A week ago, during a sleepy after-midnight session of the North Carolina General Assembly, a largely technical bill passed almost unanimously in both chambers and was sent to the governor’s desk. However, lurking in the weeds of the bill, one provision would cut off an important source of public information about deaths that occur in police custody, including incidents like the killing of George Floyd. Cooper has since vetoed the bill, but it will likely be brought up again in the legislature, hopefully without this provision.
During a time when many Americans have lost faith in the ability of police departments to safeguard the health of those in custody and report abuses by law enforcement, this bill is a step in the wrong direction.
When a death occurs in police custody, a county medical examiner is required to investigate the death, including obtaining records from police about the circumstances surrounding the death. Under current law, any records obtained this way become public records, even if they had previously been confidential.
The bill in question mostly makes minor changes to the laws governing the NC Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees medical examiners. One of these changes would maintain the confidentiality status of records obtained during death investigations. Anything public would stay public while anything confidential would stay confidential once handed over, thus closing this public information loophole.
Although this seems like a fairly straightforward correction, in practice, making this change right now is horribly tone deaf and only further harms the public’s expectation that police will be held accountable for their actions.
Confidentiality in investigations is important. Evidence for a crime can often point to multiple suspects, and it’s unfair to spoil an innocent person’s reputation based on limited information. Additionally, shielding information from the public eye allows investigators to better persuade people to give up information that can be crucial to a case.
However, these valuable considerations don’t have nearly as much weight in the circumstance of a death in police custody. For one, public opinion of the police is already hurting, with a clear majority of Americans agreeing that police unfairly target minorities and that protesters are justified in their anger, according to polling from early June. Hiding information looks much worse than any information the agency could possibly produce.
Second, the medical examiner already has the power to subpoena documents from police regardless of whether they want to hand them over, and being a public agency, law enforcement’s records should already be complete and well-organized. Persuasion shouldn’t be necessary in these cases.
The office of the medical examiner, which originally requested this change, stated that it would ease records exchange between police and their office, as police are evidently reluctant to share information with them under the current statute, which can delay investigations. But providing less transparency with law enforcement is not the way to address these slowdowns.
One of the key issues driving protests is that people don’t trust the police to act on information that indicates a problem with police behavior — a fundamentally reasonable concern about an agency that is in charge of investigating itself. Closing a loophole which allows the press to gain more information about these deaths needlessly eliminates one of the few ways the public has to keep law enforcement accountable to.
When someone dies in the hands of police, the public has a right to know why that happened, whether it was just a fluke or whether there was negligence or active harm on the part of the officers. Preserving the medical examination loophole and providing other transparency measures are what we need right now, not attempts to further shield police behavior from the public eye.
