Deadline Detroit | After Deadline Detroit's bad cops investigation, city started hiding most officer discipline

Deadline Detroit | After Deadline Detroit's bad cops investigation, city started hiding most officer discipline - Violet Ikonomova

"In early May, a week after we published a lengthy investigation on the Detroit Police Department's struggle to hold bad cops to account, Chief James White touted his department for its transparency, noting it provided the thousands of pages of disciplinary records that underpinned our review.

• Behind the scenes, however, the city was working to shield such records from the public. 
• That same month, under the direction of a new top lawyer, Conrad Mallett, it implemented a policy that prevents the release of officer disciplinary records older than four years.

Such records helped us uncover the department's habit of letting problem officers off the hook for misconduct. 

• Documents more than four years old told us, for example, that an officer who initiated a bad chase that killed two kids and wounded three more in 2015 had been involved in another deadly chase that violated policy just six months prior. 
• The department, the records showed, did not intervene significantly either time — neither with suspension, nor with retraining...