Taxing,

I wish things were as clean and simple as you believe them to be. Sadly, they are not.

The purpose of the law enforcement complaint process is to address actual misconduct on the part of an officer. Misconduct is when an officer violates the law, a a department policy, rule or regulation, or the orders of a supervisor.

However, over the years people have misused it for other purposes. Instead, they have misused the police complaint process as an alternate means of achieving political, social, moral change in government. As a result, many personnel files are filled with complaints that do not allege actual misconduct against the officer himself, but instead reflect dissatisfaction by members of the public with things the officer may have been involved with, but were beyond his control. Later on, these allegations have been used to publicly discredit the officer, assassinate his character and derail his career by making the complaints know but withholding the findings. This is known as the “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” tactic. In order to protect the officer from such blatant misuse, the California Legislature declared police personnel files to be confidential.

A good example of this involved one of my officers several years ago. An old girlfriend went off the deep end, became mentally disturbed and alleged that he raped her. Local law enforcement conducted the criminal investigation into her allegation and I conducted the internal affairs investigation. Both agencies determined the two of them hadn’t seen each other in 10 years, that he was 40 miles away from her with numerous witness at the time of the supposed crime and he was exonerated. Over the next several months she made five separate rape allegations against him. All were investigated and all were determined to be false and that he was nowhere near her.

Nonetheless, the officer still has six Internal Affairs rape investigations in his personnel file. Were his file to be made public and if someone wanted to discredit him or his employing agency, all they would have to do is publicize that he had been investigated for rape six times and then demand to know why he was still employed as a police officer, while withholding the fact that he was innocent and the complainant was a head case.

FWIW, I conducted internal affairs investigations for many years. In my personal experience, probably 85% of the complaints received from the public were without merit. Instead of alleging actual misconduct, most were either:

1. Unhappy because enforcement action was taken against them or someone else.
2. Disagreed philosophically with the law or a department policy and wanted us to substitute their personal beliefs for the law.
3. Misunderstood what the law or their rights were.
4. Had no factual (or reasonable) basis for believing the allegation to be true (false or imagined violation but real in their mind).
5. Blatantly false complaint made in retaliation against and officer for some official action he had taken against them or someone else.
6. False complaint made by arrestees against arresting officers, hoping to use it to get the prosecutors to drop the criminal case against them.

OTOH, probably 85% of the internally generated complaints against police officers (cop against cop) wound up being sustained, because cops understood what actually constituted misconduct and did not make such allegations lightly.

In addition to politically motivated investigations cdwjava mentioned, some agencies practice management by accusation. I spent many years working in an agency where if two people didn't get along, one would initiated a complaint against the other, taking just enough information out of context to initiate a full fledged internal affairs investigation. For years, I/A was kept hopping by officers who fueled morale problems by misusing the internal affairs system to initiate what turned out to be bullshit complaints against each other. Were the I/A complaint files of any of those "victim" officers to be made public, the public would be clamoring to know why cops with so many complaints of serious misconduct are still employed, when i fact, none of the allegations were true and they were simply made by other officers as part of a power play within the ranks.

Shining a light on such matters doesn't offer clarity because the public and the media are too impatient to sort through the minutia, digest the facts and read a lengthy and thoughtful analysis of what really transpired, or to accept the truth if it does not fit their preconceived notion of reality. The mantra of the media is "If it bleeds, it leads" so only the sensational gets the headlines and the facts are lost. As Mark Twain once put it, you have to go over the story with a divining rod to find the truth.

As PTPD22 mentioned, the case of Darren Wilson is the perfect example. Investigation after investigation determined that Wilson did nothing wrong and that Mike Brown was a strongarm robber who attacked Wilson and attempted to take his gun. Yet to this day, the media and public still revile Wilson as the villain and Brown as the hero. Where is the shining light of clarity there?