all that was released was a police officer's name and "sanitized" investigation records to exclude any other identifying information? I agree with public oversight and release of information, but not at the unwarranted increase in risk to the cop, his/her family. Thank you for your time.