How Transparent Should Law Enforcement Be?

Here's this morning's round up of central Texas crime stories.

• Another break in reported in Moody, believed to be related to Twilight Rapist

How Transparent Should Law Enforcement Be?
There's a story over at the Dallas Morning News regarding online access to Dallas PD's offense reports. Dallas PD allows access via it's website of reported offense data that is subject to the Open Records Act. However, there's an allegation that the department asked the vendor to make it harder for users to find certain offense data via the site.

In early January, a new vendor went live with an updated version of the department's online police reports system. The system allows the user to search for details of a crime by the offense from a drop-down sorting menu, or by other criteria, such as date, location, victim name or police report service number.

But the software was tweaked to remove some serious crimes, such as rape and murder, from the easy-to-use drop-down menu.

"I'm still confused about what exactly happened and who made the decision," Police Chief David Kunkle said Thursday morning.

"My position has always been that as much as you can, we should have online access to any information that we know is going to fall under open records," he said. "I want people to have an interest in making neighborhoods safer."

Open records laws have really changed the way that government and law enforcement in particular do business. I have written in the past that many believe that recent drops in crime are due to law enforcement agencies being held more accountable for their performance. You can read some of these posts, here, here or here. An important component of this accountability is transparency.

But there is a certain resistance to this transparency. Not all the resistance is motivated by nefarious reasons. Don't get me wrong, I am a strong believer in transparency. However, I want to bring this up so people understand why some departments are hesitant to embrace transparency.

One reason departments are hesitant is that some crime issues get blown out of proportion and departments then spend more time trying to do damage control then they spend in solving the original problem. As cops we'd much rather spend time and effort into putting bad guys in jail than we do holding press conferences.

Another reason is that cities are often times trying to promote their cities as attractive places to live and work. Many times, city leaders feel that if they admit there was any crime in the city then they will have failed in their mission to promote the city.

Another reason is that heads of police agencies can and will often lose their jobs over "bad" crime stats. No one wants their job security to hinge on the actions of another. Often times, it takes years to turn a city's crime problem around.

Communities can go a long way to ensuring that their cops embrace transparency. Let me offer a few suggestions to further that end.

• Resist the urge to storm City Hall with torches and pitchforks in hand when a crime problem comes to light. Express your concern, but also express your support of your department and your willingness to work together and partner with them to solve the problem.
• Ignore those who would use a crime problem to further a backbiting political agenda. They will cause your department to waste time in a political fight rather than focusing on fighting crime.
• Help your city leaders to see that it is not realistic to think that a city will have no crime. I would much rather see them promote the city as having an effective police department that is responsive to crime problems. People aren't stupid, they know that any city will occasionally have crime. 
• When a crime problem comes to light, give your Chief an reasonable opportunity to solve the problem. Don't immediately demand his head.
• Demand transparency from your department. Push your city leaders to formulate a plan to make all of it's operations more transparent. You could even volunteer to serve on a committee to develop that plan.

Transparency in government is empowering. However, with that power comes a responsibility to use it wisely.