Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld has no comment on it. Mayor Sheila Dixon seems OK with it. Robert F. Cherry, president of the Baltimore chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, seems absolutely giddy about it.
The “it” would be the recent announcement of the Baltimore Police Department’s public information office that, now, henceforth and forevermore, the names of police officers involved in police shootings or incidents that result in injuries to civilians will no longer be released to the public.
You read that correctly: Anthony Guglielmi, the new head of the BPD’s public information office, is behind this most recent edict. In one fell swoop, Guglielmi has decided that his office — the PUBLIC information office — will not release crucial PUBLIC information to the PUBLIC.
Great way to start your new job, Tony.
Guglielmi’s decision is wrong on so many levels that I hardly know where to begin with the criticism, but I’ll start with his rationale: The policy is designed to protect officers from retaliation.
Excuse me? Isn’t that why we give police officers guns? So they can protect themselves not only from those who want to retaliate against them, but also any other nasty, life-threatening situation that arises? And isn’t each and every officer on the force aware of that quote from an old cartoon series that goes “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it”?
I get the feeling that somewhere in cadet training, well before each and every sworn officer on the force took the oath, that they all knew that the job was dangerous and that there might be nut jobs out there looking to retaliate against them. Danger, Mr. Guglielmi, goes with the job.
Now that I’ve dealt with the bogus rationale, I’ll get to the real one: This matter of public information. If what we’ve heard from the new BPD public information officer is any indication, Guglielmi plans to give us less public information, not more.
Oh, it would have been nice to hear a new PIO come in and say, “I’m going to make this office more accessible to the media and the public, much more so than it has been in the past.” But maybe Guglielmi feels, “Hey, why lie?” In which case I’ll have to give him some points for honesty.
In fact, Guglielmi may honestly believe his own rationale: That his decision is to protect officers from retaliation. That’s what he hears when he says it. But this is what I hear:
“I don’t believe that public agencies supported by tax dollars should be held accountable to the public.”
With me, it’s all about my tax money and accountability. If an agency gets my tax money, then it’s got to be held accountable. I don’t want to hear any head of any public agency saying outright or even hinting subtly that he or she is going to cherrypick the information he or she releases to the public. Here’s my message to those who do: That’s not your job and that’s not your right. You work for the taxpayer, not vice versa. Let’s not get it twisted, OK?
The biggest problem with Guglielmi’s policy is that he implemented it in a department that can least afford it. The last thing the BPD needs is the impression that it’s not coming clean with the public. This is a department that has a history of being, to put it kindly, something other than a “friend of the Negro.” This is a department with a history of what can best be described as an adversarial relationship with civil liberties and the Bill or Rights.
At one time the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit — reputed to be the most conservative in the land — chided Baltimore police for “the most flagrant invasions of privacy ever to come under the scrutiny of a federal court.”
That was in July of 1966, when the court ruled that police acted like storm troopers when they invaded more than 300 black households in a search for two cop killers. Some people in Baltimore remember that sordid history of the 1964 “Veney raids.”
Clearly, Anthony Guglielmi isn’t one of them.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his
columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
