How Many Warrants Issued In Your County?     

For the past three weeks, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been taking testimony on S. 138, a bill that would require the state's courts to track search warrants. The bill came about following press stories that revealed there's no place you can go to find out how many warrants are issued by the state's judges. You also can't find out how many warrants are actually executed and "returned." ("Returned" means the filing of a report by the police of what was searched and a listing of any property seized.)

State court officials were clearly caught off-guard by the lack of warrant tracking by the various courts around the state. The officials quickly issued an administrative order mandating tracking.

In the process of providing information to the committee, though, the judiciary submitted a county-by-county breakdown of warrants issued in 2011 (confirming that the courts actually do record how many warrants are issued, and how many are returned; there just isn't a statewide system for pulling all the data together.)

The county breakdowns prompted numerous questions from committee members. While the numbers of applications for search warrants varied in some predictable patterns (more warrants are sought in more populous counties, for example), other variations were hard to explain.

Most notable was the variation among counties in the proportion of warrants issued and warrants actually executed and returned. In some counties, fewer than half were returned -- suggesting police in those counties get warrants and then never use them.

It could be police use the warrants as a threat, some committee members surmised. "Unless you turn over the gun I know you have, I'm going to serve you with a warrant and turn your house upside down until I find it," police might say to a suspect.

It could also be that police are executing the warrants but are never returning them to the court because nothing was found. Or, police may execute the warrants and never return them -- whether something was found or not.

A tracking system would shed much-needed light in this area of police investigations. The committee agrees on that. The question seems to be whether the legislature has to mandate it, or whether the courts will carry through and work on their own to set up a tracking system.

A second part of S. 138 is more controversial. It would allow the sealing of warrants for "just cause." This could lead to more warrant information kept secret. Establishing a "just cause" standard also conflicts with Supreme Court decisions that set the conditions for nondisclosure of warrant information. The ACLU, and the state Attorney General's Office as well, oppose this provision.

How many search warrants in your county?

• Link to a county-by-county breakdown of search warrants issued and returned. 
• Link to testimony given by the ACLU-VT to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning S. 138, the search warrant tracking bill. 

The ACLU has argued for many years that Vermont police should be licensed, as are professionals from doctors to plumbers, teachers to tattoo artists, and 40 other professions.

This year -- prompted by reports of alleged police misconduct and the use of excessive force -- Sen. Dick McCormack introduced S.248, a comprehensive police licensing bill.

McCormack hails from Windsor County, which includes the town of Hartford. Several recent cases there have caused "a loss of public confidence" regarding police, he told the Senate Government Operations Committee when he presented his bill. Having the Attorney General's Office investigating alleged abuses doesn't help. "You have a cop regulating a cop, so where's the accountability?" he said.

"It's a cornerstone of our society," he said, "that the citizens fear government, and therefore we need checks on government's authority. The police have an especially impressive kind of power. They have the power to carry weapons, use physical force, to coerce, to restrain, to be violent with people in extreme circumstances to the extent even of killing them. It is a power that needs to be adequately checked and regulated."

"Checks are empowering to those held accountable," McCormack said, noting that some of the calls he gets about alleged police abuse "are from cops themselves, who say they are tired of bad cops tarnishing good cops."

Good cops, in other words, want professional regulation.

Legislative Council attorneys put a lot of work into McCormack's bill. It's 76 pages long and would restructure the organization of police in the state, creating a Board of Law Enforcement within the Secretary of State's Office of Professional Regulation.

The board would oversee the process by which someone is licensed to be a police officer. "Licensing" would replace "certification," the current means by which someone is deemed sufficiently trained to be a police officer after attending the Vermont Police Academy. ("Certification" would remain, but only to indicate specialized training in a specific area of law enforcement.)

Licenses would come up for renewal every two years; relicensing would, among other things, depend on meeting ongoing training requirements. The board would also have the power to "Investigate complaints and charges of alleged unauthorized practice, unprofessional conduct, or incompetency against any person and take proper action...."

Two weeks after McCormack's presentation, however, the 76-page bill had been reduced to a short letter to the Law Enforcement Advisory Board to review the issues raised by the bill. The LEAB, which is composed mainly of law enforcement officials from around the state, has been looking at police accountability and oversight, recognizes there is a problem, and has decided to make that topic a major board agenda item in 2012. LEAB members suggested that letting the LEAB look at the issues was the best way to start what is sure to be a long, complex process. The Government Operations Committee wants a report by Jan. 15, 2013.

People on the national and state level who work in the professional licensing area say successful licensing schemes need the support of those within the profession. Licensing cannot be imposed. That argues for the approach the committee decided to take.

On the other hand, it remains baffling that Vermont police, who have the most direct power to take away someone's personal liberties, remain outside an accepted professional regulation system.

Indeed, minutes after the Government Operations Committee had decided to shelve the police licensing bill, the committee took up another bill, S. 87, that would keep internal police investigation records secret. This is a bill law enforcement officials have introduced in each of the past five legislative sessions and failed to gain passage.

One would think that after all the stories over the past several years about "bad" cops, the profession would want to publicize the ways it weeds them out and protects the good work done by the great majority of Vermont police officers. Continuing to insist on secret investigations at this time is a self-inflicted wound that's hard to fathom.

More testimony on S. 87 will be taken on Thursday. The ACLU will explain to the committee why we oppose the bill.

Link to a Burlington Free Press editorial regarding why internal police investigation records shouldn't be secret. 

 
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