News Archive

South Bend’s mayor announced that his city’s police will release data on their use of force and complaints against them alleging misconduct. But the South Bend Tribune has spent a month trying to get the information and found it nearly impossible to obtain, according to a story published October 17.

Releasing such information is proving to not be as simple as originally hoped. Professor J. Amy Dillard discussed the struggle to balance the need for transparency and the need to protect officers’ reputations from baseless accusations.

“The trend is toward more transparency, based on the assumption that when the police are policing themselves, they’re biased,” Professor Dillard said in the story. “The police side of it would be, in all these cases where there’s no finding of misconduct, we don’t want to sully an officer’s reputation.”

Professor Dillard joined IU McKinney in Fall 2016 as a visiting professor after teaching at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 2006. Before she became a law professor, Dillard practiced law in Alexandria, Virginia, where she specialized in criminal defense and served as the city’s deputy public defender for many years. She currently represents a client charged with capital murder in Virginia.