Bad Cops Getting Rehired Back Into Law Enforcement

At minimum, police departments whose mandate is to protect and serve the public should be compelled to remove bad cops from their ranks, to ensure that police power comes with at least a modicum of accountability. Though it doesn’t happen nearly enough, some law enforcement officials do try to weed out problem officers. Since 2006, the largest police departments in the country have fired at least 1,881 cops for behaviors that range from ethically questionable to morally unjustifiable. Those officers should have to find new jobs in fields where they don’t have the opportunity to again violate the public trust, and in some cases, endanger the community.

Instead, a Washington Post investigation finds that in at least 450 cases, officers were rehired and welcomed back onto the force.

The Post requested hiring and firing numbers from the nation’s 55 largest police departments, 37 of which responded. In case after case, investigators found that officer dismissals were overturned during the appeals process, often despite the fact that their wrongdoing remained uncontested. Arbitrators have final say in the cases they review, and are empowered to overrule law enforcement chiefs and other officials even if an officer’s guilt is well established. Reinstatement can be granted for any number of reasons, including procedural errors and other technicalities. In some cases, even officers who faced serious criminal charges were allowed to return to the job because arbitrators decided firing was “too harsh” a punishment, or because departments had “missed deadlines” in their investigations.

Of the 451 officers who were rehired, Post researchers found that 33 faced criminal charges, and of that group, 17 had been convicted. In eight cases, bad cops essentially moved through a revolving door, and “were fired and rehired by their departments more than once.”

This is all deeply disturbing, not just because it offers further evidence of the ways police are often allowed to live above the law, but because these officers are returning to a highly sensitive field in which they have been proven unfit to serve. It seems absurd to have to revisit this issue again—but when cops behave in ways that are unethical or criminal, they should no longer be allowed to police our communities and neighborhoods. From the Post:

In [Washington, D.C.], police were told to rehire an officer who allegedly forged prosecutors’ signatures on court documents. In Texas, police had to reinstate an officer who was investigated for shooting up the truck driven by his ex-girlfriend’s new man. In Philadelphia, police were compelled to reinstate an officer despite viral video of him striking a woman in the face. In Florida, police were ordered to reinstate an officer fired for fatally shooting an unarmed man…In the District, an officer convicted of sexually abusing a young woman in his patrol car was ordered returned to the force in 2015.

The Department of Justice, led by Jeff Sessions, has already announced it will pull back on Obama administration police investigations of local police department policies and procedures. Those efforts were undertaken to address public outcry about police abuses around the country—particularly the murders of unarmed African Americans by cops—and to ensure police are in compliance with civil rights laws. In accordance with the rest of Donald Trump’s “law and order” agenda, that plan has largely been scrapped. The Post points to Sessions’ statement of “concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department who have done wrong.”