Records contradict top city staff

GREENSBORO, NC -- In an opinion piece published in the News & Record and written by Greensboro City Manager Denise Turner Roth, Police Chief Ken Miller and City Attorney Mujeeb Shah-Kahn, defending the city's surveillance of law-abiding citizens, they wrote:

"[M]ultiple mechanisms exist to ensure high integrity of criminal and internal investigative processes. First, the department is nationally accredited since 1985 and earned special recognition in 2011. This process examines and validates the effectiveness of all policies, standards and practices. It produces and publicly shares an annual report that describes all facets of how the department polices itself, including an analysis of data to inform revisions to policy, procedure and training."

That sounds reassuring—a process of accreditation since 1985 that results in a publicly available annual report.

So I asked for the last three of those annual reports.

I received one internal report for 2011. When I asked for the others, this was the reply:

"The 2011 PSD Report is the first year of that report."

The opinion piece was deficient to begin with in sidestepping the issue at hand, which is accountability to the public of police surveillance of law-abiding citizens, now we learn that it was also misleading.

Where is city council on this and other issues of our civil liberties? Missing in action.

[Updated: 2:17 P.M. corrected Turner Roth's name.]