LINCOLN, Neb.—Jim Winn learned pretty quick while sheriff of Garden County that when it came to hiring new deputies, resumes often didn’t tell the whole story.
“You’d get guys who’d been in 10 different places 10 different years, and it’d take a while to figure out they’d been pressured to leave,” said Winn, recently retired. “A lot of times, you’d get somebody else’s reject.”
More bad officers could be taken off the streets under a rule change, sought by law enforcement officials, that would give them more leeway to yank the certifications officers must have to work in Nebraska.
Under the proposed change, the state Crime Commission could decertify officers for acts that “diminish … public trust in the law enforcement profession.” That expands the current criteria, which require a finding of incompetence, neglect of duty or that an officer is unfit mentally or physically to be an officer.
If approved by Attorney General Jon Bruning and Gov. Dave Heineman, the rule change would also let the commission pull certifications from officers convicted of misdemeanor crimes that have “a rational connection with the officer’s fitness or capacity to serve as a law enforcement officer,” among other changes. Currently, the only convictions that can lead to decertification are felonies.
A main reason for the proposed changes is to let officers who want to surrender their certifications do so quickly, without going through what can be a long process of hearings before the state’s Police Standards Advisory Council, said Michael Behm, executive director of the Nebraska Crime Commission. Billy Hobbs, a former Nebraska State Patrol trooper now in prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl, for example, wanted to surrender his license yet had to go through the hearing process because of the current rules.
But another possible benefit of the rule change would be to weed out officers such as the ones Winn described. Behm said some officers move from town to town, forced out of jobs by police chiefs and sheriffs for conduct that doesn’t merit decertification under the current rules.
“They keep resurfacing out there in Nebraska until finally somebody files a complaint,” Behm said.
Behm said he couldn’t recall any recent cases where officials wanted to decertify an officer but couldn’t because they were hamstrung by the current rules.
“There are isolated incidents where you have people who should not be in law enforcement but the Police Standards Advisory Council and the Crime Commission has its hands tied,” said Dixon County Sheriff Dean Chase, chairman of the police standards council.
The standards council is connected to the Crime Commission and issues recommendations on whether the commission should decertify officers.
Since the process began about 12 years ago, 33 officers have been decertified.
In some ways, avoiding bad hires is tougher than it used to be because former bosses worry about being sued if they warn potential new employers about former employees, Chase said.
Even though Winn tired of hiring what turned out to be bad apples and getting applications from people clearly not qualified—he said he once got an application from a South Dakota stripper—he worries the rule change could lead to abuse.
“I’d hate to see them go too far,” giving the advisory council too much discretion and risking the decertification of officers who don’t deserve it, Winn said.
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