Louisiana Sheriff’s Office Illegally Destroyed Misconduct Records For More Than A Decade
Shirking accountability is a standard law enforcement pattern and practice. Those enforcing laws often feel they're not obligated to follow the law.
This attitude is internalized in every sense of the word. It's not just blowing off outside oversight. The police refuse to police themselves, allowing good officers to go bad and bad officers to become even worse.
These endemic problems are even worse in sheriff's departments. Most sheriffs are elected, making them only answerable to voters. The cities and counties they ostensibly serve are hamstrung, unable to force these agencies to do much of anything because they technically operate alongside county governments, rather than working for them.
That's only part of the problem covered here in this report from ProPublica. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office (JPSO) in Louisiana has been destroying misconduct records for years. And it looks like little can be done to prevent it from continuing to do so for years to come.
Like all public agencies, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office is required by law to secure approval from the Louisiana State Archives, a division of the Secretary of State's Office, before destroying its public records. It also is required to secure approval for policies, or schedules, dictating how long public records are to be retained before they are eligible for disposal.
The sheriff's office failed to do either, records show. The only JPSO records retention policy on file with the state concerns body-worn and vehicle-mounted cameras. That was approved in November. The sheriff has not sought approval for retention policies concerning any other public record, including disciplinary files, according to the state archives.
As for securing permission to destroy public records, state archivist Catherine Newsome said, We do not have any disposal requests on file for JPSO." The state archives maintains records of disposal requests for 10 years.
If this particular sheriff's office seems slightly familiar, it's because we very recently covered its initiation of the arrest of an innocent man - one that originated with a blown call by the JPSO's facial recognition tech. The Sheriff's Office refused to provide any statement, comment, or explanation for this debacle. It will definitely be forced to say something in court, however, once the inevitable lawsuit is filed.
You'll note the phrase required by law" was used by ProPublica. That's an undeniable fact. But the JPSO doesn't appear to believe the law applies to it. It has never sent anything to the Secretary of State's office detailing its record destruction policies. It has also never secured permission to destroy misconduct records. And yet it has repeatedly done so for more than a decade, purging records every month as soon as they hit the JPSO's arbitrary three-year mark.
The state can fine the JPSO $500 for violating this law, but it appears to have never pulled the trigger on that option. It can also try to bring criminal charges against JPSO employees for illegally destroying records, but it hasn't attempted to do that either. Instead - in statements perhaps indicative of the obscene amount of power Louisiana sheriffs wield - the Secretary of State's office says it really can't do anything about the JPSO's ongoing destruction of misconduct records.
Certainly, the JPSO does not want misconduct records ending up in the public's hands. It has apparently done nothing to punish wrongdoers in its ranks and appears to be openly hostile to any outside attempts to police the office. And there's little the state or county can do. The state constitution creates a carve out for sheriffs, freeing them from government or civilian oversight. That has done nothing to provide Louisianans with better law enforcement officials. Here's what a former head of this agency said about being the sheriff of Jefferson Parish:
The late Sheriff Harry Lee, who served for 28 years until his death in 2007, called his job the closest thing there is to being a king in the U.S." Lee openly espoused racist views in public statements, once declaring: If there are some young Blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white area, they will be stopped." He eventually backed off the order, but he announced 20 years later that his solution to violent crime was only stopping Black people."
Nothing like spending 28 years under the thumb of a racist king. Whether or not his successor is as racist remains to be seen, but the current sheriff certainly believes he's the king of this 665 square mile parish. As ProPublica's previous report on the JPSO notes, the Office tends not to hold onto any paperwork that might be incriminating.
In Jefferson Parish, it's not clear that the department is tracking how its officers use force at all. In response to requests, the department provided only records of shootings. But the vast majority of use-of-force incidents - like Ferel's - do not involve shootings, experts say. However, in response to requests for records regarding those non-shooting incidents, the Sheriff's Office provided none, instead sending along files on a suicide and murders committed by civilians. The research organization Police Scorecard Project made a similar request for data on use-of-force incidents. The Sheriff's Office responded by saying those records don't exist.
It's much easier to deny you have a problem if you periodically destroy anything that might point to the existence of a problem. The dearth of complete reporting on use-of-force incidents handles the front end. The periodic erasure of misconduct records (whether or not complaints are sustained) takes care of the back end.
This has gotten the JPSO in trouble in lawsuits where it has either already destroyed records or continued to destroy records despite being ordered to halt destruction. But that trouble hasn't been anything the Sheriff can't shrug off. It has been on the receiving end of a few benchslaps, but no court has gone so far as to sanction the agency for destroying records it was obligated by litigation to retain.
If there's a solution to this problem, it's either voting the sheriff out of office (and hoping his replacement isn't as opposed to accountability as the current sheriff) or amending the state constitution to provide for more outside oversight of sheriff's agencies in the state. Neither seem all that likely to happen. Until someone in the state legislature is willing to go head-to-head with the multiple kings" dotting the Louisiana landscape, the JPSO and its counterparts will continue to answerable only to themselves.