5 votes

Transparency advocates are working to make police personnel records more accessible—and searchable—for the public. Can that go too far?

1 comment

  1. The_Fad
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    I see no issues with fully accessible personnel records with the following provisions: -Medical history is kept private, both physical and mental -Disciplinary records are considered public...

    I see no issues with fully accessible personnel records with the following provisions:

    -Medical history is kept private, both physical and mental
    -Disciplinary records are considered public information
    -Investigations that may result in obtaining information about an officer's private life will keep said obtained information private until the conclusion of the investigation, at which point a third party Judge, having had no hand in the original investigation (if ever a judge's hand was needed), will decide if any or all of that info should be made public, not including any disciplinary documents which will, of course, be made immediately public.

    My reasoning is thus:

    If we must continue to allow officers to carry and engage in lethal force at their own discretion, then they need to be treated with as much transparency as possible. These are private citizens doing a public job in the name of the public at large. There is simply no reason the details of a public job should be hidden from public view, barring extreme personal information circumstances like medical history.

    Even if overnight we removed every lethal weapon from every precinct in the nation (an impossibility, really) and removed the ability to turn off body cams, I would still stand by this. This issue stems from the much larger problem of our public processes becoming largely obfuscated for no good reason by a combination of bureaucratic growth and bad actors.

    5 votes