Respect must be earned - that includes the police

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

This letter appeared in the Cincinnati Post (Cincinnati, Ohio) on 14 May 2001.

This item may be cited as M. R. Franks, Letter to the Editor: Respect must be earned - that includes the police, Cincinnati Post, May 14, 2001, at 13A.

Dear Editor:

Will some high police official please be honest enough to stand up and say: "Declining public respect for law and order is our fault. By our conduct we have destroyed the respect Americans once had for law and for law enforcement.

"We've looked the other way while many of our colleagues lied to get convictions, and we've concealed evidence favorable to those we've accused. When evidence of miscarriage of justice came to light, we did everything we could to avoid correcting our mistakes. We prevailed upon our collaborators, the prosecutors, to resist post-conviction DNA testing - even though the only possible effect of such refusal is to keep the innocent incarcerated.

"We made it a point to blindly support our cronies - no matter how abusive, bullying or violent some of them may have been. And we just can't understand why the people no longer hold the police in high esteem or why crime is out of control."

The answer, of course, is that respect must be earned. Public respect for law enforcement - and for the law itself - will only return the day the police start policing and prosecuting their own miscreants as diligently as they police and prosecute everyone else.

What is needed now is more than just a civilian police review board - it is a board elected by the residents of Cincinnati, not an appointed body of somebody's cronies or of retired police officers. This board must have the power to hire investigators, and those investigators need the power to inspect police files.

The board also needs its own prosecutor, with the right to file criminal charges against law enforcement personnel. The board needs its own prosecutor because county and city prosecutors too often are in bed with the police and all too willing to whitewash anything the police department's own internal affairs unit forgot to properly whitewash.

The Ohio legislature needs to empower this board's investigators to inspect police and prosecutorial files. It needs to be made a crime for any police officer, prosecutor or police clerk to delay or refuse the board's investigators their absolute right to peruse and copy police files.

The board's prosecutor should answer only to the board itself. His job should be to prosecute those guilty not only of police brutality, but also of police perjury, falsification of evidence, concealment of evidence showing innocence, and subornation (urging others to commit perjury - mainly hardened criminals rewarded with their freedom for claiming that their cellmate has "confessed" to some crime).

Establish such a board, Cincinnati, and the Queen City will lead the nation back to law and order that all can and will respect.

M. R. Franks
Associate Professor of Law
Southern University
Baton Rouge, La.

Click here to return to Maurice Franks's Writings