Report says police misuse confidential databases
in court to looking up a female friend’s landlord and showing up to demand the return of money he said she was owed.
Deb Roschen, a former commissioner in Wabasha County, Minn., alleged in a lawsuit that law enforcement and government employees inappropriately ran searches on her and other politicians over 10 years. The searches were retaliation for her raising questions about county spending and sheriff ’s programs, she said.
An appeals court dismissed her suit. But, she said, “Twenty years from now... I’m still going to be thinking about it. The sense of being vulnerable, there’s no fix to that.”
The AP focused primarily on officers who accessed information about others but also counted some cases in which they divulged information without authorization, or ran searches for strictly personal purposes. The tally also includes some cases where little is known about the offenses because some agencies provided no details about the violations except that they resulted in discipline.
Since some officers were investigated for multiple offenses at the time they were punished, it wasn’t always clear if database misuse was the main basis for the sanction.
The AP sought to exclude benign violations. But record-keeping variations made that challenging.
California agencies, for instance, reported more than 75 suspensions, resignations and terminations between 2013 and 2015 arising from misuse of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. But the records didn’t specify the allegations.
Officers are only occasionally prosecuted, though one recent case involved retired New York Police Department sergeant Ronald Buell, who admitted selling NCIC information to a private investigator.