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St. Louis Police Unit to Focus Specifically on Police Shootings

A full-time team of detectives charged with making sure use of deadly force is legal will scrutinize every St. Louis city officer who kills or wounds someone with a gun.

By Christine Byers 

Shootings here have always been investigated as possible crimes _ unless the person pulling the trigger was a police officer.

But now, a full-time team of detectives charged with making sure use of deadly force is legal will scrutinize every St. Louis city officer who kills or wounds someone with a gun. This is in addition to the usual Internal Affairs investigation.

It is the kind of policy seen in some large departments, but more commonly under court order or forced after civil rights complaints.

St. Louis' version has roots in a deadly force review three years ago by University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger, who made recommendations.

"There is nothing more important in our society than when a police officer exercises the ultimate power of his or her office, and it's vital that the investigations are as thorough and professional as possible," Klinger said. "If anybody wants to say it's not important to have the best form of investigation possible, all you need to do is walk across the border into Ferguson and there's your answer."

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson announced the Force Investigation Unit after nearly a year of negotiations with the police union. Its sergeant and four detectives got their office at the new Police Headquarters this month.

But the unit is not without doubters, especially after controversies over the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer, and the fatal shooting days later by St. Louis police of a man they said came at them with a knife.

Skeptics say honest accountability cannot be accomplished internally. "Any form of police just policing themselves is the problem," said Alderman Antonio French.

But Klinger said such doubts remain even among departments that have outside police agencies investigate their shootings.

"Who else besides a law enforcement officer should investigate? Nobody," Klinger said. "That's like saying we shouldn't have physicians reviewing, in a hospital setting, the adequacy of treatment."

Dotson has promised that every shooting will be reviewed by the circuit attorney's office for possible prosecution, and that the name of every officer involved in a shooting will be publicly revealed, once it is considered safe to do so.

The Homicide Division has reviewed an average of about a dozen police shootings annually for the past five years, fitting them in among an average of 115 murder investigations. Sometimes, nonfatal police shootings would be handled by district detectives.

Now, every time a police officer kills or injures someone with gunfire, the FIU will respond. It can investigate other cases as directed by the chief. It is not being asked to examine any cases retroactively.

The leader is Sgt. Roger Engelhardt, who was moved from homicide after about six years there. The FIU detectives include a white man, a white woman, a black man and a detective yet to be named. Engelhardt is white. All have more than 15 years of experience.

"We want to gather an unbiased set of facts so the investigation can't be attacked, and we want to do it as quickly as possible so the issues don't fester in the public," Engelhardt said.

He said using dedicated detectives means evidence will be processed more quickly, witnesses pinned down before they can disappear or waver, and the public will get answers in weeks to questions that used to take months or years.

Engelhardt said he has spent most of the past year traveling the country to learn how others investigate officer-involved shootings.

Engelhardt said that while policies and practices vary among departments, one thing seems to be universal: that an officer involved in a shooting make a statement of what happened. In Florida, attorneys can give the statements for the officers, he said.

Dotson said the FIU investigation material will be available to a Civilian Review Board once one is formed.

Previously, Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said, police shooting cases came to her office only if the department already felt that a crime had occurred.

Joyce could only recall one time the office prosecuted a city police officer for a killing on the job. In 1999, Officer Robert Dodson was charged with second-degree murder in the in the death of a burglary suspect on the roof of a pawnshop. He was acquitted.

A point of contention for the union was that the investigations will be considered open records under the Missouri Sunshine Law, said Neil Bruntrager, attorney for the St. Louis Police Officers' Association.

"There needs to be a bright line between a criminal investigation and what one does in a totally internal investigation, which is a closed record," Bruntrager said. "This is not about protecting officers who have done bad things, it's about protecting officers who have done good things."

He said the details of Internal Affairs investigations will remain closed as a personnel matter.

But anything said in the criminal investigation will be public, including officers' names. Dotson said the department still will conduct "threat assessments" to determine whether the release would put the officer in jeopardy.

Engelhardt said he realizes the new protocol won't sit well among some officers. He said he has been involved in shootings, but he declined to elaborate.

"Police officers need to trust that this is not a witch hunt or politically motivated," Engelhardt said. "The public gives an immense authority to police officers and part of that is trusting that we are doing our jobs in a just manner. At the same time, police officers need to feel that there will be a fair investigation not pushed by threats of disturbances.

"If we do that, we'll earn the trust of the people and the police officers."

Nicholas J.C. Pistor of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

(c)2014 St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

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