Twenty-four Metro police officers have been suspended as part of an ongoing internal investigation into a slew of offensive e-mails sent between squad car computers in 1999 and 2000. Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer was quoted in The Washington Post as saying that the messages included comments such as ”’Let’s go punch this person,’ or, ‘Let’s go stop this person’ based on their race or gender or sexual orientation,” and that many others included vulgar or sexual banter. Car-to-car messaging was installed in 1998 to help officers check license plates and communicate more easily.
Police officials began scanning hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages last February at Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey’s request to determine if patrol car computers were being used appropriately. Nineteen months later, the U.S. attorney’s office is considering five cases for possible prosecution on civil rights charges, 44 officers have been penalized, and Assistant Chief Peter J. Newsham estimates that 450 of Metro’s 3,600 officers may have been involved in sending offensive e-mail. The department now checks internal e-mails regularly for misuse, with eight of 25 internal affairs investigators currently working on the probe.
Metro has a serious problem on its hands if officers have nothing better to do on the beat but target citizens for harassment. Regardless, police officers should not be using squad car e-mail for personal communications, offensive or otherwise, if the system is set up exclusively for conducting police business.
However, continuing to scan all car-to-car e-mails every week is not only a huge waste of police resources, but also fails to address the larger issue: Metro needs to hire more honorable cops. Rather than waste countless man-hours policing the police by reading their e-mails, officials should use their ability to check old messages on a case-by-case basis. If an officer assaults a citizen and there is some question of necessity or motive, investigators can pull up their e-mail record as a background check and look for offensive content.
Police officers who choose to voice their ignorance and bigotry over squad-car e-mail undermine their own policing even if their personal beliefs do not directly affect their work. Criminal defense lawyers can subpoena an officer’s e-mail records to undermine their credibility in a trial, meaning that these cops may help put dangerous criminals back on the streets. Metro’s focus should be on hiring better officers and monitoring the quality of their policing, not on monitoring their memos.
