Lawmakers seek to ensure police comply with complaint requirements

January survey found 40 departments were not in line with law

On the heels of a study that found many Connecticut police departments weren’t following the law regarding police complaints, legislators have raised a bill that would make the Police Officer Standards and Training Council responsible for ensuring departments comply.

Raised House Bill No. 7285, if passed, also would require council members to look into how departments are accepting, processing and investigating complaints and report their findings to the Judiciary Committee no later than Feb. 1, 2018.

The bill is in response to Public Act No. 14-166, which became law in 2014. The act requires agencies to post their complaint forms and policies online, but when the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut checked the websites of more than 100 Connecticut law enforcement agencies last October, it found 40 of them, including three local ones, had failed to do so.

Released in late January, the ACLU-CT report also found that those answering the phones at Connecticut police departments had widely

varying answers about how someone could file a complaint and whether the agency accepted anonymous complaints.

“Over the past several years, multiple pieces of police accountability reform have passed through the legislature,” David McGuire, executive director of ACLU-CT, said by phone Wednesday. “But without full cooperation from law enforcement, the laws are not worth much more than the paper they’re printed on.”

More than 40 people submitted testimony or spoke in person during an April 24 public hearing about the bill. Some of them had attended an activist training that ACLU-CT recently hosted in Hartford. Many said the bill does not go far enough.

McGuire said he’d like to see three additions to the bill: a requirement that departments adopt a standard form and make it available in common languages; a mandate that police must track and report complaints against members of their departments, and the establishment of meaningful penalties for those departments that do not comply, such as the loss of some funding.

In explaining the reasoning for the latter, McGuire cited the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act of 1999.

“That was not complied with for more than a decade because there were no teeth in it,” he said. “Once we added a meaningful penalty (in 2014), in less than a year, every police department was complying.”

The penalty, McGuire noted, never was imposed. He expects something similar would happen with police complaints if the threat of a loss of funding was added to the law.

Also submitting testimony was Heather Reid, a Canada native turned New London resident who volunteers with the homeless shelter and thus interacts with city police relatively regularly.

A former civilian member of the prosecutions section of the Ontario Provincial Police Professional Standards Bureau, she, too, recommended the three additions McGuire mentioned. She spoke of how she was on a team that worked to standardize police complaints throughout Ontario, a province that’s 70 times the size of Connecticut in terms of area and almost four times as big populationwise. That same team created a centralized and independent office to review complaints, she said, and saw trust in police increase as a result.

Officers benefited, too, she said.

“It’s helpful for officers to know the people they work with are competent and have learned from their mistakes,” Reid said.

State Sen. John A. Kissel, R-7th District, called Reid’s intentions “laudable” but said he would be hesitant to put into a bill language that could cause municipal departments to lose funding.

“Towns are under enough stress right now,” he said. “This committee, rather than bludgeoning municipalities and police departments to do x,y,z, we try to incent folks to collaborate and come up with a system that would really work.”

Kissel also questioned how much it would cost to create a statewide, independent clearinghouse.

He said getting the Police Officer Standards and Training Council involved, as well as using other authority the committee has, could be enough to boost compliance with the law.

Many departments, including Waterford and Groton Long Point, have updated their websites since ACLU-CT’s report came out and now are complying with state law.

Norwich police, the third local department cited in the study, said they’re reworking their complaint policy to bring it more in line with the state model and plan to post it online as soon as it’s finished.

McGuire, noting that ACLU-CT membership has quadrupled since the election, said he was encouraged so many members of the public took time to submit their thoughts on the bill. He’s hoping their enthusiasm will persuade members of the committee to enhance the bill and keep it going forward.

“All (the bill as written) does is acknowledge there is a compliance problem and propose solutions a year from now,” said David McGuire, executive director of ACLU-CT. “We don’t have time to wait. This is a 2014 law we’re trying to force compliance with — we need to address it now.”