Revealing Bad Cops. John Kelly talks to Armstrong & Getty

it want to pop up? I participate in McDonald's. So we've talked to a lot of cops over the years doing this show, and even at a coped panel once, and they all seem to agree. But I forget the number. What percentage of cops did these cops tell us shouldn't be cops? Cops told us thought it was a quarter, yeah, which is extraordinary. And we've gotten that same number from quite a few cops. So a bunch of different cops have told us about a quarter of a cops shouldn't

be cops, which is pretty troubling. Right. And John Kelly and his team at the USA today have been digging from quite some time into police records around the country. They found eighty five cops have been investigated from misconduct. Uh and and John joins us now to discuss Hello, John, how are you, sir? I'm doing great, Good morning guys. Excellent. This is this is quite a project. How long did

it take? We've been We started gathering records almost two years ago, um, and and there were some records that we had that we're sort of foundational, Uh, records we've already had in place. So I mean it's been about two years, right, So good cops are a blessing to society, and thank God for them. Uh, bad cops and good cops will tell you this need to go. And I think we're all aware that there are you know, episodes

of police excessive force and that sort of thing. That the aspect of this that really interests us mostly is you know, what percentage of cops are bad cops? And and how easy is it for the public to find out about it? Well, so it's really difficult, um in a lot of places, even even though a lot of the records underlying the conduct of police officers would technically be public records. And yeah, and and but there are

roadblocks to getting them. You know, a typical you know, resident going down to the police station asking for this kind of thing is likely to encounter police agencies that would maybe not be forthcoming about whether the records exist, or run into a little bit of runaround, or be charged you know, dollar a page, fees to see the records, none of that experience with this on a large scale.

And so we can in our in our team of journalists you know, includes you know, people who are experts in those public records laws, and so we can work around that by being very direct with these agencies. You know, listen, you have to turn these records over under the law anyway. So we've been gathering those slowly and then and then in effect transforming them into data that allows us to do a lot of comparison and analysis. Um that gets to some of the questions you were asking about percentages.

Most notable numbers are results in your mind, John, So, I mean so far one of the more noticeable things to me, I mean, when I knew I knew that states de certified cops. You know that that that that that in really extreme cases, you know, a local police department will tell us state, hey, this guy's misconduct is so bad that or or the cops been convicted of a crime that you know, we want to make sure he can't be a cop somewhere else he or se um.

I expected when we started gathering those from the states, I guess maybe a little bit. I expected that the number of those could be, you know, ten thousand um. The idea that that there are more than thirty thousand and substantially more was surprising to me. People who a state government have had to take the extreme action of saying this person's misconduct is so serious that we can't we in good conscience can't allow them to continue being a law enforcement officer, and we want to make sure

that they're not one. Yeah, that that's interesting that that that many people were able to pass you know, the tests and the psychologist psychological tests and all that stuff and become cops and then did something so bad that they get banned. But then how many people don't get banned at that level, They get booted out of their own department, but then get to go to some other department and work there, right, And that's one of the

surprising things for us. So, so there are a couple of big holes in that system, and you guys are getting in on a you know some early info from a coming UH story in our investigation. But in California, for instance, which has more police officers than anyone, they don't don't have a process for de certifying police officers. UH.

Several other states also don't have a process. New York, which obviously has a lot of police officers, just started doing this, and so you have these states with huge populations of police officers who don't even have a process for for doing this, and so it's very easy then for officers to move around. But even in the places

where they're decertified. To give you an idea, you know, we wrote about this police chief who was got in trouble in Kansas City for basically chasing a guy off the highway and yanking him out of his car at gunpoint while he was off duty, and the state of Kansas de certified him over that issue. But he lived right on the river, so across the river in Missouri he was not decertified, and so he became a police

chief in two towns there time after that. UM And even more interesting than that, he was also the campus police campus safety chief at a college in Kansas, a state where the state government had deemed he was unfit to be running up to be a police officer. UM. So even within the same state where he was already be certified, um he was acting in that capacity at

a college. John Kelly, director of Data journalism for the USA, today on the line talking about their investigation in the police misconduct and record keeping in the rest of it. It's making me think, what's driving that? Lazy legislatures, legislatures or the thin blue line thing or what what is what is driving this? Well, one of the things that we see the phenomenon that we see happening um and we talked about in a story that we put out today that focuses on these police chiefs as a sort

of microcosm of the problem. We found three things. Uh. One, there are laws that legislators have passed asked that helped hide some of these records. There are prosecutors and judges when cops are convicted who will seal records or allow them to plead down from a felony to a misdemeanor on something that's a you know, a serious criminal act in because they know that the felony will automatically be

certified the officer. But a misdemeanor will not uh. And then more than that, the thing we ran into a lot was as we called these departments and said, do you know that officers so and so or Chief so and so had this incident in a neighboring town or in a different state. And we kept running into two things. No, we didn't know that he didn't tell us that, and you know, maybe they called for a reference and the

place that they called to didn't tell them that. Or in some cases we've had people that mayors and and and people that have hired these people into these jobs say we did. But I talked to him about it, and I felt like, you know, that he deserved a second chance. Uh. And then we had other We had a top that that came up in this that that was under indictment in Ohio and got a job as

a sheriff's deputy in Daytona Beach Luge County, Florida. And you know, we thought it was pretty telling and somewhat of a microcosm of the larger problem that they later deterred. They later found out he was under indictment and they had to fire him just a little while after hiring him, and the headline in the local paper was that the sheriff promised he would start googling his police candidates. There you go. John Kelly is the director of Dantage Journalism

for the USA Today. John, terrific job. I'm afraid we're out of time, but we'll have a lenk so folks can find their way to your piece and your team's pisa very easily. Well done, good to talk to you. Thanks, Thank you guys. And it sounds like there are follow ups to come. Maybe we can talk to him again.

But that's that is really troubling. And there's gotta be enough people out there that want to be cops, that would be good cops that you don't have to keep anybody around who's bad, but let them serve somewhere else well. And the good cops that I know don't like what the bad cops due to the reputation of their agency or police in general. So it's in everybody's interest to be better about this. Be fair, but be better about it.

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