Months-long racism investigation recommended 8 key changes for Boise police
The investigation into potential racism at the Boise Police Department did not yield widespread evidence of racism, though a number of minority employees said they have experienced discrimination on the job.
The investigation began after revelations that a retired captain, Matt Bryngelson, expressed white supremacist views in blog posts and a video interview while he was employed at the department. Mayor Lauren McLean hired the Washington, D.C. law firm Steptoe & Johnson in December, allocating $500,000 for initial work.
Lead investigator Michael Bromwich on Tuesday recommended a number of changes to department policy and practice. Here were the firm’s key recommendations to Boise police.
Recruit diverse officers; don’t lower hiring standards
Bromwich said Boise should focus on recruiting more racially diverse officers. Boise did not hire its first Black officer until 1989, which is “way too late,” he said.
Despite its staffing shortages, Boise police also should not lower its hiring standards, Bromwich said.
In August, the department lowered its education standards and nixed a college requirement. Bromwich said the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. lowered its standards in the 1980s because of staffing shortages, and that within a decade, the department began to encounter higher levels of officer misconduct and corruption.
Training should be rigorous
Investigators found the department should ensure its training for new recruits is rigorous and incorporates “adult learning” principles, which are a set of educational approaches for teaching adults.
Bromwich noted that until recently, no one had failed out of the department’s academy in a decade. He said the average failure rate at police departments across the country is between 10% and 25%.
“If you’re failing no one, your standards are not high enough,” he said.
Bromwich said he had learned that because all recruits passed at the academy, post-academy field officers who provide further training for new recruits became responsible for problematic trainees, either having to recommend they be terminated or passing the responsibility off to a supervisor.
Boise must look at how police promote officers
The department should scrutinize its promotion practices, Bromwich told the council.
Bromwich detailed numerous complaints from within the department about Bryngelson that officers had anonymously written in surveys when he was promoted as sergeant in 2009 and as lieutenant in 2019. While many comments in the surveys about Bryngelson were positive, some officers called him lazy, described him as rude to the public, and said he was unable to keep personal dislike for other officers out of his professional decisions.
He was also accused of being “liked but not respected by his peers.” One senior member of the department said in 2009, when Bryngelson was promoted to sergeant, that he was “strongly” opposed to the promotion, and that if it went through, “we will be reading about this in the newspaper some day.”
“It’s clear that Bryngelson was singularly ill-equipped for a supervisory role,” Bromwich said. “This really does represent a failure of the promotional process within the Boise Police Department, because the overall diagnosis was that he had the right contacts (and) was a member of an internal club within BPD where members took care of each other.”
Training records kept inconsistently
Bromwich said it is important to know “exactly” who has been trained when and on what topics, and that leadership training should develop a “strong bench” of internal officers capable of becoming supervisors.
Bromwich said he was “not aware” that such training existed at the department. He also said it is “vital” that the department conduct exit interviews with all employees, and that those interviews be conducted by current or former officers rather than command-level staff.
Reform critical incident investigations
The standard practice for Ada County’s Critical Incident Task Force, which reviews serious use-of-force incidents, is for the interview to be led by a separate local police department. Bromwich said that set-up primes the investigations to take longer, because they are a lower priority for the outside department than its own business.
He also said internal investigations into such incidents should happen concurrently with criminal investigations, rather than afterward. Otherwise, internal investigations must wait until after the critical incident team and the Ada County prosecutor completes its work, which can take months or years. Bromwich said it’s a mistake to wait that long if “internal justice” and discipline is necessary.
Body camera audio must be recorded
Officers should be required to record sound on their body cameras, Bromwich said.
Bromwich said the previous chief, Ryan Lee, changed the policy by executive order, but that until then it was standard practice for officers to turn their audio off during interactions with the public. Bromwich said that “undermines one of the central purposes” of the cameras, which is to have a record of the full interaction.
Boise police should approve speaking engagements
The department should have a “rigorous” process for reviewing and approving outside consulting and speaking engagements, Bromwich said. Other than Bryngelson, who was scheduled to speak at the American Renaissance Conference — an organization known for white supremacist views — after his retirement, Bromwich said other current and former members have had “extensive speaking engagements and consulting gigs.”
He said those activities can become problematic if it distracts officers from their policing work.
Boise should look at other police agencies
Department leadership should “fight the natural instinct to be insular,” Bromwich said, having cited Bryngelson as a problematic internal promotion and what he saw as policy improvements when Boise hired leaders from other agencies.
Bromwich said it’s important to look at what reforms other police departments around the country are doing, and not to assume that the way things are done in Boise is the best way.
”You need to welcome outside scrutiny,” he said. “You need to learn from other departments in order to be the best department you can be.”
