Wyoming Highway Patrol looks to scale back police oversight bill

The House Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced the POST records bill championed by Rep. Provenza. Sheriff Appelhans spoke in its favor, but other law enforcement leaders expressed worry.

House Bill 31 would empower the state’s main police oversight agency to do the work it’s officially been tasked with doing for decades.

The bill would give the Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission the ability to view law enforcement personnel records when it’s investigating a deputy or officer for possible decertification.

HB31 is sailing through the Wyoming Legislature, having earned a nearly unanimous vote on the House floor last week followed by a unanimous vote from the House Judiciary Committee Monday.

But new detractors have emerged — specifically, Wyoming Highway Patrol and the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police — whose leaders told lawmakers Monday they have concerns about the legislation and the level of oversight it would enable.

Wyoming Highway Patrol Administrator Tim Cameron told the committee he feared that “downrange,” Wyoming might be creating a new entity that’s “investigative in nature.”

“We are not opposed to this — in fact, we applaud good policing, hiring good police officers and holding them accountable,” Cameron said. “Our only concern is: does this open the door and create a new entity that would, on its own volition, investigate what may be gauged as not-appropriate discipline, or resolving a citizen complaint?”

Albany County Rep. Karlee Provenza (HD-45), who has shepherded the bill from its inception, defended its goals against these complaints, saying the bill is limited in its scope and simply lets the oversight agency do what it’s been tasked with doing since the 1970s.

Albany County Sheriff Aaron Appelhans also spoke in favor of the bill, saying it would protect agencies like his, which currently feel they would open themselves up to litigation by turning over personnel records.

“This bill puts POST in line with basically every other licensing agency that we have here in the state,” Appelhans said.

What’s in the bill?

House Bill 31 would let the POST Commission access the personnel records of sheriff’s deputies or police officers, including psychological evaluations and other documents, during official investigations.

POST is tasked by state statute with certifying and decertifying law enforcement officers. For example, it will investigate officers who were fired for the commission of a crime or who have inspired complaints from their bosses or the public.

Decertification prohibits badly behaved officers from taking up a new law enforcement job with another agency. But POST is often barred from accessing the personnel files it needs to decide whether an officer should be decertified. When its request is denied, POST can file, and has filed, subpoenas to have those records turned over.

But agencies have often refused to hand the records over — and the courts have backed them up, pointing to the fact that state statute doesn’t specifically grant POST access to personnel files.

HB31 seeks to clarify that POST can indeed access the personnel records it needs to complete its investigations.

“The certifying bodies should have access to these records,” Provenza told her fellow Judiciary Committee members Monday. “Without it, there’s not a mechanism to ensure that we have good police legitimacy and public trust … there’s no way to make sure that we’re protecting good law enforcement officers.”

Highway Patrol and the slippery slope

The bill has, until this point, been uncontroversial. Both Republicans and Democrats have supported it. The committee has heard from Provenza, police accountability advocates, the director of POST, the director of the state’s prison system, and now Albany County’s sheriff, who all support the bill and its goals.

But during the House Judiciary Committee meeting Monday, legislators heard from law enforcement officials who take issue with the scope of the bill and would like to see it reined in.

Commenting alongside his superior, Administrator Cameron, Wyoming Highway Patrol Lt. Colonel Josh Walther also expressed concerns that the bill would go too far and allow POST to access too much.

Specifically, Walther took issue with the type of records POST might request.

He said having POST examine citizenship status, criminal history and education is fine. But POST is also tasked with determining that officers “Be of good moral character as determined by a background investigation” and “Be free of any physical, emotional or mental conditions which might adversely affect the applicant’s performance as a correctional officer.”

And Walther said that was a step too far.

To be clear, POST is already required by state law to evaluate these qualifications — they are explicitly enumerated in the existing state statute that gives POST its mandate — and the new bill would simply let POST access the records it needs to conduct that evaluation.

But Walther argued giving POST this access would put Wyoming on a slippery slope.

“To us, that opens the door to really anything somewhat subjective when we determine what is in the background investigation,” he said. “So when we’re turning over documentation, if requested, to prove that they’re of good moral character or not — that’s really opening the door to all their personnel records or their entire background investigation.”

Wyoming Highway Patrol wasn’t the only organization to raise this argument. Allen Thompson, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, objected to the bill on similar grounds.

“Our organization very much supports the idea of promoting good law enforcement going forward and giving our law enforcement professionals the ability to weed out those that are not living up to the high standards of law enforcement,” he said. “But it does beg the question, you know, how much power does this give POST to do investigations? … We have our membership that are concerned about the scope of this and how deep it can go.”

Thompson said he had served on the POST Commission before.

“I believe there are instances where organizations have made notification to POST about some disciplinary action that has occurred with their employees and POST has instituted a harsher sentence — even decertification — in those cases,” he said. “And so when that takes the power away from the local law enforcement administrators that are responsive to the community that they serve in, that does cause some questions.”

Provenza pushed back on these objections, arguing that the bill does not allow POST to simply target or harass individual officers.

“POST can’t say, ‘I’m going to look at your personnel records [because] I’m upset that you violated this certain thing’ — there’s another due process that has to happen in the Office of Administrative Hearings,” she said. “There, to my knowledge, have not been any witch hunts after officers for things that don’t fit under ‘egregious misconduct.’”

Walther also expressed concern that the bill would make police personnel records more readily available to the media or the public. But that is not true.

Personnel records for government employees — including sheriff’s deputies and police officers — are exempted from the Wyoming Public Records Act, the law that allows journalists or other citizens to request government documents. House Bill 31 would not change that.