Why don't police track how many of its officers have been charged with or convicted of crimes.

The Honolulu Police Department doesn't track how many of its officers have been charged with or convicted of crimes. As it turns out, it's a statistic that very few cities keep, national experts say.

“I’m not aware of any police department keeping a separate compilation” of officers who’ve faced criminal investigations, said Karen Kruger, a Baltimore-based attorney who serves on the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Legal Officers’ Section.

Civil Beat reported last week that HPD does monitor the cases of individual officers who have been charged or convicted for crimes. But it does not compile that data, and neither does the city Police Commission, arguably making it difficult for the department to put together a complete picture of what's happening within their own walls.

According to Kruger, while “keeping tabs on officer misconduct” — from accusations of on-duty “discourtesy” to off-duty criminal activity — is standard for police departments, calculating aggregate statistics on the officers who've been charged or convicted is rare.

"Generally speaking, I know of no agency that documents the convictions of its sworn personnel," says Thomas Martinelli, a police misconduct expert and former Detroit police officer and attorney who trains agencies across the country in police ethics and liability issues.

Furthermore, Martinelli says legal advisors for police departments across the country likely "do not encourage the keeping of such statistics, on a list or database, as they would then be discoverable in any civil lawsuits filed against the department."


That void is what moved David Packman to set up The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, an independent, one-man campaign that gathers and distributes data on police misconduct.

And “it’s fairly rare that those law enforcement agencies track police misconduct at all or, if they do track it, that they release that info to the public,” says Packman. He calls it a “fundamental lack of information about police misconduct” on his web site.

National Police Misconduct Website:
http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/

Link:
http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2011/07/14/12065-few-cities-track-police-crimes-honolulu-included/