A police databse needs to be publicly available and include each police officer’s credentials, along with an extensive list of the disciplinary action and complaints he or she has faced. Fortunately, a good model exists in the financial sector.
The depository currently has information on roughly 700,000 brokers/advisers and their firms. A central feature of the system is a disclosure website, which makes it easy for members of the public to search for their brokers or run a background check on prospective ones. This is the perfect model for a national police disclosure scheme.
After the police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis — just a few miles from where we both live — it was shocking to learn that Derek Chauvin, the officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, had 18 prior complaints against him, two of which led to disciplinary action. And even though the Minneapolis Police Department disclosed this information, it did not provide any additional details regarding the nature of those complaints. Even after the death of Floyd, Chauvin was protected by the secrecy that too often veils police records.
There are many reasons to make these disclosures public. Most obviously, it would allow the public to access important information which could reveal patterns of department-wide failures.
