Overland Park police killed John Albers. Why can’t his parents see the police reports?
Imagine your troubled teen is shot and killed in the family van by police responding to a request to check on the youth’s welfare.
Imagine further that you’re not even allowed to see the police reports that were relied on to exonerate the officer involved.
Sheila and Steve Albers don’t have to imagine it. The Overland Park couple lived it, losing their 17-year-old son John they’d adopted from Belarus in a January 2018 tragedy on the family driveway.
They don’t want it to happen to anyone else.
While they can’t prevent another officer-involved shooting, they’re hoping to at least provide some sunshine for similarly situated parents in their darkest days — with a bill in the Kansas Legislature requiring the release of police reports when officers involved in fatal shootings aren’t charged.
Nearly two years and one big lawsuit later, the Albers have yet to see the police reports in their son’s death.
“I feel like we have tremendous (public) support” for House Bill 2424, formally introduced in the Kansas Legislature Monday, Sheila Albers said, adding that law enforcement agencies should also get behind it. “They have everything to gain from this and nothing to lose.”
What do they have to gain? “Trust,” she says. “Credibility. The ability to 100% clear an officer of wrongdoing.”
Albers points to Chief Frank Donchez’s full-throated support of the Overland Park Police Department’s addition of officer body cameras last November. “What I have found in my experience with in-car cameras,” Donchez said last July, “is that, by far, they exonerate more officers of wrongdoing than convict officers of wrongdoing.”
“So why not do the same with these records?” argues Albers. Of the state’s half-dozen to dozen officer-involved fatal shootings a year, Albers says, “If those shootings are truly justified and the officer did need to use lethal force, why wouldn’t you release the records?”
Actually, Chief Donchez says he’d be fine with such a law if passed by the Kansas Legislature. “If that’s what they choose, yes,” he told The Star.
We’d encourage every law enforcement agency in the state to feel the same way. Donchez is right: Transparency bodes well for law enforcement officers.
Albers couldn’t agree more: “I feel that the large majority of police officers are amazingly good people and do really good work. Transparency, communication and collaboration is a leadership issue. And that tone and that climate is set from the top.”
Albers says official accounts of her son’s shooting differ in significant ways with the family’s own reconstruction expert, and with some of a federal judge’s findings in their lawsuit against the city — which ultimately settled the case for $2.3 million a year ago. For one thing, Albers cites differences in how fast her son was backing the van out of the garage and whether it truly menaced the officer who shot him.
It’s unconscionable that, to this day, Albers has never seen the police report of the incident.
Though the Kansas Legislature is governed by its Republican majority, Albers and Democratic freshman state Rep. David Benson of Overland Park — who ran on a transparency platform and filed the legislation — both stress the bipartisan appeal of openness.
“Transparency and trust are nonpartisan issues,” Albers says.
Benson’s bill also would require written policies on such incidents, as well as investigations by outside law enforcement agencies — which Johnson County agencies already observe and which make absolute sense.
Albers anticipates arguments that sparsely populated western Kansas counties don’t have the resources to invite outside investigations. But Benson knows better, having lived there, and Albers says bluntly, “I call B.S. on that.”
She’s right. There aren’t that many such shootings anyway, especially in small-town Kansas. There is no good reason and no excuse for not getting this done.This bill corrects one of many serious and, frankly, hurtful flaws in Kansas open records laws cited by The Kansas City Star’s 2017 “Why So Secret, Kansas?” investigative series.
Publicly known facts would certainly seem to back up Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe’s ruling Monday that Olathe officers were justified in shooting at a couple of combative teens in an incident last November. Still, police reports of the incident aren’t open to the public.
Benson’s legislation, which would change that, is modeled after a similar law in Wisconsin — in which residents there were treated to some 275 pages of documents detailing one recent officer-involved shooting.
Are Kansans so much less deserving of information?