State government’s retreat from accountability for its employees and municipal employees is continuing, as legislation that would conceal accusations of misconduct against police officers is working its way through the General Assembly without any critical reflection by legislators.
The bill, publicized by Connecticut Inside Investigator’s Katherine Revello, was approved unanimously by the Senate and would prohibit the release of complaints of misconduct against officers prior to any formal adjudication of the complaints by police management.
Of course that’s an invitation to police agencies to conceal all complaints of misconduct and delay formal adjudication of them.
Yes, there can be false or misleading complaints against officers, and maybe disclosure of such complaints will unfairly harm some officer’s reputation someday. But the chances of that are small. News organizations aren’t likely to publicize such complaints without doing some investigation themselves, and the local news business is withering away.
But police misconduct is always being covered up somewhere, Connecticut has a long record of it, going back to the murder of the Perkins brothers by four state troopers in Norwich in 1969, and chances that government will strive to conceal its mistakes and wrongdoing are always high, just as the chances that the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration will nullify any serious discipline for government employees are always high.
Testifying against the secrecy legislation, former South Windsor Police Chief Matthew Reed, now a lawyer for the state Freedom of Information Commission, noted that the bill would impair the high standards Connecticut purports to want in police work. Reed cited the state law that prohibits municipal police departments from hiring any former officer who resigned or retired while under investigation. If such investigations are kept secret, that law may become useless.
Government employees in Connecticut are always seeking exemption from the scrutiny guaranteed by the state’s freedom-of-information law, and imposing secrecy on complaints against police is likely to lead to requests from other groups of government employees for similar exemptions.
Even the state senators from districts with large minority populations who have supported police accountability legislation in the past seem to have given the complaint-secrecy bill a pass. Maybe they are tired of being criticized as anti-police when they are really pro-accountability. Will there be enough pro-accountability members of the House of Representatives to stop the cover-up enabling act?
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To help save it from itself, Connecticut could use a few more gadflies like T. Chaz Stevens, a Florida resident who used to live in Shelton and who keeps an eye out for government’s excessive entanglement with religion.
Stevens is the founder of what he calls the Church of Satanology and Perpetual Soirée, and the other day he scolded the Hartford City Council for having flown a Christian religion flag at City Hall in April. In response Stevens wrote to Mayor Arunan Arulampalam asking that City Hall also fly the flag of his church, thereby complying with the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that if government buildings grant requests to fly non-government flags, they have to grant all such requests, lest they violate First Amendment rights.
If Stevens’ request is denied, he could sue and well might win.
The Hartford Courant reports that two members of the Hartford City Council, Joshua Michtom and John Gale, both lawyers, saw this problem coming and voted against flying the Christian flag. Other cities in Connecticut recently have made the same mistake by flying a Christian flag on government flagpoles: Bridgeport, New Britain, Torrington, and Waterbury.
No matter how the Constitution is construed, government flagpoles should be restricted to government flags, which represent everyone. Anything else allows the government to be propagandized by groups with political influence. That is especially the case with the continuing efforts around the state to fly the “Pride” flag on government flagpoles.
The national and state flags already represent freedom of sexual orientation. But the “Pride” flag is construed to represent letting men into women’s restrooms, sports, and prisons, politically correct silliness about which there is sharp division of opinion.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)