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Prosecutor: A registry of officers with infractions might help
SUNBURY – The current call to defund and reform policing in Pennsylvania hasn’t gone unheard by a local, former district attorney. Former Montour County DA Bob Buehner was on On The Mark Monday and said he favors a state or national registry for officers who have committed serious offenses, “An idea that’s being floated around, and I think it’s getting support from all corners and all sides to it, is to have somewhat of a registry where you can go and see who the bad cops are.”
“The disciplined cops. One of the things that happens in policing is that if somebody is allowed to resign their police officer position without any discipline, you know they’re told ‘resign or be fired’, so they resign, he said.
He said state or national lists may work, “So then a job comes up somewhere else and they apply for it, and there’s no record of any malfeasance in office or any misconduct. So having that available so that bad cops don’t keep moving from department to department.”
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Buehner also says he believes the issue of excessive use force needs to be addressed. He cited the two secured juvenile detention facilities in Montour County which have a protocol called safe physical management, “There are tools and techniques that one can use called safe physical management to control these people when they get out of control. Adopting those kinds of tactics is important.”
Buehner says that in most instances, he is very uncertain of the existence of systemic racism in the U.S. He cites the city of Minneapolis in which the Democratic Party has held control since 1973 with a mayor and a council that hires the chief of police that takes care of all of the law enforcement oversight. He says that if they haven’t been able to root out institutional racism in the last 50 years of their control, Buehner is ‘skeptical of whether it actually exists in a broad, pervasive way.’
“Are there instances of officers in maybe the Minneapolis police department or elsewhere that are racist? I believe so. But is it institutional or systemic? Well, how can that be in a city like Minneapolis or a city like Philadelphia which has been controlled by a part that really, as part of its platform, rails against institutional or systemic racism, yet they’ve been in control?” he said.
Buehner tells On The Mark that municipal police officers ‘are required to attend 30 hours of mandatory training every year’. He is on the statewide committee which does the training on legal updates. That training only takes up about 6 hours of the required 30. He says ‘there are other things to fill up the other 24 hours that can be incorporated every year for all officers to address these issues.’
