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The Maine State Police withheld details about 9 separate occasions it disciplined its workers for misconduct over a five-year interval. It in the end took a lawsuit from two Maine newspapers to power the state’s largest police company to show over the undisclosed self-discipline data, which it did late Friday afternoon greater than two years after the newspapers requested them.
In a lawsuit filed final yr, the Bangor Each day Information and Portland Press Herald argued that key parts of self-discipline data offered to the newspapers had been unlawfully redacted and that a number of the data referred to further disciplinary actions that had not been handed over, with the end result that necessary details about police misconduct remained hidden.
On Could 31, a Superior Court docket decide ordered the state police to carry the redactions and conduct one other seek for data of misconduct, that are public underneath Maine legislation. Days later, the state police turned over unredacted paperwork revealing how officers lined up descriptions of misconduct in addition to obscure language that continued to obscure the explanations officers had been punished.
On Friday the company fulfilled the remaining request of the decide handy over the self-discipline data it had initially did not make public. It’s not clear why the state police didn’t initially launch them. Underneath their union settlement, troopers can request that the state police take away corrective memorandums, reprimands and suspensions from their personnel recordsdata after various intervals of time. However these paperwork are nonetheless thought of public data.
The lawyer basic’s workplace, which represented the state police in court docket, didn’t reply questions from the BDN about why legislation enforcement officers failed to show over the extra paperwork till now, how the state police supposed to right its practices in coping with data requests, and whether or not anybody had been disciplined for offering an incomplete set of data.
Practically all the 9 data, for eight workers, documented minor punishments for largely driving-related coverage violations.
Between 2016 and 2019, the company disciplined six troopers — one among them twice in a two-month interval — a detective and a specialist on the Bureau of Identification. They had been punished for unsafe or distracted driving, utilizing a state laptop computer to immediate message about private affairs and failing to correctly request time away from the workplace, the data present. The company additionally offered a closing opinion from the state labor relations board affirming a trooper’s demotion for retaliating in opposition to one other two troopers.
