Last week I taught an IA seminar in Kansas City. By the way, they have one of the finest police
training facilities you’ll find these days.
One of the students offered a suggestion that I quickly gave
a knee jerk reaction to and dismissed.
But the thought intrigued me as I chewed on it for a few moments.
His suggestion was whether it might be beneficial to assign
an IA investigator to decentralized police stations as a local resource. It may only be practical in an agency with
more than one station or maybe a statewide agency. Progressive agencies today do that when they
insert a local prosecutor into the station.
In that case the attorney helps with search warrant applications, legal
questions and provides some roll-call training.
Some agencies currently have a victim advocate in-house who can help
with difficult emotional cases including child sex, rape and domestic violence.
Now what would an IA rep in the station house do? You might rush to say it wouldn’t work
because s/he would simply be considered a snitch. In some agencies that might be true. It would be a constant challenge for the IA
investigator to build trust and show that IA expertise can be beneficial. But, s/he could become a valuable resource
for local supervisors and the station management. The vast majority of citizen complaints are
usually delegated to the field sergeant.
The IA rep could be a resource to help that supervisor and could even
assist with a critique of the completed investigation. Local station managers are often the ones who
have to review administrative investigations done by IA and make
recommendations. The local rep could
assist and the final product will most likely be better. The IA investigator assigned to this local
station would still carry a normal workload; just do it at another location
other than the IA/OPS office. This might
encourage the investigator to make more face-to-face calls to complainants and
civilian witnesses rather than wait for them to come to the central office or
conduct them on the phone. It could also
cut down on the overtime or loss of field time by not having agency witnesses
and targeted employees going to the main administration building.
I must admit that I find this an interesting concept. A couple of years ago the Texas DPS began a
program of decentralizing its IA process.
It trained sergeants to conduct IA investigations and assigned a cadre
to each of its seven district areas throughout the state. I’m not sure how the DPS program has worked
out and it seems to be still in the developmental stage. NYPD has integrity lieutenants in each
precinct house who are supposed to do checks, audits and other types of
oversight; but it appears to be less effective and they spend most of the time
with trying to ferret out accepting gratuities, checking on overtime usage and officers
who are sleeping on the job. New Orleans
recently has placed compliance officers in each of its stations to do some IA
type tasks as well as audits and training.
Maybe we could take this decentralized IA/OPS concept a
little further and even use it in an agency with a single station. Too often the IA/OPS function is either in
some office down the hall from the Chief or in some outside location away from
the station. The only time the uniformed
cops see someone from IA is when they’re under the gun either as a target or
witness officer.
We’ve continuously worked to get detectives to visit
uniformed officers’ briefings and roll calls.
The idea was they could share current crime trends, offer some suspect
information and answer any questions.
Unfortunately, most of those attempts have failed. We can all argue why and come up with a bunch
of reasonable answers!
What could regular visits to uniformed cops by an IA
investigator do? One is that the uniformed
cop would now see the investigator without being under the gun. The investigator could discuss completed
administrative investigations where the work of the officers and the IA
investigation ended up clearing the accused employees. Or the IA investigator could grab some case
from the Internet where an officer got jammed up in another city and use that
as a catalyst to discuss agency protocols and safeguards. IA gives an investigator valuable experiences
that most cops never get. Sharing these
can only make everyone a better cop and further professionalize the police
agency.
It’s an intriguing concept; something we should not rush to
kick aside. At least it’s something to
chew on….
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