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A Lifetime Pursuit

05/15/2018

It’s rare to find a professor who has devoted nearly his entire career to one community and one scholarly pursuit, but for the past 40 years, Roger Goldman, the Callis Family Professor of Law Emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law, has been singularly devoted to his SLU LAW students and to his work on police misconduct and license-revocation laws.

Roger Goldman discusses police licensing reform with a reporter in the John K. Pruellage Courtroom at SLU LAW.

Roger Goldman discusses police licensing reform with a reporter in the John K. Pruellage Courtroom at SLU LAW. Photo by Adam Westrich

His goal has remained constant: to change traditional methods of dealing with police misconduct so that bad officers who are fired from one department cannot simply proceed to another department in another county or state and get rehired. By keeping bad officers off the streets, good officers can be more effective, the relationship between a police unit and its community will be strengthened, and citizens ultimately will be safer.

Goldman’s devotion has paid off. After decades of painstaking collaboration with politicians, police officers, journalists, citizens and other academics from across the country, he has worked in three states to enact decertification laws, and continues to work on creating a federally mandated national database that tracks repeated incidents of misconduct. He has won dozens of awards, including most recently an Ingram Magazine’s 2018 “Icon of Education” award; has authored numerous articles and three books; is called upon frequently by national media outlets seeking his expertise; and though he is retired, still can be found in his office at Scott Hall almost daily.

The good news? He has no plans to quit anytime soon. Here is Prof. Goldman reflecting on some lessons learned over the course of his career, and where we go from here.

“In the late ’70s, a series of articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured a Maplewood Police Department lieutenant whose technique for getting a confession consisted of playing Russian roulette with handcuffed suspects. After Maplewood fired him for this and other misconduct, he was hired to work one day a week at the Breckenridge Terrace Police Department in a small community in North St. Louis County. While off-duty, he returned to Maplewood, where he shot and killed an unarmed man whom he believed was going to steal his personal car. The officer was not prosecuted because he claimed he thought the fleeing suspect was reaching for a gun. No gun was ever found.

This series of events caught my attention. I soon became aware that, in contrast to other Missouri professions and occupations such as medicine, accounting, even massage therapy, there was no equivalent to license revocation for police officers who engage in serious misconduct. At that time, 35 other states did have the ability to revoke police officers’ licenses. In 1981 I received a summer research grant from Saint Louis University to travel to Florida, the state with the most active decertification program.

Shortly after my return, I formed a coalition of law enforcement officials, civil libertarians and state legislators that drafted a bill. The police commander of internal affairs for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was the bill’s lead witness before the legislative committees, and Gov. John Ashcroft signed it into law in 1988. It took five years to get the law enacted, and it is one of the strongest in the nation, with more than 600 officers having their license revoked or voluntarily relinquishing it.

Getting that law enacted was my proudest achievement in police decertification.

I later was a catalyst for getting decertification laws enacted in two other states, Illinois and Indiana, but the laws in those states ended up being much weaker, demonstrating that leadership in such efforts needs to come from residents on the ground in the state, not an outsider. I’ve also worked in Vermont and Washington state in getting laws passed there, and in 2016, I helped a state agency develop a decertification regulation in New York.

Currently, all but five states have decertification laws; those without them are California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island — all progressive states with very strong police unions. That means leadership must come from chiefs and sheriffs who will make the point that revocation is necessary to enhance police professionalism.

What counts as public interest work needn’t be limited to litigating on behalf of individual clients. I view my role as working on behalf of the unknown client."

Prof. Roger Goldman

And while decertification laws have seen increased support over the years — garnering national attention and major media coverage following the 2014 events in Ferguson — related problems remain.

One problem we have seen in Missouri, for example, is that of smaller police departments hiring officers known to be potential problems but never decertified, simply because these departments’ respective municipalities have constrained budgets and can more easily afford an officer already trained.

Another issue that has gone widely unaddressed over the decades is sexual abuse at the hands of officers. I recently wrote an op-ed for Newsweek discussing this curious absence of police sexual misconduct — which is far and away the most prevalent type of citizen abuse that leads to decertification — from the #MeToo movement.

Changing these laws is slow work. You have to be willing to collaborate with people whom you might disagree with on other issues. You have to be your own spokesperson and know where to publicize your ideas; I’d been writing for years in law journals about the need for a federal database tracking police misconduct, but it wasn’t until I wrote an article for Police Chief magazine that anyone paid attention and it became a recommendation by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing!

A few weeks ago, I told a group of SLU LAW students that what counts as public interest work needn’t be limited to litigating on behalf of individual clients, and that doing this work can become an obsession, but if you’re okay with that, it can be immensely rewarding.

I view my role as working on behalf of the unknown client, who will hopefully never become a victim of a “repeat offender” officer. The thought of the unknown client is what motivates me to keep going, pursuing decertification laws state by state. And I’m in it until all the states have done it.”