Would this new NC bill expose bad cops, or protect them?
.jpg)
A bill to protect police officers who expose illegal or unethical behavior by their colleagues is dividing Republicans and Democrats at the North Carolina General Assembly.
A group that represents police officers, the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association, is pushing the bill with backing from GOP lawmakers. They say it will help stop people in power from retaliating against cops — or any other city government workers — who try to shine a light on corruption or abuse inside government.
“If you want to have true police reform in this country, you need to have a situation where officers can report corruption that is happening in their own ranks,” said Randy Byrd, a Cary police sergeant who’s president of the PBA.
“It doesn’t happen a lot,” he said. “But they need that.”
Democrats and a group that represents city governments, the League of Municipalities, oppose the bill, House Bill 7. They say it’s secretly intended to prevent bad cops or other government workers from ever being fired or even disciplined, since they could just claim to be whistleblowers.
“My concern is that bad apples are going to be protected by this bill,” said Leo John, a lobbyist for the League of Municipalities.
Issues of police abuse and reform have increasingly come to light in recent years, in part due to the proliferation of video, both from police body cams and bystanders’ cell phones.
The issue of police accountability has often broken down along partisan or ideological lines, with liberals saying they should be held to higher standards and conservatives saying they need legal leeway to properly do their jobs.
Past police whistleblower bills failed
The bill passed the House committee on local government Tuesday, when Byrd and John both spoke about it. It still has to pass through other committees before potentially coming up for a vote. But that could happen soon. A similar bill, albeit with some different details, passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives in 2019.
But, due in part to opposition from the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, which also opposed a similar bill in 2017, it never got a vote in the Senate.
Eddie Caldwell, the general counsel and lobbyist for the Sheriffs’ Association, wrote in an email Thursday that the group hasn’t decided if it will take a formal stance on the new version of the bill this year. But he does still harbor concerns, Caldwell said, listing many of the same issues that the Democrats and the League of Municipalities also brought up on Tuesday.
“While perhaps well-intentioned, an unintended consequence will be difficulty in removing bad officers (and other employees) as has been experienced in other states,” he wrote.
The bill wouldn’t apply to sheriffs, since they are at the county level and this bill would only apply to city-level officials. But when the Sheriffs’ Association opposed the 2019 version, sheriffs said they were concerned it would lead to similar rules at the county level in the future.
Caldwell said it also appears the bill would encourage city employees to report each other for even minor violations — like speeding or making a brief personal detour in a government-owned vehicle, such as stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work.
The PBA’s executive director, John Midgette, downplayed concerns during Tuesday’s committee meeting. He said the fears that the bill would protect bad cops are overblown.
“An employee can’t just say ‘Oh, I don’t want to be fired for having 15 wrecks with my squad car, so I’m going to file for (whistleblower) legal protection,” Midgett said.
And even if someone did try that, said bill sponsor Rep. Bobby Hanig, a Currituck County Republican, it shouldn’t be too hard to prove whether their discipline was legitimate or retaliation.
“If you have a bad employee in this day and age, I can assure you there’s a paper trail,” he said. “That employee has been written up, reprimanded, you name it.”
But one area of the bill in particular where Caldwell as well as Democratic Rep. Julie von Haefen of Apex raised concerns was a clause that said it would protect not just a worker who filed a whistleblower report, but also anyone who “intends” to file one.
“It seems very, very vague,” von Haefen said during the committee meeting.
Hanig told her that language is intended to address a situation where an employee told someone they were thinking of filing a complaint, and then were threatened or disciplined before they could make it official.
Caldwell said he’s concerned that in reality, the bill “as currently worded does make it more difficult for cities to remove bad police officers.”
Hanig, however, won the committee’s support for the changes, saying they’re needed to build trust in law enforcement.
“Given the current climate in our state and the nation, this bill is critical,” he said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Megaphone or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 2:41 PM.
