Two months after a Washington, DC law firm presented findings about deficiencies it saw in the Boise Police Department, police leaders outlined changes that have been made to officer hiring, promotions, body cam policies, exit interviews and performance reviews.
The law firm, Steptoe & Johnson, in May recommended eight key changes, some of which the Police Department has said it was already working on. The investigation was launched after revelations that a retired captain had espoused white supremacist views.
Here are four key problems the law firm cited, and the department’s responses.
1. Recruit diverse officers, and don’t lower hiring standards.
Deputy Chief Tammany Brooks told the council on Tuesday that the department recently raised its hiring test score requirements and reinstated a polygraph exam.
He said the department recruited officers at job fairs and from the military but did not indicate whether it was new.
Last year, the department got rid of an associate’s degree requirement, allowing those without college experience to still apply to become officers.
In response to a question about the changed hiring requirements, police spokesperson Haley Williams said in an email that “at this time we do not have any additional announcements to make about our hiring criteria.”
“We are committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards involving character and integrity when we hire police officers and have no plans to lower those standards in any way,” Police Chief Ron Winegar added in an email to the Statesman.
2. Reform critical incident investigations.
The Steptoe lawyers said the investigations of police shootings by an outside agency can cause investigations to take longer. Such shootings lead to automatic criminal investigations by the Ada County Critical Incident Task Force, whose members include each law enforcement agency in the county.
The lawyers also criticized the department’s practice of waiting for the criminal investigation to finish before beginning the department’s internal investigation, which further extends the process. Police shooting investigations take months if not years.
Since May, the department has decided to begin Internal Affairs investigations of shootings by officers at the same time as the outside investigation. The task force’s investigations begin shortly after a shooting occurs.
Winegar said on Tuesday that the department is working with the Ada County Coroner’s Office to expedite toxicology and death reports, which can sometimes slow the Critical Incident Task Force investigations. But he said he did not think having outside agencies conduct criminal investigations of the officers leads the task force to give them lower priority, as the independent investigators had suggested.
3. Body cam audio must be recorded.
The department has drafted a new policy to describe specific instances where officers are allowed to mute their cameras. Current police policies exempt officers from having to record when there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and during undercover work.
The internal affairs office also conducts random audits of body cam footage.
4. The department should review promotions and training.
Winegar said he would bring back performance reviews of officers, which have not been conducted for several years.
He also noted that one of the independent investigation’s findings that no officer had failed to leave the department’s training academy in a decade was not entirely correct. He said the department usually gives new hires the opportunity to resign instead of being fired, and that 33 of the 203 officers hired in the last decade had left for “performance-related reasons.” Six were fired after finishing the probationary period, five left during academy training, and 13 left during training in the field, which follows the academy.
Oversight office to review documents
Elected officials tasked Nicole Schafer, the interim director of the Office of Police Accountability, in June with reviewing the tens of thousands of documents the independent investigators had planned to review. Boise cut off funding for the Steptoe investigation before it was finished, instead choosing to have Police Department documents reviewed internally.
At a Tuesday presentation, Schafer said an outside law firm will review the documents and produce a report, which is expected to take 80 hours of work.
Council members question promotion policies
The Police Department’s report also raised concerns among some council members, particularly about the department’s promotion policies. The department employs about 400 people, three-fourths of whom are sworn officers.
To become a sergeant, a job that now pays at least $109,000 per year full time, four-year officers applying for promotion take a set of scored exams, which result in an overall score, Brooks said. When a sergeant vacancy occurs, the conditions of the Police Department’s agreement with the police union requires the chief to select a replacement within 45 days.
The chief can select from the top three scorers, and the same list of officers is used for up to a year — a reduction from the previous policy, when the same list of top scorers was used for two years.
But if multiple sergeants need to be hired, the chief has to come back to the same list, and may eventually be required to promote officers who barely pass.
“It seems like your hands are really tied when making some promotional decisions,” Council Member Patrick Bagant said.
Winegar said if there were an officer who had a serious and recent finding of corrective action in their internal affairs file, that person could be passed over for promotion.
“Outside of that, you kind of are at the mercy of this list,” Winegar said, which can be a concern “if you get deep down into that list.”
After shooting, questions were raised about Boise’s interim police oversight office, director