Police misconduct seen in half of South Bend complaints

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - Evidence of police misconduct was found in more than half of citizen complaints filed in South Bend between January and August, according to information released by the northern Indiana city's police department.

The data, released in response to a public records request filed by the South Bend Tribune, show that civilians made 28 complaints against officers in 2016 through August and evidence was found supporting 15 of those, or 53 percent of the total.

Just three of the 28 complaints were tied to alleged excessive force, and the officer was exonerated in each of those, the South Bend Tribune reported (http://bit.ly/2eugnoA ).

Sgt. Dan Demler, president of the Fraternal Order of Police in South Bend, said the numbers offer evidence that the department is taking a vigorous approach to uncovering cases of bad behavior by officers.

He noted that four of the cases included in the data were listed as "misconduct not based in complaint," which means that an investigation uncovered violations unrelated to a citizen's original complaint. Demler said that shows that the department investigates and holds officers accountable even for policy violations that may not be visible to the public.

"It does demonstrate that we're being held accountable, and a big signifier is that complaints are being sustained," he said. "They're being taken seriously."

But without knowing more details of the complaints and how officers were disciplined, it's difficult to draw conclusions about how seriously police take each case of alleged misconduct, said Amy Dillard, a visiting professor at Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis.

"It's one thing to say someone is guilty of engaging in misconduct, but that finding of guilt is irrelevant if you don't know what the penalty was," she said. "The penalty is how you know how seriously the department takes its role in addressing officer misconduct."

Information about complaints against South Bend police has traditionally not been available to the public. Mayor Pete Buttigieg has said the city will start publishing certain records about police conduct as soon as late this year as part of a police data initiative led by the White House.

The information released to the newspaper is the first example of the records that will be included when the city begins posting that data.

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Information from: South Bend Tribune, http://www.southbendtribune.com