officers - The Black Vault

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. Charles~on, S. C., police:qfficer Julius Jeng was photographed recent-'
ly.~neem~ suspect Howard Sims .. Jeng was temporarily suspended.
:review bo~rds. They hav~ varying'
· degrees of independence; said the·
University of Nebraska's Walker,
and most cities adopt them only
after controversial incidents, such
. . as shootings a'nd beatings, spark
· public protests ..
But in Chicago, New York and in:
· some other cities that have review
· : boards not wholly independent; of
. the police department .or city ad­
,: ministration, critics contend that;
·:. they are set up in such a way that·
; .. they become little more than arms
; c of the police department.
~- .: "Every single [review board] ·
that exists still only has power to·
make recommend~tions to the police
chief, so the single critical
factor is the attitude of the police·
chief," Walker said. Also, in slight-·
ly more tpan half of the big cities!
that have them, the initial investi-
. gations are performed by police­
·officers, not independent investigators.
Jay Miller, director of the Amer­
.ican Civil Liberties Union of Illi-.
nois, said his office does not refer
brutality victims to Chicago's Office
of Professional Standards,
which .sustained only 190 of the
2,410 exce~si_ve force complaints
. .
filed with it last year. "We don't
trust them," he said.
In addition, police ·critics complain
that the agencies charged
with investigating police misconduct
frequently are not interested
in determining whether a systematic
problem exists. In many cities
records of complaints filed against
police officers are purged after a
·few years.
For Denver City Councilman Hiawatha
Davis, an advocate for
changes in the internal investiga­
·tions system in his city, the failure
-of pol~ce ~epartments to keep:J;"ecords
IS evidence that the system is
"severely flawed and totally compromised.
They obviously . don't
have any information to evaluate ·
~ trends. Without records, you can't
1 ·do any analysis of the characterisi
-tics of complainants or the officers
1
who have been complained about,"
i ·He added:""Ironically, the investigative
nature of the police institution
suggests that one of their
primary activities would be record
keeping. Police work thrives on
bits and pieces of information
,gathered over a long. period of
.:time." . - ; ·
But Chuck Lepley, assistant district
attorney iri Denver who in­
:·,vestigates poli