Opinion | Prosecutors Must Fight Police Misconduct

Likewise, the St. Louis circuit attorney, Kim Gardner, placed 22 officers on her office’s witness exclusion list and banned seven of them from presenting cases, which reduces the incentive to put them back on the streets.

Prosecutors should also review pending cases and past convictions to see if they are tainted by officers who betrayed the public trust, dismissing those that rely principally on those officers’ testimony and that cannot be sustained by independent evidence.

They must allow community members to scrutinize what is being done in their name by supporting efforts to designate police files as public records. And they ought to support reform legislation that will combat police violence, racial bias and over-incarceration.

In Maricopa County, Bill Montgomery calls himself a “21st-century prosecutor,” but his record falls short. He has worked to undermine police transparency, delaying the release of body cam video in the Mesa police shooting of an unarmed man begging for his life and insisting that police not release such records without his approval.

He has joined police in blaming civilians for the epidemic of police violence and has repeatedly opposed reasonable checks on police authority, like bills to prevent unfair civil asset forfeiture or to reduce possession of small amounts of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor.

All our leaders should work to improve police accountability, and their engagement in moments of crisis is essential. But that is especially true of the elected prosecutor, who has unmatched power to demand better police practices and to reduce the role of officers who engage in misconduct.

By not doing so, Mr. Montgomery has enabled the gross misconduct that has made Phoenix and its police department the object of international scorn.

Chiraag Bains (@chiraagbains) is a former federal prosecutor specializing in police misconduct and senior counsel to the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Kyle C. Barry (@KyleCBarry) is a senior legal counsel at The Justice Collaborative.

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