Oct 5, 2015 3 min read

Despite recent, well-reported incidents across the country of police using unnecessary or highly questionable lethal force, most people understand policing is an enormously difficult and demanding job, and the overwhelming majority of officers act within the parameters of the law.

It’s kind of like the old saw about airplane crashes – we don’t report on the thousands of planes that routinely glide to safe landings. We report on the landings that don’t go so well, simply because they’re so rare.

But there are some ways, particularly in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., Eric Garner in New York and Freddie Gray in Baltimore that police can help increase public trust: Minimize the use of overly-aggressive tactics and the use of cast-off equipment from the Pentagon designed for war zones; use body cameras; and hire officers who hail from, or look like, the communities they serve.

Police agencies should also offer complete transparency when it comes to investigating incidents when force is used.

According to a recent story by the nonprofit investigative news agency PublicSource, the Pennsylvania State Police could be doing better on that front.

The report by Jeffrey Benzing, which appeared in the Observer-Reporter Sept. 29, details how over the last seven years, Pennsylvania State Police troopers fired their weapons at least 120 times in the course of their jobs. Of those 120 shootings, only one was deemed improper by internal investigators, and details from the incident were kept under wraps, with state police insisting it is a personnel matter.

Though it’s possible that in 119 of 120 incidents, Pennsylvania State Police were correct in using their weapons, because a suspect they were facing immediately threatened the lives of officers or others within the vicinity, that’s a batting average that should raise eyebrows. We can’t really know for sure if those 119 incidents fell within the guidelines state troopers must follow because the state police provided only a meager amount of information about their investigations despite three open-records requests from PublicSource.

As the story noted, “The pristine record of the Pennsylvania State Police could well be a mark of strong training, rather than a record of poor judgment. But that is impossible to examine because there is so little information about the investigations.”

Within the state police, investigations are handled by troopers outside the chain of command of anyone whose actions are being scrutinized, and, occasionally by other police departments. But we, and others, believe these investigations would be better handled if they were carried out not by fellow troopers or officers, but by knowledgeable third parties who would not know any of the individuals involved and have no stake in the outcome.

“Asking an agency, any police agency, to police itself is fraught with peril,” Pittsburgh attorney Joel Sansone told PublicSource.

These investigators could very well find the troopers used their weapons in a way that was wholly and entirely justified, and consistent with their training. But the public would have more confidence in their conclusions if they came from entirely outside the realm of the Pennsylvania State Police.