Trooper scandal demands more scrutiny

Don't even try to keep score of the Connecticut State Police ticket scandal, because the scoreboard is broken. Discovering that even one traffic ticket issued by Connecticut State Police was falsified would be a cause for concern. Finding out that at least 1,372 manipulated records were sent to the Connecticut Racial Profiling Project will taint faith in state police far beyond the four troopers already under fire for boosting their numbers with fake tickets.

The project compares the tickets to records submitted to the Centralized Infractions Bureau. It would be reasonable for a few discrepancies to show as a result of glitches or human error.

But there's too much human error here to even process.

Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection Commissioner James Rovella, whose department oversees state police, advised the profiling project to focus only on Troop E where the four troopers were based.

Such a request suggests there's no reason to suspect the problem is more widespread. Yet a state police audit found that ticket numbers were incorrect for about 75 percent of the 709 state troopers. For more than 150 of them, errors were in the double digits.

That would seem like a good place to start looking for other patterns of potential abuse. But state police decided to narrow their focus to troopers with 50 or more tickets that raised questions.

That's a much wider margin than should be investigated. Even at that, the probe circled the names of 17 troopers. Hearst Connecticut Media assessed the same date and came up with 35 names.

State police, citing this as an ongoing investigation, declined to comment. The discrepancies certainly left an impression with Ken Barone, who runs the profiling project, that there could be more fake tickets out there.

It's not good for the image of the Connecticut State Police to leave such deep shadows of doubt. Troopers file tickets into two systems. For 189 troopers, the numbers matched. That still leaves more than 500 troopers with mistakes. One trooper had 175 tickets in one system and zero in the other, which happens to be the one that department officials claim can't be tricked.

Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, tickets issued moving forward need to be scrutinized for their authenticity. More audits should be mandatory.

If some troopers need more training in the systems, that should have happened already.

But there are other questions that need to be addressed about the faux tickets. What profiling data was submitted in the bad batch? Would it have skewed the numbers for a project that by design aims to prevent profiling by police? Have issues regarding training been resolved?

There is so much that needs to be addressed moving forward. Any trooper with suspicious records deserves the chance to have their name cleared. We can only hope that most of them are the result of glitches from a broken scoreboard that can be repaired.

It’s not good for the image of the Connecticut State Police to leave such deep shadows of doubt.