“What I Did After Police Killed My Son”: The Argument for Independent Review Commissions

Politico has
a powerful piece by Michael Bell, a retired Lt. Commander in
the Air Force, whose son was shot and killed by Wisconsin police
while handcuffed. Bell pushed to bring mandatory outside reviews
into the system:

It took six years to get our wrongful death lawsuit settled, and
my family received $1.75 million. But I wasn’t satisfied by a long
shot. I used my entire portion of that money and much more of my
own to continue a campaign for more police accountability. I wanted
to change things for everyone else, so no one else would ever have
to go through what I did. We did our research: In 129 years since
police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin,
we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an
inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.
There was one shooting we found, in 2005,  that was ruled
justified by the department and an inquest, but additional
evidence provided by citizens caused the DA to charge the officer.
The city of Milwaukee settled with a confidentiality agreement and
the facts of that sealed. The officer involved committed
suicide.

The problem over many decades, in other words, was a near-total
lack of accountability for wrongdoing; and if police on duty
believe they can get away with almost anything, they will act
accordingly. As a military pilot, I knew that if law
professionals investigated police-related deaths like, say,
the way that the National Transportation Safety Board investigated
aviation mishaps, police-related deaths would be at an all time
low. 

In this case, Bell’s tenacity paid off in legislative
change:

In April of this year we passed a law that made Wisconsin the
first state in the nation to mandate at legislative level that
police-related deaths be reviewed by an outside agency. Ten days
after it went into effect in May, local police shot a man sleeping
on a park bench 15 times. It’s one of the first incidents to be
investigated under the new law.

Read the whole thing.

It’s easy to understand why law enforcement might be slow to
make common cause with this sort of review process, but just like

mandating the use of wearable body-cams, the end result will be
far better relationships with citizens and, in the end, many fewer
problems all around.

Back in 2011, I interviewed Radley Balko, then with
Reason and now with The Washington Post, about
police brutality. Ironically, he said, that the rise of cell phones
and other recording devices probably make it seem that the police
are more violent than ever when in fact there’s reason to believe
the opposite. That’s not an excuse for any instance of police
violating anybody’s rights, but it is a strong point in favor of
bringing in outside reviewers. If the cops are doing their jobs
properly and fairly, they will benefit greatly from having that
validated by independent observers.