Two standards of justice
The death of George Floyd has provoked a national debate on police reform and the need to hold misbehaving officers accountable.
Unfortunately, two cases highlighted recently in the pages of the Times Union show that police misconduct is still not taken seriously enough by some public officials, who seem too willing to shrug it off.
One case involves Cohoes Police Officer Sean T. Mckown, who in June fired his service pistol while at his summer home in the Adirondacks and allegedly told State Police a Black youth had fired at him first.
That isn’t what happened. Investigators found Mr. Mckown’s statements about the Elizabethtown incident to be either false or “extremely inconsistent.”
Yet Essex County District Attorney Kristy Sprague has not charged Mr. Mckown with filing a false report or menacing the youth. It’s fair to doubt whether the DA would have been so lenient had Mr. Mckown not been a cop.
Cohoes Mayor William Keeler says he is troubled by the allegations, but he nevertheless let Mr. Mckown
quietly retire in good standing rather than face any formal punishment.
Mr. Keeler, a retired high-ranking State Police leader, says the move was right for his city, given that disciplinary processes can be long and costly. But his decision will do nothing to inspire confidence in law enforcement or dispel the widespread belief that officers benefit from a double standard.
Neither will a case involving state troopers assigned to a federal drug task force in New York City.
An internal State Police investigation — launched only after the Times Union raised questions about a senior officer crashing his police vehicle far from where he was supposed to be working — found that many officers in the elite narcotics squad had falsified work records, lied about overtime, ignored department surveillance rules and improperly used publicly owned vehicles.
Despite the blatant misconduct, the officers mostly evaded meaningful punishment, with many — this will sound familiar — allowed to quickly retire in good standing. A damning new report by the state inspector general says the discipline was “extremely lenient.”
We wish we could say these two cases are outliers, but that obviously isn’t true. Instead, they’re examples of how public officials have long handled police misconduct.
The slap-on-the-wrist approach has had profound consequences. It has undermined public confidence in policing and deepened cynicism. It has also led some officers, secure in the knowledge they won’t be punished, to flout the rules in ways that further undermine public faith.
It’s a bad cycle that helps to explain the distrust and frustration being expressed in the protests since Mr. Floyd’s death. How to address that distrust may seem like a complex topic, but the most important step is actually pretty simple: Public officials need to hold officers to higher standards of behavior. Until that happens, real progress is impossible.