The Baltimore Police Department acknowledged yesterday that its decision to withhold the names of officers who shoot or kill civilians has become a distraction from crime fighting and said it would revisit the policy in an effort to ensure both public disclosure and officer safety.
Mayor Sheila Dixon said Wednesday that she had asked the police to "strike a balance and come up with a revised policy," though yesterday her spokesman would not guarantee that the review would result in changes.
"The issue has taken on a life of its own and is truly a distraction for the department and City Hall," said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. "We're going to try to find a middle ground between transparency and protecting officers and their families."
After months of informally holding back the identities of officers involved in shootings, police in January said they would end the decades-old practice of releasing names, citing concerns for the safety of officers and their families. Police noted that the FBI and other big-city departments, including those in New York and Atlanta, have similar policies.
They said the increasing availability of personal information on the Internet makes it easier for people to make good on threats of retaliation if the officers' names are known. The city police union supports the policy.
But critics worried that withholding officers' names would endanger an already tenuous relationship between the police and a community besieged by witness intimidation, and some saw it as a scaling back of openness and accountability. Maryland's police agencies and other large cities such as Los Angeles continue to disclose names.
"We are constantly asking our citizens to come forward and to be ready to stand up and identify criminals and to participate in the process," City Councilman James Kraft said at a hearing this week. "When a citizen sees that a police officer is afraid to have his or her name out there because they could be a victim, I think it creates the perception that if the cops are afraid of retaliation, then why should the average citizen help out?"
City police have shot seven people this year, four of them fatally. Shootings have been on the rise in recent years, with 21 police-involved shootings in 2008 and 33 in 2007. The department had 15 or fewer police-involved shootings in each of the five years before that.
