By Sam Stecklow of Invisible Institute, a public interest investigative news organization. Reposted by permission from the FOI-L mailing list.
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On July 4, 2023, Samuel Davis, a 26-year-old officer for the Northwoods Police Department in North St. Louis County, took Charles Garmon into custody at a Walgreens. After handcuffing Garmon, Davis drove him to a remote intersection outside of a Pepsi bottling plant in Kinloch, a now-largely industrial city of under 300 residents, some four miles and five municipalities from Northwoods.
Outside of the Pepsi plant, Davis pepper sprayed Garmon, beat him with a baton — breaking his jaw — and “told Garmon not to return to Northwoods,” according to a federal civil rights lawsuit Garmon later filed.
Rather than then transport him to any kind of facility where he could then receive treatment, Davis left Garmon in a field on the side of the road for someone else to find, leading to a 911 call, Davis’s identification, a warrant being issued, and his eventual arrest on felony assault and kidnapping charges two weeks later. (Davis’s supervisor, Michael Hill, was also arrested, and both have also since been
indicted on federal civil rights charges.)
Within a few weeks, local TV station
KMOV found that in his short career, Davis had already jumped to the Northwoods police from the North County Cooperative Police Department, something reporters found using a roster from that department.
“
Tracking other departments Davis may have worked at isn’t easy in Missouri,”
the station noted. “The state doesn’t have a central system for the public to see if an officer has moved around. The only way to know is to ask each department if an officer worked there.”
It is true that, unlike many other states, Missouri doesn’t have a system for the public or press to see if an officer has moved around. However, the Missouri Department of Public Safety’s
Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST), which licenses police officers in Missouri, is also
required by law to keep track of their employment changes, which it does in an internal database.
It’s a system that was instituted in large part due to a troubling history of
department-hopping by officers in the St. Louis metro region, and a failure of oversight by the state — a problem often referred to as “
wandering cops,” or locally as the “officer shuffle” or “muni shuffle.”
The shuffling of problem officers between departments has played a recurring role in police misconduct scandals in the St. Louis area since at least the 1970s, according to a review of official studies, newspaper investigations and archives, and interviews with experts.
While not unique to St. Louis, the region’s strikingly harsh history of using municipal borders and law enforcement to
severely maintain racial segregation as Black residents began to move out of the city core led to particularly acute examples of violent cops being shuffled from one tiny department to the next — rather than being held accountable.
This practice became so infamous by the 1980s that it prompted a local law professor to successfully push for state police training boards across the U.S. to exercise greater oversight of local cops.
Many of those state training boards — 26 total — now release data showing the employment history of officers to allow for use by the public, press, researchers, attorneys, and others to quantify the problem of wandering officers that was first fully exposed in Missouri.
Missouri, however, interprets state law as barring the release of the historical data that would show the public and press which officers qualify as wandering cops. Missouri POST restricts the data it releases to snapshots of what officers are active in Missouri and their current agencies at the time the information is requested.
Experts have called on the state to reconsider its withholding of this basic information.
“It’s hard to imagine data that would be more important or relevant for the public to have,” said Christy Lopez, a former Department of Justice official who led the federal consent decree investigations in Ferguson and Chicago, “and where the state would have less of an argument that that information shouldn’t be shared.”
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Sam Stecklow
Journalist
Invisible Institute
he/him/his
