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| NEWS > 18 November 2007 |
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Police refute corruption claim
The head of Public Relations Unit at the Botswana Police Service, Senior Superintendent Solomon Mantswe, says more than 99 percent of the Botswana police officers respect the rule of law as enshrined in our constitution.
Mantswe was responding to allegations of corruption and inhuman treatment levelled at police officers by Zimbabweans residing in Botswana behind the Grand Palm Hotel. The area is commonly known as Maipaahela Block V. Mantswe appealed to the Zimbabwean community not to be afraid to bring their grievances forward. "Our offices are open, from the commissioner d... Read more
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Providence Journal - Providenc
18 November 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Many police departments fall s
PROVIDENCE — Almost half of the police departments subject to a provision of the state’s anti-racial profiling law are violating it, according to a study by the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“A number of departments are in noncompliance with the clear terms of the statute,” ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown said last week.
He said the situation is “one piece of a much bigger picture” of the way police have responded to the three-year-old law, which was intended to end discriminatory enforcement of the traffic laws.
It contains a provision requiring that police departments with Web sites post their forms for filing complaints accusing officers of misconduct, along with the procedure the departments use to address the complaints. It’s intended to make it easier for people who think they are victims of police misconduct to file complaints.
Searching the Web, the ACLU said it found 32 Rhode Island police departments with operating Web sites, but only 17 of them had posted both the complaint form and their complaint procedures, as the law requires.
Col. Stephen McCartney, the Warwick police chief and vice president of the state Police Chiefs’ Association, said the chiefs haven’t met since the study came out last month, but that he hasn’t heard from any chiefs who felt wronged by it. His department’s own Web site had wanted complaints to be notarized, something the ACLU objected to, and McCartney said he removed that requirement.
“I would certainly encourage every police department to comply with the law,” McCartney said.
When the ACLU did its survey, it found that six police departments — Foster, Glocester, Richmond, South Kingstown, Tiverton and West Warwick — “completely ignore the statute” by posting neither document on their Web sites.
Last week, the Foster Police Department Web site had answers to the questions, “How can I get a burning permit?” and “Can I get a Foster PD shoulder patch?” (answers: from the state Department of Environmental Management, and yes, for $5) but not the complaint information. Foster Police Chief Robert E. Coyne Jr. said that was an oversight and “was certainly not intentional.” A search of the site yesterday showed a link to the information had been posted under the “Did you know?” category.
Until recently, the ACLU said, the Pawtucket Police Department told anybody who wanted to file a complaint about police conduct to sign a waiver granting the police access to their medical, employment, financial and credit records. The ACLU said it got a complaint about that from the Urban League, looked into it, and found that the Pawtucket police were asking complainants to “essentially waive their entire right to privacy.”
Pawtucket Police Chief George L Kelley III said his department did ask for access to all that information, but that it was a mistake. For a year or more, the chief said, the department mistakenly sent a form intended for background checks for would-be police officers to people who wanted to file complaints alleging police misconduct. He said that has been stopped.
Of the departments that have posted the forms and policies, Brown said, only 11 did not require complainants to submit “unnecessary and potentially intrusive information,” such as their Social Security numbers. They were the Bristol, Lincoln, Middletown, Narragansett, North Kingstown, North Providence, Providence, Scituate, Smithfield and Woonsocket departments and the state police.
Four departments, Barrington, Coventry, Jamestown and Portsmouth, asked for complainants’ Social Security numbers, which the ACLU said are “completely superfluous to the matter of police misconduct,” and suggest that the police are more interested in investigating complainants than in investigating alleged police misconduct.
Brown said there are more serious problems with the police response to the racial profiling issue. Referring to the pair of studies showing that Rhode Island police stop and search minority group members more often than whites, he said, “Police departments have for the most part failed to make use of the reams of data they have on their traffic stop practices.”
McCartney, however, said the police chiefs are having constructive talks with the Civil Rights Roundtable, a coalition of groups that pressed successfully for the anti-racial profiling legislation.
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