Andrea Cabral, former sheriff of Suffolk County and former secretary of public safety, weighed in on Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins’ release of a publicly available database of Boston area police officers with “questionable" credibility on Thursday.
The LEAD database, which stands for Law Enforcement Automatic Discovery, is a public spreadsheet that currently lists 136 police officers with potentially tainted credibility. It includes state troopers, Boston Police officers, transit officers, and a handful of officers from departments in Revere and Chelsea.
Cabral explained that the list will help prosecutors determine whether an officer should be permitted to testify in court.
“It’s really kind of astonishing when you look back on it, but for years and years and years, prosecutors have put police officers on the stand — frequently, if not always, in cases where their credibility is determinative in the case — without knowing whether or not there are issues that impact their credibility that are known to the police department, and that are potentially exculpatory,” Cabral said on Boston Public Radio.
For years, she said, police departments across the country have been wary about releasing these kinds of lists, citing concern that bad actors might use them to unjustly harass officers and their families. And while the former Suffolk County sheriff acknowledged those concerns as being valid, she added that “there has to be some balance.”
“[Officers] get on the stand, cloaked in the credibility of being a police officer and being associated with the police department,” she said. “When they testify, they get the benefit of all of that. Knowing whether or not they deserve the benefit of any of that is important for a prosecutor.”
She also noted that having an officer’s name in a public database creates incentive for forces to resolve internal investigations more efficiently.
"You’ve read a ton of stories about people who’ve filed complaints with internal affairs, and they’ve been pending years later," she said. "Well, if there’s an interest in maintaining the accuracy of the database so that officers that’ve been exonerated or for some other reason don’t deserve to be on it, then those investigations will proceed will all delivered speed.”
Cabral is the former Sheriff of Suffolk County, former Secretary of Public Safety, and current CEO of Ascend.
