Police departments across the state have grappled with how to address officers who use excessive force. Some departments have recommended officers lose their certification, while others have let problem officers remain on the force for years and ignored civilian complaints.
During Boston Public Radio on Friday, a listener asked Attorney General Andrea Campbell whether her office has sufficient processes and rules in place to prevent a police officer with excessive force complaints against them from being hired in other towns.
“No,” Campbell said. “We have more work to do in this regard.” The main overseer of cases involving individual officers with misconduct violations is the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, said Campbell. The POST Commission is in charge of officer decertification to ensure that officers with violations cannot be hired in other jurisdictions.
Campbell said some lawyers in the Attorney General’s civil rights division are working on small police misconduct cases, but the office doesn’t yet have the resources to maximize this authority.
“We want to change that,” said Campbell. Her office is actively setting up a Police Accountability Unit to oversee police practice investigations, and she said that the authority and oversight of this committee will be strengthened by recent police reform laws — although police reforms from 2020 have not always been successfully executed.
Once the new unit is established and a director has been hired, “we can take on the systemic issues that we’re seeing in police departments across the commonwealth,” Campbell said.
Because it operates at the state level, the attorney general’s office can have systemic conversations, Campbell said, working with law enforcement officials to meet their needs or address mental health cases with the ultimate goal “to hold folks accountable."
