Police Chief: Canton in Line With Recommendations Regarding Civilian Complaints Against Officers

While a report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut contends that police departments across Connecticut routinely make it difficult for civilians to file complaints against their officers in a number of ways, Canton Police Chief Christopher Arciero said the department has an open policy. 

"I think Canton is where it should be," he said. 

The ACLU's non-scientific survey released Tuesday said many departments fail to make complaint forms available, refuse to accept anonymous complaints, impose time limits on receiving complaints and require sworn statements or threatening criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit for false statements.

The barriers to filing complaints that the ACLU cites in the study fly in the face of “best practices that are widely accepted by law enforcement experts,” on the processes police departments should follow for accepting civilian complaints, the agency said.

The ACLU report was based on a telephone survey of 104 Connecticut police departments and agencies, including 92 municipal departments and the state’s 12 police barracks.

The report indicates a caller was told Canton will not take anonymous complaints. Arciero said the department does accept them and he does not know who they talked to.  

The department's policy (attached) notes several examples of this, but also states that anonymous complaints can be harder to fully investigate. 

Arciero said he has done a preliminary review of the ACLU's recommendations and said the one weakness that he did see is providing a process through the department's web site. While people can submit complaints through the town's general Web site, the department's page should facilitate the process, he said.

He also acknowledged that he tweaked the policy after the ACLU's report to clarify that complaints could be filed through methods such as fax and e-mail. That had been the case but needed to be stated more clearly, the chief said. 

Arciero said complaint forms are available at the department but are not needed to make one, he said. 

"Any complaint will be accepted and investigated," Arciero said.

On a statewide level, the findings in the report, the ACLU said in a press release, “reveal a need for statewide standards to ensure that civilians with complaints about police misconduct will not be turned away, intimidated or silenced.”

“We’ve been hearing from too many people who have had difficulty filing complaints with their local police departments,” said David McGuire, staff attorney for the ACLU of Connecticut, who supervised the study. “We rely on the police for our safety, and we’re grateful for their service. But we also entrust police officers with extraordinary authority, including the power to use deadly force, and this must be balanced by accountability, with a clear and reliable method for civilians to register their concerns about police conduct.”

You can view a PDF of the agency's findings attached to this story.

The ACLU report was based on a telephone survey of 104 Connecticut police departments and agencies, including 92 municipal departments and the state’s 12 police barracks. The survey found that:

Twenty-three percent of municipal police departments (excluding state police) reported having no complaint form for civilians to fill out.

Sixty-one percent of the municipal police agencies in Connecticut told callers they don’t accept anonymous complaints, although law-enforcement policy experts strongly agree that police should accept complaints made anonymously. Another 10 percent could not or would not answer the question about anonymous complaints.

Nearly two-thirds of the complaint forms posted online by municipal police departments in Connecticut contain warnings of criminal prosecution for those making false complaints, though such action is widely considered a deterrent to those with legitimate complaints.

Nearly half the complaint forms posted online by municipal police departments in Connecticut mention a requirement for complainants to file a sworn statement, though law enforcement policy experts recommend strongly against demanding such statements. Employees at several departments without online forms also mentioned the requirement to ACLU callers.

Just a third of the departments in the survey clearly stated that immigration authorities would not be called against a civilian complainant. More than half did not answer or expressed some degree of uncertainty and 15 percent said they would definitely report a complainant to immigration authorities.