It was all too predictable. After months of local speculation about why the city of Inglewood wasn't releasing a report on the practices of its police department, a department that became infamous last year for fatally shooting four black and Latino men in four months, the city announced last week that we're all going to have to wait some more. A city spokesperson said that the report, which Inglewood hired an outside body to do well over a year ago, could violate attorney-client privilege and therefore had to stay under wraps for the time being. What sort of attorney-client privilege? No details. When would the report be released? "Eventually," said the city spokesperson.
Excuse me? Such vagueness reeks not just of incompetence, but arrogance. The whole point of the report was for Inglewood officials to demonstrate transparency, accountability and expediency in the wake of a string of highly controversial shootings by its police force last year--among its victims were a 20-year-old man sitting in a car at a drive-thru, a homeless man with a toy gun and a postal worker roused in the middle of the night by cops who had a wrong address (also a dog, Topaz, that happened to be in the line of fire of the 48 shots unloaded on the homeless guy--but at least the dog survived). Last year's constellation of shootings wasn't the first time Inglewood made national news for questionable police conduct, but it was certainly the most sensational, and with good reason. Faced with so much negative attention and palpable public anxiety about the next shooting, Inglewood city officials had little choice but to act; the council hired the county's Office of Independent Review to assess what exactly was going wrong and how to fix it.
That was just about a year ago. Rumor has it that the report was completed in the spring and the city council had been sitting on it ever since. Inglewood Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks told me last month that that's an exaggeration, but she didn't say what was holding things up. She did say that there's nothing in the OIR report that she doesn't know and no problem cited that she isn't currently working to correct.
Great--so why not let taxpayers in on what they're entitled to know, on what they need to know, on what they've paid to know? I suspect that the report, despite Seabrooks' confidence in the progress of the department, is still damning enough to have Inglewood civic leaders in a panic about lawsuits emanating from the families of the shooting victims, and any other victims of police misconduct in Inglewood over the last, oh, 20 years. Hence the vague but telling concern about breaching "attorney-client" privilege.
Not even the city Police Oversight Commission, a citizen watchdog group that the council put together in the wake of the shootings, has seen the report. Nor does the commission have the power to demand it--actually, it doesn't have the power to do a lot of things that it should be doing. Which makes me and a lot of other people in town wonder if the whole police reform push in Inglewood is mostly a charade.
But let's not forget that the IPD is also being investigated by the Justice Department, another development last year after the fourth-in-four-months shooting made Inglewood a national model for what police ought not to be doing, especially in neighborhoods of color. Whatever the misgivings of our city fathers, make no mistake that the truth will out--eventually.
This image was taken from flickr user kevindean. It was used under the Creative Commons license.
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Transparency is a joke if those being audited have the right to withhold the information. Surely they will find a way to sugar coat various infractions of character. But do we need the report to be published in full for us to know what will be in it? Is there more to know about how terrible the LAPD has been in the past?