Jackson County prosecutor leads national committee seeking to improve investigations of police shootings

A national committee of big-city prosecutors, led in part by Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, has released a report with new recommendations for how they and their colleagues around the country should handle police shootings.

Prompted by recent controversies over killings of people of color by police officers, the report is the first of its kind commissioned by the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, based in Washington, D.C. It includes guidance to local prosecutors on responding to officer-involved shootings, investigating them and releasing information to the public.

The report, “21st Century Principles of Prosecution: Peace Officer Use of Force Project,” came out of a year-long process that brought selected prosecutors from major cities — including New York, Chicago and East Baton Rouge — together with critics from the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and police groups, among others.

The authors of the report noted a growing distrust between police and some communities, aggravated by raw video of citizens’ deaths and by a rash of “ambush killings” of police officers last year in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.

Baker, a co-chairwoman of the committee that authored the paper, said she has already taken some of the recommended steps, including some aimed at greater transparency. Last year, her office began releasing detailed letters explaining charging decisions and posting them online for the public to see. Previously, the specifics of those decisions were often kept secret.

“The public trust frays when prosecutors fail to explain how and why decisions were made,” Baker said in a statement announcing the report. “We must do everything within our legal authority to rebuild this trust and extend fairness to all parties, including police officers and community members.”

Among the committee’s biggest concerns was the apparent conflict of interest presented by a police department investigating a shooting by one of its own officers. In Kansas City, as The Star found in its 2015 examination of police shootings, police and prosecutors control such investigations. The city’s civilian oversight agency, the Office of Community Complaints, is not empowered to review shootings.

The report seeks to position local prosecutors as an independent eye on those investigations and counter the perception that they are too close to police to charge them if a shooting is wrongful.

In its recommendations, the committee says police should turn to outside agencies to investigate their officers’ shootings or other use of force when possible. But it pushes back against those who have called for special prosecutors to take over charging decisions in such cases, arguing that local prosecutors should demonstrate their independence by keeping the case.

The report also suggests that prosecutors enter into a memorandum of understanding with law enforcement officials in their area to organize police shooting investigations, as Baker did with the FBI and the Kansas City Police Department in 2015. Local prosecutors should also have written protocols describing the roles of police and prosecutors in such investigations.

Among other recommendations, the report calls for prosecutors to respond to the scene of a police shooting, meet with family members of those killed or injured, and observe interviews with witnesses, which should if possible be recorded. Witness statements should be taken from police officers before they are allowed to view body cam video or other recordings, the report says, “consistent with the way all witnesses should be treated.”

In nonfatal police shootings, the committee recommends a separate prosecutor be brought in to examine possible criminal charges against the injured person, to avoid mixing that decision with possible charges against the officer.

One problem the prosecutors noted as they wrote their report: there is no comprehensive record of police shootings in the U.S. To get a picture of the numbers involved, the committee relied on a database compiled by the Washington Post in 2015.

The same database served as the basis for an academic paper, released two days earlier, that concluded minorities were more likely than whites to have not been attacking an officer when they were killed. It also found that black civilians were more likely than white civilians to have been unarmed when they were killed.

The paper, “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015,” was published in the Journal of Criminology & Public Policy.

This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 9:25 PM with the headline "Jackson County prosecutor leads national committee seeking to improve investigations of police shootings."