Lukasz Palka
Police records delay
On April 4, the Madison Police Department’s Professional Standards and Internal Affairs Unit emailed its quarterly disciplinary summary to dozens of local journalists and news outlets. It showed that, during the first three months of this year, there was just one occasion in which a Madison police officer was sanctioned for breaking the rules.
The case, #2022PSIA-0161, was an internal complaint, originating from within the department, not a member of the public. It appears to be a minor matter, concerning a sergeant who “sent an unprofessional email to command staff,” drawing a one-day suspension.
Wait a minute. Who was the sergeant? What was said in this email? Was it a paid or unpaid suspension? Lt. Angela Kamoske, who heads the department’s Professional Standards and Internal Affairs Unit, told me this all must come “through our records process. I am not at liberty to release any other information.”
When I asked for more information on the case, including the underlying complaint and any record explaining how things turned out, the police department’s records custodian, Julie Laundrie, replied: “I am currently at 14 months for personnel requests to receive [a] reply because of the volume and complexity of requests in the queue of this type. We have recently hired someone to help with these requests, but at this time that is the timeline I have for reply on this. Reach out if you have any questions.”
I did and I do, starting with, how is this even legal?
Like all state and local public entities in Wisconsin, the police department is statutorily required to provide requested records “as soon as practicable and without delay.” While the law is imprecise, I believe a 14-month wait for a few pages about the only disciplinary case in the entire first quarter of 2023 is, however you slice it, delay.
Besides these bare-bones quarterly reports, the Professional Standards and Internal Affairs Unit releases lists of employee recognitions. The latest one fills 15 single-spaced pages with 131 commendations for things like “A community member sent an email to thank an officer for assisting them with a wrongly parked vehicle” and “The initiative displayed by an officer throughout the past year has been fantastic.”
Perhaps the enormous amount of time it must take to produce this document would be better spent responding to records requests in a timely fashion, as the law requires.
Laundrie, in our email exchange, explained that disciplinary cases are considered personnel records, which “much like a request for a homicide report are large requests” that take longer to handle. She said they are processed separately, at the rate of around one per month.
Since January 2016, according to the summaries posted online, the police department has opened disciplinary cases against 64 officers and 25 civilian employees; all but 12 were internal complaints. At least 32 led to letters of reprimand and 33 to suspensions. Two individuals were terminated; 12 resigned and one retired to avoid being disciplined. Offenses ranged from being late to work to “intimidating and harassing coworkers,” to accidental gun discharge, to getting caught having sex in a police vehicle (one of the only cases that has received public attention). Printouts of the summaries total 33 pages.
During this same multi-year period, the office filled 674 pages with 3,839 employee recognitions. A note at the top of each quarterly report advises that “further information on any of these specific examples” is just a phone call away.
To get a broader picture, I’ve asked the police department for basic records on the seven cases in 2022 in which discipline was imposed, as well as all complaints received during the past quarter, whether or not they lead to discipline. Laundrie said these requests also had an estimated wait time of 14 months, meaning June 2024, although efforts are being made to speed things up.
Laundrie invited me on a tour of the department’s records operation; I took her up on it. On April 21, Laundrie, a civilian employee who has held the job since 2018, showed me around the command offices. I got to see what an enormous amount of records, of all kinds, that it keeps, some in a locked vault, some on microfilm, some in folders on shelves. I learned the office last year handled requests for 32,000 records, all requiring individual attention. Laundrie, likeable and professional, says she is doing all she can to handle records requests more promptly: “We realize it’s a challenge and we’re trying to fix it.”
And yet, I still must protest that it should take more than a year to process — that is, to suppress from public view — records regarding disciplinary actions against police officers and civilian staff. It is contrary to the records law, and it foments distrust between the department and the people it serves.
Twice in the 1990s, I took part in lawsuits brought by Isthmus, the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times against the Madison Police Department over records of complaints against cops. In 1995, Judge Sarah O’Brien resoundingly affirmed our right to obtain complaints filed by members of the public, writing, “In order to minimize abuses of police power, society needs to have a great deal of scrutiny and oversight into any allegations of police misconduct.”
In a second lawsuit, we won the right to obtain internal complaints, those brought by other officers, although the judge, Mark Frankel, allowed for the redaction of most names. The taxpayers ended up having to reimburse the papers for the tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs they incurred fighting the police department’s illegal denials. But at least it was established that these records were public, presumptively available for the asking.
Isthmus also sued the police department, successfully, in 2018, over its failure to provide requested records for more than a year. The city apologized and repaid the paper’s legal fees and court costs.
Fast-forward to present, when the public is told that if it wants to know more than the bare summaries the Madison Police Department provides regarding allegations of police misconduct, it needs to get into a line that stretches back 14 months. The right of the public to timely access to this information is being violated.
Perhaps there are cases in which the department’s Professional Standards and Internal Affairs Unit has minimized or otherwise mishandled serious misbehavior. Maybe there are times it’s been too tough. Quite likely, it does a generally good job of investigating complaints and meting out discipline.
But the fact of the matter is we just don’t know. And that is just not right.
Bill Lueders, Isthmus news editor from 1986 to 2011 and the former editor of The Progressive, is a writer in Madison and president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.
