The state agency charged with setting up certification standards for officers and investigating abuse claims is again putting off the release of 4,500 disciplinary records from over 300 police departments.
The Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission is worried that the data includes redundant or missing names and complaints, with multiple entries for officers who moved from department to department, according to interviews and a Thursday commission meeting.
“We feel it is necessary to conduct a last step of data validation,” Enrique Zuniga, executive director of the commission, said at a Thursday meeting of the group. He said they will allow each police department to “see the records submitted to us and were aggregated and to allow them an opportunity to see them and make any last-minute correction.”
Zuniga also said the commission staff will reach out to departments with records related to terminations and suspensions of police officers in particular.
“In some cases, there are a few instances in which somebody may have been terminated and then later reinstated. And these are the type of records that we are contemplating should be made public,” he said. Zuniga said he does not have an estimate on how many agencies need to fix issues in their complaint submissions.
The release of the data has been delayed on several occasions, according to messages between GBH News and the POST Commission over the past two months. Now the plan is to release the database after the next commission meeting on June 1.
The public release of the database is one of the main accountability measures of the policing reform bill that Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law at the end of 2020, which passed after significant legislative and public debate over police use of force and behavior following the murder of George Floyd.
The database, which is mandated to be made public under that law, will be comprised of information drawn from disciplinary records, including names of former and current police officers who were previously investigated by their departments, what happened, and the outcome of those. It will also include redacted data showing ongoing investigations into current officers. Data was initially going to be included about officers who retired or left their departments following the opening of investigations into their conduct, but Zuniga raised the issue on Thursday of whether the commission should release that information.
“Since we started to get all of those records, there have been a not insignificant number of retirements, or voluntary resignations or people who are no longer with the force,” said Zuniga, adding those officers weren’t terminated.
“This becomes really a question as to whether a retired officer should have their past disciplinary record out in the public,” he said.
Besides the data holdup, the POST Commission is also fighting a legal challenge from police unions who want to do away with parts of a questionnaire that's required for officer recertification.
On Thursday, the commission members entered a private executive session after the public meeting of 150-plus participants. They discussed the ongoing lawsuit brought by several law enforcement unions last month in Suffolk Superior Court over the inner workings of the commission.
The unions said the complaint demonstrates how the “ POST Commission created subcommittees that have illegally performed their work in total secrecy — without any notice to the public and without any public involvement or observation.” The Commission denies this.
Plaintiffs allege the commission members violated meeting law in those gatherings to create policies that will influence officers.
Less than an hour after the commission meeting, a hearing over the matter was held before Superior Court Judge Robert Ullmann. The police unions are seeking an injunction to stop the Commission from asking four questions in the required survey, which was due on May 13.
The questions the unions object to — partly on free speech grounds — ask officers about their tax payments, social media posts that might be perceived as biased, organizations they belong to and anything that might hinder their fitness to be an officer.
Ullmann didn’t issue an injunction decision, and said another judge may take up the decision in June. He laid out the bar unions have to meet, saying that “irreparable harm” to officers has to be proven.
“I haven't heard that there has been any actual — or as far as I know, no police officer or peace officer at this point has been harmed in any way by the failure to submit a completed application,” he said.
