EDITORIAL

Officers, Use Judgment: 

Law Allows To Provide

Mugshots To The Public

The recently completed state budget contains a measure, championed by Governor Cuomo, that prohibits police departments from releasing mug shots of suspects.

The other day, Monday, April 22, Trooper Aga Dembinska, Trooper C spokesman, declined to release a mug shot of Gabriel Truitt, 33, suspect in the Dec. 29 arson fire on Oneonta’s Walling Avenue, where former city firefighter John Heller was killed.

Dembinska advised that, while the governor has yet to apply his signature to that part of the state budget that will make mug shots closely held in the future, the Department of State Police, which is under the governor’s administration, has put it in place, anticipating its approval.

“No one will get anything from us anymore,” she said.  Granted, she and Maj. Brian Shortall, Troop C commander, are simply following orders from headquarters, as they must.

At the time, Truitt was at large. As it happens, he was wandering in our midst.  But without the mug shot, how could anyone have identified him? This newspaper circumvented the ban by obtaining Truitt’s mug shot from a 2018 arrest report, but that’s going to be harder to do as time goes on.

Originally, Cuomo had intended to bar release of all police reports, in effect enabling secret arrests, anathema – and historically unprecedented – in our system of open justice.  And so is the mugshot ban.

Welcome to the Cheka, Albany style.

In proposing the mugshot ban, the governor put it this way in an interview on WAMC, Northeast Public Radio:

“What’s happening is private companies are taking the mugshots, they’re putting them up on their website, they’re then calling up the person who had the mugshot … saying if you want the mugshot to be taken down you have to pay me.”

What these websites are doing, of course, is disgraceful, extortion even, and should be prohibited, but that can be done without damaging concepts of open justice that have been central to our Republic since its founding.

There is some room for discretion, as the laws says departments can decide “public release of such information will serve a specific law enforcement purpose,” although Troop C failed to recognize the clear “purpose” – helping citizens identify an indicted arsonist who may be in their midst.

There’s another issue, and this is a sensitive one: While police departments can use their new powers to protect the accused, to use Governor Cuomo’s rationale, they can also use it to protect themselves.

A recent instance came as recently as Feb. 20, when state police broke up a fight between a father and a son, Gary Lubrano, 65, and Michael, 34, along Interstate 88 near the Otsego-Schoharie line.

In the course of what followed, the father was injured, a trooper was hit in the face, and “a second trooper was injured, breaking his hand,” according to a report based on the press release.

And how, you might say, looking at the elder Lubrano’s face in the mugshot.

No one is saying the officers did anything wrong; among other things, the son may have punched the dad. Still, knowing suspects’ mugshots will be released to the public must, from time to time, help internalize restraint all law-enforcement officers are trained to exercise.

Several years ago, an instance of excessive use of force in Oneonta, and the OPD’s failure to appropriately respond, led to a civil lawsuit and a shakeup in the department.

Police officers are endowed with a great deal of power.  The mugshots are one check and balance to ensure that power is used with discipline.

Since 911, the rise of the national-security state has been generally recognized, manifest locally in the ever-tightening security at the annual Baseball Hall of Fame Inductions and the posting of a sheriff’s deputy at the county Board of Representatives’ monthly meetings.

Citizens generally accept that trade-off: safety in exchange for innumerable intrusions.  But the mugshot ban is an unnecessary and unwise intrusion.

The Department of State Police has no choice but to follow Governor Cuomo’s command, one that many individual troopers no doubt disagree with.  But local law enforcement has room to exercise judgment, and should do so.

The Oneonta Police Department, the Otsego County Sheriff’s Department and Cooperstown Village Police should, with support and guidance from the county District Attorney’s Office, should continue to routinely release mugshots and incident reports until there is a commanding reason to do otherwise.

Yes, governor, that “will serve a specific law enforcement purpose,” to ensure police officers’ hard-earned public trust and respect is not diminished.