Quote Quoting PTPD22
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No, those boards are made up of experienced DOCTORS who are actually knowledgeable about the complexities of the medical profession.
And generally very overprotective of their own profession. You know how many doctors who commit malpractice ever have action taken against their medical license? Very, very few. The same is generally true for states in which lawyers are the only ones reviewing the alleged misconduct of lawyers, too, btw. I won’t exempt my own profession from that criticism. It is for that reason in my state that the lawyer disclpline process includes not just lawyers on the panel but members drawn from the general public too. And the Supreme Court publicly releases the written determination of the review panel in every case in which discipline is actually imposed and maintains a freely available web site that the public can search any lawyer and determine what his/her disciplinary record is. I strongly supported those changes. Exposing the profession to public review helps to ensure the integrity of the profession and holds legal profession and the Court accountable for how lawyers are regulated and disciplined.

You can point to a few specific cases where publicity screwed the professional careers of an officer. You can't prevent all instances of that. And in the case of Wilson, it was not the release of personnel documents that did that to him, so you cannot blame rules meant for transparency for that.

As I stated from the outset, I suspected that cops would defend the protection from release of even the limited information I suggested we ensure gets released: records of those officers who have been determined after their department’s investigation process to have committed misconduct and what discipline was handed out to that officer, and I see that the police officers of this forum have done just as I predicted. I have not advocated for release of ALL information from personnel records, just that related to officer misconduct. I guess that blue line is so tight that good officers would rather protect the bad ones than allow the public to see what happens to those bad officers. The public needs to have a way to see what their public officials do and hold them accountable for the decisions they make, like the decisions to retain on the force officers whom most would say should be fired: those that lie, those who abuse suspects, those who cheat their department out of money, etc. How can the public do that if you hide the information needed to do it?

Let me ask you officers this question: how would you propose to give the public the information to hold official accountable if you protect ALL information about a police officer? Do you actually have any workable solutions that would provide useful information, or are you just giving me a knee jerk reaction that release of this information must be a bad thing and the public be damned? The federal government generally does not disclose records of mere allegations of misconduct against its employees but will release records regarding significant acts of proven misconduct; not every detail is released, but the general nature of the misconduct and the action the agency took is typicall available to the public. If the federal government can do that, why can’t state and local governments do that too?