“So-called ‘wandering officers’ have presented a significant danger to residents of every state, and an impediment to lasting police accountability,” said Chaclyn Hunt, legal director of Invisible Institute, a Chicago nonprofit journalism organization.
For example, last summer, an Illinois sheriff’s deputy, Sean Grayson, was charged with murder after he shot and killed a woman, Sonya Massey, in her home during an exchange about a pot of boiling water. It later came out that Grayson had been discharged from the U.S. Army for wrongdoing, pled guilty to two DWIs, then worked in five different police departments — some with findings of misconduct. Hunt said if the Sangamon County sheriff knew the public could easily look up officers' employment history, Grayson may never have been hired.
The Minnesota POST Board possesses records on officers' employment history but doesn’t make them available as a part of its own lookup tool because of technological limitations, according to POST Board executive director Erik Misselt.
When Invisible Institute first asked the POST Board for that data, the POST Board did not immediately provide it, citing the manual labor and costs of undergoing an intensive exporting process.
Local independent journalist Tony Webster, who once successfully sued the Minnesota Secretary of State for business registration records, assisted the Invisible Institute by visiting the POST Board and tailoring the request in such a way that implied the state might face another lawsuit if it failed to comply.
Webster said it’s important for journalists and regular people to be able to research the employment histories of officers following critical events.
“As much as I believe that journalists should be empowered to access data freely, so should the public,” he said. “And that is all the more important when news organizations are shutting down and journalists are getting laid off.”
Minnesota is among just a handful of states that provide a police license lookup tool at all. Some states have denied the Invisible Institute’s data requests, and others will only supply anonymized data, making employment history useful only for statistical analysis. But there are also some states that collect more data than Minnesota does, such as Florida, which tracks the reasons why an officer separated from a place of employment.
Misselt said the POST Board hopes to upgrade to a new record management system that will be able to host more data on the POST Board’s own website, including previous employment. But for now, members of the public should use the POST Board license lookup tool and Invisible Institute’s database together.
“We’ll defend the ability to withhold private data, obviously, and that’s our responsibility, but we try to be as transparent as humanly possible,” he said. “It just so happened that in that one instance, we can’t do it currently.”
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