You Know What Gets Me About This Whole Mess?

[Editorial]

It is that other officers must have known what was going on but they didn’t cross the Blue Line.

Thousands of fake traffic tickets recorded by CT state police to be formally reviewed

Connecticut Public Radio

By Matt Dwyer, Patrick Skahill

July 24, 2023

Thousands of fake traffic tickets recorded by Connecticut state police will now be the subject of an independent review, state officials announced Monday.

A recent audit found hundreds of Connecticut state police troopers falsified information on at least 26,000 traffic stops from 2014 to 2021, skewing reports on the race and ethnicity of pulled-over motorists.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, said the law firm Finn Dixon and Herling will interview state troopers and other people as part of their review into why the erroneous records were created.

The effort will be led by Deirdre Daly, Connecticut's former U.S. attorney.

The leader of the Connecticut state police said in a statement Monday he has ordered troopers to cooperate with the investigation.

"I have issued an order today to all state troopers instructing them to cooperate with the investigation and come forth with relevant information," Connecticut State Police Colonel Stavros Mellekas said. "The Connecticut State Police takes this matter very seriously and we have already instituted several reforms based on the recently released audit. We look forward to continuing that work. We welcome this investigation and will cooperate fully."

I certainly hope so since they are law enforcement officers.

POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY LAW IS FIRST STEP FOR CHANGE

ACLU Connecticut

December 15, 2020

[…]

Police Accountability,” a report focused on how pieces of municipal and state police contracts shield police employees from meaningful discipline when they harm people, lock towns into guaranteed year-over-year investments in policing, prevent transparency and accountability for police overall, and at times conflict with state laws. The report also recommended actions for municipal and state policymakers, including for the state legislature to end a state police contract provision that conflicted with freedom of information laws.

As the legislature came in for a special short summer session in July, the message from people across our state was clear: enough was enough. Faced with disinformation and thinly veiled aggression spread by police unions, the ACLU of Connecticut and advocates together pushed the legislature to take action for meaningful police accountability. More than 1,200 ACLU of Connecticut supporters emailed their legislators to tell them to act.

As a result of this advocacy and a courageous effort from the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican caucus, the legislature passed a first step bill that includes: 1) ending stop-and frisk, the unconstitutional practice that feeds on and perpetuates systemic racism in policing; 2) ensuring police union contracts can no longer supersede open records laws, 3) expanding and centralizing statewide collection of police use of force information; 4) creating an office of Inspector General to investigate and prosecute police who harm and kill Connecticut residents; and 5) requiring police officers to report excessive use of force used by a fellow officer.

Number 5 is my emphasis… when I was a student intern for my MSW I was required by law to be a mandatory reporter, if I see something I have to say something or I could be guilty of a crime.

Why did that law come about? It was because social workers were not reporting on possible child abuse so they passed a law forcing them to report it.

Why did PA20-1 AN ACT CONCERNING POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY get passed? Simply because the police were not reporting on other officers who broke the law. Period. They were not reporting other officers when they saw them plant evidence, when they used excessive force, etc. etc. etc.

The Republican candidate for governor at the time said according to the Patch,

Stefanowski mainly focused on the issue of qualified immunity during a news conference, and said the change has made it harder for police departments to recruit candidates, according to the CT Mirror.

Stop and think for a minute. They say it is harder to get recruits because of the mandatory “duty to intervene” — that they must stop an officer if they are using excessive force and they most report another officer if they are doing something illegal like planting evidence. In other words they think that they might use excessive force or do something illegal… Um do we want police officers who think they might do those thing?

Now we get to the fake tickets. The Connecticut PBS article says,

The audit was spurred by a Hearst Connecticut Media report last year that said four state troopers in an eastern Connecticut barracks intentionally created hundreds of bogus traffic stop tickets to boost their productivity numbers. After internal affairs investigations, one trooper was suspended for 10 days, another was suspended for two days and the other two retired before the probe was completed.

1. This was illegal but no other police officers reported them.

2. This was what the new law was designed to stop, evidently the other officers ignored the law.

3. The state police officers felt that the Blue Line was more important than the laws of this state.

[/Editorial]