Secrets have no place in Iowa’s rights watchdog

By Quad-City Times

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We expect city leaders in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, would have preferred to keep secret the civil rights complaint against their police department.

Who wants it known that the Iowa Civil Rights Commission bound their town to a settlement requiring new racial profiling policies, public posting of those policies and training for every police officer, including documenting reasons for every traffic stop over the next two years?

The Iowa Civil Rights Commission issued the ruling April 13. Commission director Beth Townsend commended the settlement at that time, saying, “the citizens of this jurisdiction will be assured that law enforcement officials for this municipality are better trained to avoid racial profiling. ... (T)he citizens of this community can be assured that they have an avenue for reporting complaints of discrimination or racial profiling.”

The only problem? The commission's settlement agreed to keep the name of the town secret. How in the world were those citizens supposed to be “assured” of anything?

All the commission cryptically divulged was “the police department is located in a town with approximately 4,000 residents in an Iowa county with a high Latino population.”

Times reporter Mike Wiser started digging and found 22 towns that fit the commission's description. So he started making calls. Folks in some of those other 21 towns recoiled at the prospect of being labeled by the commission's cryptic, unspecific description. But when a Sioux City Journal reporter called Sergeant Bluff, Mayor Dale Petersen candidly confirmed his Woodbury County town was the culprit.

Townsend said she was hamstrung by state law and terms of this specific, negotiated agreement. “The parties agreed that this is the best we could do.”

We're confident the commission can do better.

The complainant in this case alleged officers were using racial profiling to systemically stop Hispanics. An agreed-upon settlement to aggressively combat racial profiling might have no effect if allowed to remain secret. And as Wiser found out, leaders in other small Iowa towns that fit the commission's vague description didn't take kindly to being lumped in with one alleged offender.

In fact, the commission's unspecific order tended to inadvertently slam a whole group of towns based on the alleged actions of just one.

That sounds like behavior the Iowa Civil Rights Commission is supposed to fight, not model.

We remain staunch supporters of the commission's mission, knowing that secret settlements have no place in it.