[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by silverwhaletail

It has existed for at least 21 years. It is called EWS in California. Early Warning System. Every State has some form of it and has for decades.

You have an opinion on everything and knowledge of nothing.

The problem is, it's administered by police. Most outside of the the law enforcement community agree it's been an unqualified failure. From just one major California city, but even the most cursory research shows this is endemic across California:

SFGate: The Use of Force

One particularly interesting article from the above reference:

State law protects officers from disclosure of complaints

In California, unlike much of the country, police disciplinary records and citizen complaints against officers are kept secret by law.

By contrast, at least 30 states allow partial or complete public access to police personnel records.

But here, where the disciplinary records of numerous professions -- including doctors, lawyers and accountants -- are readily accessible to consumers, the public is largely kept in the dark, even when officers have a continuing pattern of misconduct.

The confidentiality law was enacted a quarter-century ago at the urging of law enforcement lobbying organizations.

"Police in California and some states have had the political clout to have most of their records closed,'' said Samuel Walker, a leading expert on police discipline who recently wrote "The New World of Police Accountability."

"That's the only explanation for it,'' Walker said.

Law enforcement officers in California, as well as 13 other states, have an additional shield, a special set of legal protections when they are being investigated by their own departments.

Called the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act, the almost 30-year-old state law imposes limits on investigative procedures, internal hearings and punishment.

One important provision requires that disciplinary charges or other punitive actions be lodged against an officer within one year of the time of complaint. The legislation was created in response to departments' overzealous internal investigations, police say.

Critics of the statute of limitations say disciplinary investigations can be complicated and take more than a year to complete. In San Francisco, between 1996 and 2004, 129 cases were dismissed because the Office of Citizen Complaints or the Police Department failed to meet the deadline.

"It was controversial providing all these rights,'' said Hank Hernandez, a former Los Angeles police officer who helped draft the law. He is general counsel for the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

"We had to come up with a lot of horror stories about departments holding officers incommunicado for many hours, not disclosing charges against them.''

Police officers and other law enforcement representatives, who lobbied for their special protections, say they are entitled to singular rights because their work is dangerous, their profession unique.

"No other public employees have the awesome power that the law grants a police officer,'' Hernandez said. "We need a police force that is motivated to engage the criminal element."

If the public "doesn't support officers," he said, "if officers aren't treated fairly, what's to motivate them to go down the alley? What you would have is a heck of an increase in crime."

In 1978, a confidentiality section was created in the state penal code after a state court decision expanded defendants' rights to obtain citizen complaints against officers.

Some law enforcement agencies, in response, tried to protect their officers by destroying complaint reports, in what legislative documents described as "massive record-shredding campaigns." That made it impossible to prosecute some cases.

Powerful police unions "aggressively pushed" for the measure to keep the records confidential, in return for preserving them, said John Crew, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union's police practices project, which monitors Bay Area police departments for violations of constitutional rights.

"Why should you have a privacy right to how you hit someone with a baton in public?" he said. "To do the very delicate job of police, we delegate certain powers to use in our name. But that delegation of power isn't unlimited. If they misuse the powers, it has a huge ramification.

"The idea that how an officer exercises those powers should be secret is contrary to a free society."