One of my daughters played softball through Starkville Parks a few years ago. That particular season, the same umpire called almost all the 12U league games.

By all accounts, he was a nice guy, but he wasn’t that good of an umpire. The strike zone tended to move during games. He was often out of position to make proper out/safe calls. What’s more, he handled criticism poorly, routinely pausing games to warn spectators not to “heckle him” by questioning calls.

One game, he took it too far. The father of our team’s catcher, a military man no less, had loudly taken issue with some calls. Soon after, a run scored, and the plate was completely covered with dirt. Our catcher asked the umpire to brush off the plate. He refused. The catcher got up to clean it herself. The ump yelled at her to get back in her position and not to touch the plate. Predictably, the father lost his mind and was immediately ejected from the park. The pitcher had to throw an entire at-bat without seeing the plate, and parents from both teams complained to the parks director.

The next night, not only did the same umpire call the games, apparently unreprimanded, he issued a blanket pregame warning to the crowd to keep their criticisms to themselves.

Without accountability, anyone can devolve into using the power of their position improperly. So imagine, for a moment, giving this umpire a badge, gun and qualified immunity.

A central question in policing right now is how to close the trust gap between police departments and the public. Why won’t witnesses and victims talk to officers? Why do so many people point to the “few bad apples” to unfairly discredit entire organizations sworn to protect them?

It is a complex issue with myriad answers. One solution, on which police departments often dismiss or equivocate, is transparency.

The job is hard, you’ll hear police brass say. The pay is crap. Officers risk their lives and have to make snap decisions in the heat of the moment, and people don’t always understand the nuances of that. All of these things are true, but they shouldn’t serve as catch-all shields from public scrutiny.

Public access to incident reports (now often shielded from disclosure as “investigative”) has been replaced with press releases. I’d encourage anyone who thinks that is a worthy substitute to read the press release Minneapolis police issued after George Floyd’s death.

Body camera footage and other supposedly “transparency-driven” mechanisms are often protected from timely, or any, disclosure.

“Questioning police” in any fashion can sometimes be viewed as an obstruction that needs to be “dealt with.”

An extreme example recently is a police raid of a newspaper in Marion County, Kansas, in which one reporter was read Miranda rights, and officers seized phones, computers and other materials from the newspaper’s office and the publisher’s home. Ostensibly, they were looking for evidence of allegations lodged by a local restaurant owner that information the paper had about her driving record was illegally obtained. Paper leadership, however, points to reporters digging into the chief’s past as fuel for the department’s overreach.

Though the police chief has defended the raid with copspeak vagaries, the search warrant that permitted it has since been withdrawn.
If you think something like that wouldn’t happen here, excuse me for begging to differ.

I’ve had police, citizens and public officials tell me no one wants to be a police officer anymore because of the “social climate” created by “anti-police” citizenry. I would argue that’s code for not wanting any public scrutiny of police. People who feel that way are unqualified to be officers in the first place.

Whether with departmental flubs or individual officers making mistakes that affect citizens, public scrutiny is not a natural enemy of good policing.

So, rather than hiding behind a wall of secrecy, I propose a different tack, once again drawn from umpiring.

Major League Baseball keeps stats used to determine their game-by-game grades for umps. While they don’t necessarily release those grades publicly (MLB is a private entity, with unions protecting its labor), a Boston-based data analytics company has taken up the mantle of doing Ump Scorecards for public perusal. They show the number and percentage of wrong calls and issue a rating for each umpire, using established, accepted parameters.

Any time I look at those cards, I find the vast majority of umpires are doing one heck of a job — something I didn’t expect.

I think police report cards, updated regularly and available to the public, would be equally valuable. How often are an officer’s traffic stops thrown out in court? How often are an investigator’s cases no-billed or acquitted? How many times did an officer use force? How many constitutional questions were raised about an officer and how were they resolved? Tax money pays for these departments, so why shouldn’t we know these things?

You’d find human error, sure. No one is beyond that. But I think it would show firmly what police are already saying: Most officers do a very good job.

Also, this measure would organically weed out a lot of “bad apples.” If these report cards existed, what are the odds Keith Dowd — who resigned in 2017 after his inexcusable conduct on a traffic stop — would ever have worked for Columbus Police Department?

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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