Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

About three months ago, just before we switched from the conventional content management system to the blog format for my rants, I wrote an editorial titled The Rat Squad. I commented that some internal affairs units were used as weapons by unscrupulous commanders who were looking to get rid of employees that had displeased them, regardless of whether they were any good at being cops. I further suggested that some, if not all, internal investigations should be done by a state-level agency that didn’t have a political agenda with regard to that law enforcement agency.

My pontifications on this topic were not warmly received by the National Internal Affairs Investigators Association, an outfit that I didn’t know existed until I got an e-mail from their president, Randy Rider. Randy is a lieutenant with the Douglasville, GA Poice Department, and for what it’s worth, a very nice guy. Randy told me that he had received a number of calls and e-mails from his membership, criticizing my views and recommending that the NIAIA take some official position on the issue. I told Randy that if he or one of his colleagues wished to write an opposing editorial, I would publish it on Officer.com and cross-link the two files. For whatever reason, that hasn’t happened yet. Randy did invite me to attend his association’s annual conference, which was held in Gatlinburg, TN this last weekend. In fact, it ended on Tuesday, but I had to beat feet on Monday afternoon to attend a business meeting. But I did get to meet many of the members of the NIAIA, all of whom I found to be friendly and professional, and completely unlike the sleazy characters I described in my article and whom are portrayed on TV.  And, fortunately for me, those that were anticipating the opportunity to tar and feather me or bestow a public Atomic Wedgie were dissuaded by cooler heads.

It was never my intention to demonize internal affairs investigators as a group. The administrative death squads and package builders that I described in my first editorial exist, but only in dysfunctional agencies. And they exist not because of bad IA investigators, but because of bad agency executives and nonexistent leadership.

The IA investigators that join NIAIA and go to the trouble and expense to attend their conference aren’t the ones I’m concerned about.  They get training in this area because they want to do the right thing, and do it well and professionally.  The package builders and death squad types don’t bother, because they know from the beginning that there’s nothing right about what they are doing and the way they are doing it. 

Am I retracting my original claim that Internal Affairs is used to retaliate against officers that have fallen into disfavor with their bosses? Nope. They’re still out there, doing the dirty work of bad leaders that subscribe to the “management by intimidation” school. And I don’t know what proportion of agencies have good IA systems as opposed to those that are Machiavellian. I do know that there has to be some kind of system to serve as a check on police power.

Without exception, every authority-based organization will become corrupt and self-serving when left with no oversight or constraint on its power. The Bow Street Runners that were the predecessor to Sir Robert Peel’s Police of the Metropolis (which became the London Metropolitan Police and the model for American policing) were uncontrolled and unregulated, and it wasn’t long before the citizen had more to fear from the “police” than they did from less-organized street criminals. Large city police forces in the United States, run under the “spoils” system where they did the bidding of whoever was in political favor, found that there was lot of opportunity for personal enrichment, even after the pols took their cut. The Los Angeles Police Department was a pretty nasty place until William Parker took it over in 1950 and cleaned house. The Knapp Commission investigated the NYPD in the early 1970s and found widespread practices of bribery and protection schemes ongoing. Neither agency (nor any other) has experienced a permanent cure as a result of changes - the hits just keep on comin’, even though the overwhelming majority of police everywhere do an honorable job under difficult circumstances. In nearly every case of police corruption, there has been a failure of management and oversight. It’s the job of management to be proactive and keep the bad things from happening. It’s the job of internal affairs to step in and clean up the mess when management can’t or won’t act.

As someone who always thought of himself as an honest cop, I had no fear of someone who was going to inspect my works and determine if I had acted properly. I did have significant fear of anyone that was going to investigate me with a pre-determined disposition in mind. And I knew the frustration of having no one to turn to when I saw misconduct occurring in the upper ranks, where oversight and controls were absent. When a citizen is outraged by an episode of deliberate police misconduct, honest cops are outraged a hundred times more. The citizen will get over it. The cops have to be reminded of it and live it down every day.

I’m not much of a Bible person, as a rule, but at the invocation that opened the NIAIA conference on Monday, Randy quoted from a biblical passage that I thought very appropriate. It’s from Romans 13:

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

As long as we recruit from the human race, we’ll always have wrongdoers in policing, as it seems that it’s just our nature to get carried away with power if there’s no one to look over our shoulders. Fortunately, we have our own “agents of wrath” who are willing to ask the difficult questions and keep everyone honest. And, if I offended any of those agents the first time around, let this be my explanation and apology.