Could state commission help weed out bad cops?
Agency’s powers limited in scope
When Michael Rosfeld, a rookie East Pittsburgh police officer, shot and killed an unarmed teenager, Antwon Rose II, in June 2018, some Pennsylvania lawmakers started kicking around the idea of improving training and hiring standards for police across the state.
Several months before Mr. Rosfeld was hired in East Pittsburgh, he’d resigned from a university policing job after being notified that he was going to be fired. That a troubled officer could so easily get another law enforcement job — and then take someone’s life — seemed to make the case that the state needed to have a better way of regulating its police forces, which number more than 1,000.
There was a catch, though: Pennsylvania already had an organization to do the job. The Municipal Police Officers’ Education and Training Commission, created in 1974, provides a standardized certification process for aspiring police, as well as a way to kick out certain bad cops.
The commission has gone about its work so quietly that it’s rarely mentioned in conversations about police accountability, a topic that remains a potent issue for presidential candidates and such local officials as Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, both of whom were elected on platforms that promised criminal justice reform.
The commission is more than just an item on a cadet’s to-do list; it has the power to revoke an officer’s license. But it takes that step only in rare circumstances: if a police officer has been convicted of a felony or a serious misdemeanor, or is deemed physically or mentally unfit for duty. As a result, in a state with more than 27,000 law enforcement officers, the commission has revoked licenses from only 35 officers since 2015 — with just a single revocation in all of 2016.
But in states such as Kansas and Oregon — both of which have fewer than 8,000 police — similar commissions strip licenses from dozens of problem officers every year, even if they’ve committed misconduct that doesn’t result in a criminal conviction.
“I wouldn’t say the problem is the agency itself. It’s that the agency’s powers seem quite limited,” said Roger Goldman, professor emeritus at St. Louis University School of Law and an expert on police license revocation laws.
“And that’s something that does need legislative attention.”
A commission with expanded powers might be welcomed by police officials in Philadelphia, where commissioners have complained for decades that arbitrators routinely overturn their firings and put bad police back on the force. But could any bill aimed at creating stricter oversight of police gain bipartisan traction in an era of fiercely divided political loyalties?
‘LEO land’
Gary Stead calls Kansas “LEO” land — in other words, a predominantly white, Republican state where law enforcement officers enjoy plenty of support. Yet Kansas has gotten particularly adept in recent years at yanking licenses away from police officers who run afoul of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training, where Mr. Stead is executive director.
Mr. Stead, a former sheriff of Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita, said Kansas’ ability to discipline police officers was limited for years to a handful of scenarios: felony convictions or loosely defined “moral character” violations.
Then in 2012, Kansas lawmakers added 58 misdemeanor charges that could also result in police losing their licenses, even if the evidence didn’t climb to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for a criminal conviction. Revocations climbed.
“We went from doing about eight a year,” Mr. Stead said, “to probably about 40.”
The newly added charges include offenses that appeared in 170 Philadelphia police arbitration files The Philadelphia Inquirer obtained earlier this year: stalking, assault and violation of a protection from abuse order.
Another crucial difference between Kansas and Pennsylvania: Thanks to funding it receives through court fees, the Kansas commission employs investigators who examine allegations of misconduct, separate from local police departments. The investigators present their evidence to a three-person panel that decides the appropriate discipline.
Pennsylvania’s commission has 15 board members — including Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Robert Evanchick, former state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf and longtime Philadelphia police chief inspector Chris Werner — but doesn’t conduct its own investigations.
Mr. Stead said the response to the Kansas commission’s work has been largely positive: “We continuously gets comments from officers and chiefs and agency heads that they’re glad we’re doing what we do. We’re trying to professionalize law enforcement in Kansas.”
Tough to get
Philadelphia officials recoiled at the idea of outside oversight for its police force from the very beginning.
In 1974, with the country still reeling from Watergate and years of violent clashes between protesters and police, Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania hashed out amendments to the bill that would create the commission.
Then, that spring, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission released a landmark report on the Philadelphia Police Department, which found corruption was “ongoing, widespread, systematic and occurring at all levels of the police department.”
Yet as the bill for the Education and Training Commission got closer to a final vote, some politicians were disturbed to find that Philadelphia police wouldn’t have to go through the commission’s certification process.
“It was the mayor of the city of Philadelphia, along with his legislative aide and others, who coerced the Senate into taking Philadelphia out,” then-state Rep. David Richardson complained during a June 1974 House session, a reference to then-Mayor Frank Rizzo, according to legislative records.
Mr. Richardson implored his fellow members of the House to support an amendment to reverse the Rizzo-directed change.
By a vote of 152 to 28, they rejected Mr. Richardson’s plea.
But Mr. Richardson’s desire for Philadelphia to become subject to the commission’s standards ultimately came to fruition — in 1984.
Some experts think Pennsylvania officials should consider the nuclear option: replacing Act 111, the 1968 state law that requires disputes between government agencies and unions to be resolved through binding arbitration.
Such a suggestion might be greeted with howling
“Laws are changed across this country all the time. Why are we not looking at this? Because it’s hard?” — Chris Burbank, a former Salt Lake City police chief, now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity
disapproval locally, but to Chris Burbank, a former chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department, it’s an obvious solution.
“Laws are changed across this country all the time,” he said. “Why are we not looking at this? Because it’s hard?”
Mr. Burbank, now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity, a think tank at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said governments should consider moving away from the civil service and unionized workforce model for law enforcement and seek more educated, diverse and experienced employees. He said bad police who remain on the force through arbitration “poison” entire departments and fuel community mistrust.
Cara Leheny, Philadelphia deputy city solicitor, who handles police arbitration cases for the city, said Philadelphia could try to limit the power of arbitrators by implementing a stricter disciplinary code with more specific punishments, such as automatic dismissal for certain offenses. But past attempts at curbing arbitrators’ discretion hasn’t gone well for the city.
In 2008, as part of negotiations over a new police contract, then-Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration proposed limiting an arbitrator’s ability to reduce discipline in cases where the arbitrator found a police officer to have been guilty of misconduct.
The proposal went before a panel of arbitrators who were in charge of setting the terms of the new contract. They didn’t grant the city’s request.
A rare charge
Antwon Rose’s death resulted in something rarely seen in Pennsylvania: a police officer charged with first-degree murder.
But any hope Antwon’s family held of seeing Mr. Rosfeld go to prison for shooting the teen evaporated earlier this year, when a jury found the exofficer not guilty. Several Democratic lawmakers sensed an opening for legislation that would prevent future Antwon-like tragedies.
Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa Jr., D-Forest Hills, and state Rep. Jake Wheatley, D-Hill District, said they will introduce legislation to beef up the police certification and training, not only for municipal officers, but also state police, sheriffs’ deputies and correctional officers.
Rep. Chris Rabb, of Philadelphia, has introduced a bill that would allow law enforcement agencies to access a statewide database of police misconduct. Mr. Rabb believes it would prevent problem officers from easily moving from one department to another.
Republicans, who control both chambers of the state Legislature, have largely shied away from taking public stances on new legislation pertaining to police. “Most of our members believe hiring and internal management practices are best left to the people in our communities who choose to protect us,” said Mike Straub, a spokesman for House Republicans.
The prospect of expanding the commission’s powers or creating a new agency to address police accountability gets an automatic thumbs down from John McNesby, the president of Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5.
“I don’t believe that’ll happen,” he said.