No more secret police in Kansas: Time to open up in officer misconduct cases
Even after writing multiple pieces on an Overland Park police officer’s killing of 17-year old John Albers during a welfare check in 2018, I can’t possibly imagine what the Albers family feels.
Especially after having to fight through their grief ever since just to find out what happened and why.
Getting information on alleged police misconduct is so much more painful than it has to be. It also takes a heck of a lot longer and involves many more lawyers.
It’s an unnecessarily torturous process that grieving families in officer-involved shootings shouldn’t have to put up with. Blessedly, the Kansas Legislature has an opportunity to make sure they don’t from now on.
A bill put forth by Sen. Cindy Holscher, Democrat of Overland Park, would require that records in cases of officer-involved shootings and allegations of police misconduct be open to the public unless there’s an active investigation. It would even prohibit those officers who resign or are removed for serious misconduct from being hired by another law enforcement agency and just changing uniforms rather than tendencies.
It’s amazing you even have to write a bill like that in the 21st century, and 10 nationally agonizing months removed from the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But there it is.
Holscher had both Floyd and the Albers family in mind when she started work on the bill last summer. She has been joined in the effort by John’s mother Sheila Albers and several lawyers, after getting input from the NAACP, law enforcement and others.
And the Democrat has moral support from Mike Kuckelman, chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, a lawyer who’s represented victims of police shootings in court. He hasn’t studied Holscher’s SB 270, he said, but agrees with the concept.
“Transparency is good for everybody … really good for the 98% of good, honest, hardworking law enforcement officers — honorable people,” Kuckelman says.
As Albers notes, “Transparency is not a partisan issue.”
“There are a number of people (in law enforcement) who are very much in favor of it,” Holscher says of her bill. “A lot of our officers say, ‘We need to have some accountability in place to protect those of us who aren’t causing problems.’ ”
The Star went to court and recently won the release of the severance agreement with former officer Clayton Jenison in the Albers case. Among other things, we learned that Overland Park papered over the circumstances of Jenison’s resignation, telling the state agency that certifies law enforcement officers that he voluntarily resigned in 2018 “for personal or professional reasons.” Tidy, but not quite the entire picture — especially since the city admits it approached him about leaving, not the other way around.
It’s heartbreaking that it takes so much time, so much money and so much emotional torture for families to get to such records, says First Amendment attorney Max Kautsch of Lawrence, who has consulted with and supported Holscher on her bill. The outcome of the fight for Jenison’s severance agreement “should have been the outcome years ago,” he says. But he hopes it’s a catalyst for the passage of Holscher’s bill.
Grief-stricken families and communities shouldn’t have to fight so hard to see such documents. And if they were more readily available, perhaps their content would be more straightforward — since government officials would know their handiwork would be seen by the public.
In a legislative session that’s still stunted by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s likely Holscher’s police transparency bill may not pass this year. But we’ve got to get this done.
As Kuckelman notes, transparency often works in the favor of the police officer. And when it doesn’t, other officers should be the first to want that dealt with, and in the open.
“The bad apples are few in law enforcement. But they’re very dangerous,” Kuckelman says. “Why we want to keep protecting the bad ones, I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Nope.
Please. No more hiding public documents, especially when it concerns a family in mourning.
