“A police officer who was hired by the city of Snoqualmie despite a history of excessive force has been placed on administrative leave and is under investigation by the department, according to city officials.”
That cop was hired by Snoqualmie P.D. despite a rap sheet that reads like bad fiction:
- He was fired from Tukwila P.D. after the city paid $425,000 of settlements for excessive use of force
- He allegedly consorted with a violent anti-drug gang
- He allegedly targeted African-American men for violent arrest
- Other Tukwila cops didn’t want to work with him
- He posted lyrics celebrating police brutality
- He kept a “trophy binder” of his use-of-force cases in his locker
A Tukwila police commander said he “can’t see how any department would hire him” knowing of his record at Tukwila, where his internal-affairs file is over 1,000 pages long. Read the Seattle Times story here.
But police departments can and do hire the bad cops kicked out of other law enforcement jobs. The reason they do is because it saves training costs, and they get a street-ready cop immediately, instead of having to wait for a recruit to complete the police academy. And because nobody stops them from hiring cops who’ve proven they’re unfit for police work.
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African-American boy, was shot dead while playing in a public park with a toy gun by a rookie Cleveland cop who had been fired by a neighboring police agency for failing firearms training and general unsuitability. After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ripped the cover off municipal corruption in St. Louis County, it was revealed that many of the dozens of small cities in that county — each with its own police department — shuffled troubled cops between them in a macabre game of musical chairs.
I don’t have much respect for our state’s occupational licensing agencies. They’re mostly window dressing. Here in Washington, for example, a medical doctor almost has to be a serial killer to lose his M.D. license. But if these licensing agencies could somehow be made to actually do their jobs, there would be a possible solution to the bad cop / musical chairs problem. And that is to require a state-issued license to be a cop — and revoke that license for repeated or egregious violations of professional standards. This would prevent other police agencies from hiring the castoffs and rejects.
There’s so much police abuse in this country — too much of it racially motivated — that America faces a policing crisis. The very legitimacy of law enforcement is on the line. There clearly are people wearing badges who should not be working our streets. Fundamental reforms are needed in how police officers are recruited, trained, supervised, and disciplined. Among those needed reforms, the revolving door for bad cops must be locked shut, so that cops fired for cause can’t get back into the profession by walking across the street to another department’s personnel office.