By Peter Dujardin
Daily Press
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — There’s no settled convention around the country on whether police officers involved in police shootings should be publicly named.
Newport News Police Chief Richard W. Myers talked at recent news conference of “a national discussion going on among police leaders” on whether — and when — to make public the names of officers who shoot in the line of duty.
The Newport News Police Department’s “historic policy and practice” — similar to many other local agencies — is to withhold the name of the officer being investigated. “Our current policy prohibits the release prior to any criminal charges being filed,” Myers said.
A group of pastors he called the “the Concerned Clergy,” Myers said, urged him to “be fair and consistent and follow our policy the same in all cases.” Another factor, he said, is whether there’s any “intelligence on threats to the officers involved.”
Myers told the Daily Press that there were threats on social media against the officer who shot and killed Kawanza Beaty, though the chief declined to get into specifics.
The commonwealth’s attorney’s practice, Myers said, is to release the officers’ names when the final prosecutor’s report is complete. The chief said that he and Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn have jointly decided they will follow the same course in the pending investigation.
The identification of the shooter by prosecutors typically comes within the context that the shooting has been ruled justified. Of 19 fatal police shootings on the Peninsula over the past 25 years, prosecutors ruled 17 justified. In two other shootings, the cases were referred to grand juries that declined to indict the officers.
But in recent years, some police reformers around the country have contended that the names of officers involved in fatal shootings should become public far sooner — and that citizens have the right to know which officers have used deadly force on the job.
That has been echoed locally, as well.
Andrew Shannon, president of the Peninsula chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said releasing of the name helps to build public trust.
“All information should be made available, including the name of the officer,” Shannon said. “I believe that because I believe in open government. … Everyone should feel good about the process, and that no one is being shielded and no one is above the law.”
Shannon said withholding the identity of the officer shooter “will only heighten the tension” in the community. “If you want to reduce tensions, you got to be open and provide information to the citizens,” he said. “They should give the name up.”
Norfolk community activist Michael Muhammad, who often gets involved in police shootings, likewise called on Newport News police to “immediately” release the names. “What we’re finding” around the country, he said, is that officers who use deadly force often have done so before.
Different department chiefs handle the matter differently.
After a police shooting in Roanoke in late July, the Roanoke Police Department released the names of the two officers who shot and injured a man. The officers said the man pointed a gun at them before they opened fire.
But the York-Poquoson Sheriff’s Office withheld the name of the deputy who shot and killed a man who pointed a gun at the officer following a traffic accident. The deputy’s version of the threat was backed up by body camera footage viewed by the Daily Press.
A model police policy on deadly force investigations provided by the International Association of Chiefs of Police goes into great detail on many aspects of an investigation. But it doesn’t say anything on whether it’s a good idea to name the officers involved.
Likewise, a recent comprehensive national report by a group of scholars and police chiefs — from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing — didn’t address the issue of whether officers involved in shootings should be named.
“We did not issue any recommendations on that,” said Laurie Robinson, a George Mason University criminologist and co-chairman of the task force. “It really varies among jurisdictions, with the laws in different states and the different chiefs have different ways of approaching it.”
It’s a balancing act, she said, and “it’s hard to draw hard and fast rules.”
“In the ideal world, you would be sharing information with the community,” Robinson said. “Part of what we were urging broadly in our report was to provide information early and often in areas that have the potential to be areas of discord with the community.”
“But if there are concerns about protecting the officer, or issues about the case itself, it’s hard to say in every case we do X or in every case we do Y,” she said. “If there are good reasons not to provide it — the integrity of the case or someone’s physical security,” then it could be withheld.
The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police also doesn’t have guidance or a model policy on the issue of naming the officers who have shot suspects, said Dana Schrad, the group’s executive director.
“It’s hard to standardize something like this because there’s so many facts and perceived risks,” she said. “The rule of thumb is to release information as quickly as you can and as safely as you can. … Release as much information as possible, but use good judgment to determine when release of information would put an individual in harm’s way.”
One factor, Schrad said, is the “civility of the community.”
“If it involves race relations or a volatile situation, in one circumstance it might be safe and in another community there would be a concern,” she said. “Officers have rights too and have the right to be treated safely … and all those things are taken into consideration.”
Candace McCoy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, said that to protect the investigation and the police officer, a department is well within its discretion to withhold the name from the public.
“The (investigative) process needs to unfold without bias,” she said. “I am very much for police reform, but we’re talking about individual people’s lives and sometimes a serious likelihood of reprisal. …. We should not discount threats to people’s lives.”
McCoy said, however, that the officer’s name should ultimately be released by the prosecutor’s office once it makes its final finding — even if the officer is cleared.
“If somebody has been shot dead, there’s a great public interest,” she said. “There should be a presumption of releasing the name when the investigation is done.” McCoy added, however, that there could be exceptions, and “you can’t make a hard and fast rule.”
Public Accountability
Journalism experts say that media organizations are acting properly to identify the police officers who have used deadly force once they have them on good sourcing.
Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in St. Petersburg, Fla., said news organizations should name key players in newsworthy events.
It’s long been part of the job that police officers have had to fire their weapons while on duty, he said. “Most often, they do that responsibly,” Clark said. “In some cases, they do it irresponsibility or criminally. And in other cases, there are gray areas.”
“I think what’s different now is that the stakes have been raised in the past year — that a police shooting, especially when the person who is shot is African-American, has become part of a much larger story in America about race, and about justice and equality. In a sense, the news of these shootings has a higher news value than it has in the past.”
What that means, Clark said, is “all of the persons who are named in the story are more vulnerable than they have been in the past.”
“The person who is shot, their lives and activities and actions, will come under much greater scrutiny. And the police officers will be scrutinized not just in a formal way, but in a very, very heated environment where there may be protests.” That can include, Clark said, “people who may want to reach out against him in some way.”
“But I believe that the appropriate action for the news organization is to name the key figures and the stakeholders,” Clark said. How the story is played in the paper, including whether the officer is pictured, how the story is sensationalized, “are subject to the good judgment of the editors.”
Likewise, a former dean at Columbia University School Graduate School Journalism said the standard journalistic practice is to name people in the news — and that should apply to police shootings, he said.
“I would come down on the side of naming the officer,” Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus at Columbia, wrote in an email. “Using real names is a general journalistic convention, and it seems off in these cases if one side gets named and the other gets protected.”
If a newspaper withholds the name of officer who shot someone, Lemann said, it “comes across, intentionally or not, as the paper’s being on the police’s side.”
Myers, for his part, has provided “limited backgrounds” into the three officers at the scene that day — the narcotics detective who fired the three shots, as well as a canine officer and police sergeant.
The shooter is a detective with eight years’ experience and was involved in one prior police shooting. The canine officer has 10 years on the force and no prior shootings. The sergeant has nine years with the force and no prior shootings.
Copyright 2015 the Daily Press