By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
As a police officer in a small
Oregon town in 2004, Sean Sullivan was caught kissing a 10-year-old girl on the
mouth.
Mr. Sullivan’s sentence barred
him from taking another job as a police officer.
But three months later, in August
2005, Mr. Sullivan was hired, after a cursory check, not just as a police
officer on another force but as the police chief. As the head of the department
in Cedar Vale, Kan., according to court records and law enforcement officials,
he was again investigated for a suspected sexual relationship with a girl and
eventually convicted on charges that included burglary and criminal conspiracy.
“It was very irritating because
he should never have been a police officer,” said Larry Markle, the prosecutor
for Montgomery and Chautauqua counties in Kansas.
Mr. Sullivan, 44, is now in
prison in Washington State on other charges, including identity theft and
possession of methamphetamine. It is unclear how far-reaching such problems may
be, but some experts say thousands of law enforcement officers may have drifted
from police department to police department even after having been fired,
forced to resign or convicted of a crime.
Yet there is no comprehensive,
national system for weeding out problem officers. If there were, such hires
would not happen, criminologists and law enforcement officials say.
Officers, sometimes hired with
only the most perfunctory of background examinations — as Kansas officials said
was the case with Mr. Sullivan — and frequently without even having their
fingerprints checked, often end up in new trouble, according to a review of
court documents, personnel records and interviews with former colleagues and
other law enforcement officials.
As fatal police shootings of
unarmed African-American men and sometimes violent protests have roiled the
nation, the question of how best to remove the worst police officers has been
at the core of reform attempts.
But a lack of coordination among
law enforcement agencies, opposition from police executives and unions, and an
absence of federal guidance have meant that in many cases police departments do
not know the background of prospective officers if they fail to disclose a
troubled work history.
Among the officers, sometimes called
“gypsy cops,” who have found jobs even after exhibiting signs that they might
be ill suited for police work is Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland officer who
fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.
Before he was hired in Cleveland,
Officer Loehmann had resigned from a suburban police force not long after a
supervisor recommended that he be fired for, among other things, an inability
to follow instructions. But Cleveland officials never checked his personnel
file.
Officer Loehmann, who was not
indicted, remains on the Cleveland force. He is on desk duty pending the result
of an administrative review, Sgt. Jennifer Ciaccia, a police spokeswoman, said.
While serving as a St. Louis
officer, Eddie Boyd III pistol-whipped a 12-year-old girl in the face in 2006,
and in 2007 struck a child in the face with his gun or handcuffs before
falsifying a police report, according toMissouri Department of Public Safety
records.
Though Officer Boyd subsequently
resigned, he was soon hired by the police department in nearby St. Ann, Mo.,
before he found a job with the troubled force in Ferguson, Mo., where Michael
Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American, was fatally shot by a white
officer in 2014.
Officer Boyd is being sued by a
woman in Ferguson who said he arrested her after she asked for his name at the
scene of a traffic accident. He declined an interview request.
The Ferguson police declined to
comment about him, but said in a statement that their applicants “undergo
extensive investigation before final hiring decisions are made, which includes,
but is not limited to, a psychological examination, investigation of an
applicant’s prior work history, consultation with applicant’s previous
employers and a criminal background check.”
Across the state, the Kansas City
police fired Kevin Schnell in 2008 for failing to get medical aid for a
pregnant woman after arresting her during a traffic stop. The baby was
delivered, but died a few hours later.
Officer Schnell has since been
hired by two other Missouri police departments, including his current employer
in Independence. Officer Schnell and the Independence police declined to
comment.
Criminologists and police
officials said smaller departments and those that lack sufficient funding or
are understaffed are most likely to hire applicants with problematic pasts if
they have completed state-mandated training, which allows departments to avoid
the cost of sending them to the police academy. Such officers can start work
almost immediately, usually at a modest salary.
But police officials say most
departments perform reasonably well in discovering when officers have histories
of misconduct.
In addition to checking
applicants’ work and criminal histories, and having a psychologist interview
them, departments like those in Seattleand Austin, Tex., check credit
histories. The Houston and Phoenixpolice departments are among those that
administer polygraph tests.
Roger Goldman, an emeritus law
professor at St. Louis University and an authority on police licensing laws,
said that using the National Practitioner Data Bank for physicians as a model,
the government must establish a database of officers who have criminal
convictions, have been fired or forced to resign, have had their law
enforcement licenses revoked, or have been named in a judgment or settlement
involving misconduct.
“After Ferguson and the other
stuff that’s happened, if we can’t get this done now, when are we going to get
it done?” he said.
Last year, in a report by
President Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing, law enforcement
officials and others recommended that the Justice Department establish a
database in partnership with theInternational Association of Directors of Law
Enforcement Standards and Training, which manages a database of officers who
have been stripped of their police powers. There are some 21,000 names on the
list, but Mike Becar, the group’s executive director, said his organization
lacked the resources to do a thorough job.
“It’s all we can do to keep the
database up,” he said.
The Justice Department, which
gave the association about $200,000 to start the database in 2009, no longer
funds it. The department declined to explain why it had dropped its support,
but a spokesman said the goal was “ensuring that our nation’s law enforcement
agencies have the necessary resources to identify the best qualified candidates
to protect and serve communities.”
Law enforcement groups advocating
reforms say an effective database would go a long way toward ensuring that
unfit officers are not given multiple chances.
“Every chief wants as much
information as possible about potential hires before making a hiring decision,
and hiring one wrong person can undo a lot of an agency’s prior good work,”
said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research
Forum, a policy group.
He said that while his group was
investigating hiring practices in St. Louis County, Mo., after Mr. Brown’s
death, it found that officers facing severe discipline and possible termination
in many agencies were routinely allowed to resign to avoid a record of having
been fired.
“They could then join another
area department,” Mr. Wexler said.
Mr. Sullivan, who became the
police chief in Cedar Vale, Kan., after being convicted on a harassment charge
for kissing a 10-year-old girl, had been the second-highest-ranking officer in
Coquille, Ore., before he was forced to resign in November 2004.
While prosecutors suggested that
he had been “grooming” the girl for a sexual relationship, he avoided a jail
sentence.
But in August 2005, not long
after an Oregon judge barred Mr. Sullivan from working as a police officer, the
Cedar Vale Police Department hired him. Mr. Sullivan had not told anyone about
his past, local officials said. City officials involved in his hiring no longer
work for Cedar Vale.
Prosecutors in Kansas
investigated a relationship between Mr. Sullivan and a 13- or 14-year-old girl,
but the girl refused to cooperate and the investigation was dropped, Mr.
Markle, the Kansas prosecutor, said. Mr. Sullivan did not respond to a letter
seeking comment.
Eventually, officials checked the
police decertification database and found Mr. Sullivan’s Oregon conviction and
the order barring him from police work.
Wayne Cline, Cedar Vale’s current
police chief, never met Mr. Sullivan, but said he is still talked about around
town.
“Everybody was surprised and
would say, ‘He was such a nice guy,’ and I would think, ‘Yeah, he’s a con man.
They’re like that.’”
