Commentary

So What’s Wrong With Reviewing The Police?

By Bill Collins

Could mean danger,

But I stop;

Racial-profiled,

By a cop.

A reporter called yesterday from Tages Zeitung, a nationwide German newspaper. He wanted to know more about my friend Rit Goldstein, now a high-profile international fugitive hiding out in Sweden. I told him what I knew.

Rit, you see, has become quite an item in Europe. He fled Connecticut about three years ago, escaping what he perceived to be steady police harassment. In Sweden he applied for political asylum. His official reception there was about as cool as the January temperature, but the issue he raised has generated plenty of heat with the international press. Now his case is wending its way up to the European Court of Justice.

In short, Sweden’s equivalent of our INS denied Rit’s application, seeing no reason to even examine the facts. It said simply that since the United States is a democracy, there is no need of asylum — he can jolly well get his grievances redressed right here.

Britain recently took that same position in a similar case. The press, however, isn’t quite so sure. Editors read our papers, and are far from convinced that, despite being a nominal democracy, we can get our police grievances resolved in any meaningful way. This is especially true if we are black or dead.

Some European politicians and human rights leaders have also joined those skeptical editors in taking up Rit’s cause. That’s why his case is moving steadily up the judicial ladder, even though he remains concealed somewhere beneath a pile of reindeer hides.

So far the only medium in this country to give Rit’s case much ink has been The San Francisco Chronicle, though a couple of networks have chatted with him informally. At one time that was all very different, at least here in Connecticut. The Hartford Courant reported and editorialized favorably on his crusade to create a statewide civilian oversight board. But if that proposal was popular with journalists, it hardly endeared him to the police.

As it turns out, Rit was ahead of his time. Maybe way ahead. Despite the best efforts of those who have since picked up his torch, the General Assembly still won’t even direct a commission to study the idea of a statewide board, let alone create one. Lawmakers maintain a head-in-the-sand position in the face of a mounting array of cases which cry out for just such oversight.

The need for civilian review would seem self-evident to most of us. Surely it is clear to the European reporters. They rub their eyes in disbelief that we, unlike they, haven’t already adopted it. Surely also, the well-placed mistrust of police by Connecticut minorities shows no sign of abating without it.

But not all civilian oversight is created equal. Hartford, New York and other American cities have found it wanting. That was the genius of Rit’s scheme.

He proposed to protect oversight from harmful local politics by setting up the board statewide. That meant investigators for any incident could be drawn from other towns, making them freer to call things the way they saw them.

The fruit of that theory was recently plucked in New Milford. Citing new law, Chief State’s Attorney John Bailey appointed a prosecutor from Waterbury, not New Milford itself, to investigate a police shooting there. Free of local entanglements, that prosecutor, though hardly a civilian, charged the officer with murder. His unprecedented action was probably the single biggest boost to police-community relations in Connecticut history, but its lesson for civilian oversight has thus far gone unheeded at the Capitol.

Shivering in Sweden, Rit was warmed by the New Milford tale, but chilled by the slim prospects of Connecticut persevering with any real reform. Our continued air-freshening of smelly deeds by bad-egg cops bears him out. But it’s nice, at least, that he, and common sense, are getting a better hearing over there.

(Bill Collins, a former mayor of Norwalk, is a syndicated columnist.)