Who should investigate police officers when they commit crimes?

This interesting NY Times op-ed says that it should be public defenders, not prosecutors. It’s pretty convincing:

After a police officer in South Bend, Ind., shot and killed Eric Jack Logan last month, contentious meetings between the public and Mayor Pete Buttigieg showed that there is often a serious lack of faith that allegations of police misconduct will be fairly investigated. We can fix this: Public defenders, not law enforcement officials, should be responsible for determining whether police misconduct occurred.

The skepticism about the way investigations are currently conducted makes sense: Police departments’ internal investigations are reliably lenient. The New York Police Department, for example, took nearly 2,500 reports of biased policing from residents since 2015 and found not a single one credible. Prosecutors and state police, the two other entities most likely to carry out an investigation of police misconduct, often decline to press charges even when video evidence seems to leave little doubt that an officer’s conduct has violated departmental policy.

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Not surprisingly, communities of color, who are disproportionately exposed to police violence and misconduct, have a much less favorable view of the police than the population overall, and little belief that misdeeds will be revealed or punished. In a 2017 Pew Research poll, 64 percent of Americans said they had generally warm feelings toward the police. But for black Americans it was just 30 percent. If mayors, police chiefs and legislatures are serious about instilling real faith in these communities, they should hand over full control of investigations to the one group of lawyers used to treating the police in an adversarial fashion, all of them experts in police rules and procedures: public defenders.

Unlike prosecutors, who often work hand-in-hand with the police to make a case for conviction, defenders are used to questioning the stories police officers tell. For example, in a case of mine many years ago, the prosecutor and his police witness seemed confident that their evidence was unassailable: Two officers had walked up to the car my client was sitting in, looked in the windows, and seen what looked like cocaine. What never occurred to them, although it was easy enough for me to find out, was that their walk from the police car to my client’s car took them from one city to another. When they arrived, they were out of their jurisdiction and had no authority to make an arrest. It seems minor, but it exemplifies the different approach that defenders must take to protect our clients’ interests — and the rigor we are accustomed to bringing to our investigation of everything the police say and do.

A good-thought provoking article. I wonder how the juvenile prison guard case would have turned out if the Federal Public Defender’s office was prosecuting instead of defending.