Sheriff turns off
public accountability
In a cowardly surrender to bureaucrats seeking to protect the privacy of hardened criminals, Sheriff Jeff Soyez acted without warning Monday to block citizens from exercising their long-cherished right to monitor police radio transmissions.
Nationwide, sheriff’s departments and even entire states — especially those that value openness in government — have challenged bureaucratic overreach and actively defended the public’s right to know about crime and how law enforcement officers whose salaries they pay perform their jobs.
Even the Kansas Highway Patrol — which by virtue of its assignments is much more likely to transmit supposedly private information about hardened criminals — has to date rejected overreacting to federal bureaucrats’ guidelines about encrypting radio transmissions.
The actual rule to which Soyez is responding is one that states that certain personally identifiable information, such as Social Security numbers, about convicted criminals from a very particular FBI database cannot be transmitted in the clear over police radios.
Rarely is such information transmitted. The database is seldom consulted and is not needed to check whether a suspect is wanted or to whom a vehicle is registered. In most cases, officers asking for sensitive information have instructed dispatchers to send it to their cell phones, print it out for later use, or flip a simple switch and use a special encrypted channel to relay it while keeping normal communication in the clear, where it belongs.
Recent moves by a cadre of bureaucrats to cast a shroud over police communication seem to have been intentionally overstated. Those like Soyez who would just as soon keep the public in the dark and eliminate an important check citizens have on law enforcement have insisted — wrongly — that they have no choice but to comply in overly grand and costly fashion.
Ironically, the encryption will be imposed on a system that, at great cost, was designed to make it easier for emergency personnel to communicate across multiple jurisdictions in a crisis. With encryption, the ease of communication that the costly system sought to create will be stymied by separate jurisdictions having separate encryption keys.
It’s pure coincidence — or so everyone tells us — that the move occurred on the very day of the initial court appearance on felony charges of disgraced police chief Gideon Cody, Soyez’s friend whom he recommended to become Marion’s chief and who then led a now-disavowed raid on the Record’s newsroom and two homes, contributing to the death of one of the homeowners.
Soyez could have prevented the year of hell that descended on Marion after Cody acted with malice and either intentional or incompetent deceit to trick an overly hurried magistrate into approving fatally flawed search warrants.
Soyez knew they were wrong at the time and said as much in a note to the county’s prosecutor, who also could have stopped the raids. But rather than have the courage to try to block the raids, Soyez assigned a deputy to help draft the misleading warrant applications, provided manpower to help with the raids, and threw a pizza party afterward for the raiding officers.
All the while, he carefully and cowardly avoided getting personally involved — and bragged about that to others — so he could escape legal liability that now appears to be falling on his deputies, some of whom resigned in protest of his attempts to shield himself.
Soyez has been no fan of openness in government. Official reports from the sheriff’s office often arrive weeks late, and documents clearly labeled as open public records often are censored before they are released. Last year, Soyez encouraged Cody to cease providing information to the media, sneeringly adding in a note: “We don’t work for them.”
Sorry, Sheriff Soyez, but you do work for us — and for all other citizens in the county who think, particularly after such things as Cody’s illegal raids, that it’s not a bad idea to occasionally monitor what law enforcement officers do.
Soyez’s refusal to let the public and the press have access to much of what goes on in his department is in sharp contrast to the practices of other police departments, notably Hillsboro’s. Reports are provided in extremely timely manner — this week, just hours after an arrest. They never are censored, and everyone in the department eagerly and promptly answers whatever questions reporters might have.
Undersheriff Larry Starkey will answer questions about county operations, but Sheriff Soyez rarely will return a call, email, or text.
Even with Hillsboro’s openness, reporters attempting to provide accurate and complete coverage of police activities often find — as happened this very week — that it’s necessary to consult recordings of police transmissions to get everything straight.
Now, thanks to Soyez, that no longer will be possible. The great veil of secrecy that so many elected and appointed officials like to hide behind has needlessly been pulled tightly over all citizens who listen to police radio calls. And the excuse given is to protect, without any legislative mandate, the supposed privacy of hardened criminals.
— ERIC MEYER