Anyone who wants to work as an officer for the High Point Police Department will have to do more than simply meet the basic requirements, according to Police Chief Curtis Cheeks III.
When Cheeks took over the department of around 250 sworn officers in 2024, he inherited an agency that already had an exemplary track record of not hiring wandering officers — those who continue to work despite misconduct leading to their departure from a previous agency.
According to a Carolina Public Press analysis of law enforcement employment data from 1973 to 2022, High Point is one of the largest agencies in North Carolina with no record of having hired a previously dismissed officer. That analysis identified at least 679 officers working across the state as of 2022 who had been fired from a previous agency.
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While it isn’t an explicit policy of High Point, Cheeks attributes his department’s lack of cops with checkered pasts to the department’s rigorous interview and background investigation procedures for new hires.
“We have our own standard, which is a lot tougher, probably, than other larger departments,” he said.
Unlike some other law enforcement agencies, Cheeks said, High Point has a nearly identical hiring process for lateral transfers – those who were already certified with another agency – as it does for new recruits fresh out of Basic Law Enforcement Training.
All applicants must submit a state-mandated personal history statement that includes questions about their family, education, finances, criminal history and previous employment. Background investigators on staff are responsible for verifying that information.
High Point takes it a step further, however, by requiring applicants to undergo a polygraph, more commonly known as a lie detector, attesting to the truthfulness of their responses. During that polygraph, recruiters ask lateral transfer applicants why they left their previous departments.
“The ones that want to get what I call ‘cute’ in their response, that’s a red flag for us,” Cheeks said.
Further investigation will often reveal that those officers didn’t provide the full truth about their separations from past agencies, he said.
Other agencies, as well as state lawmakers, could probably take a cue from how High Point handles new hires.
This is the third article in the three-part investigative series Stray Cops from CPP, exploring the issue of wandering officers in North Carolina. This article surveys potential solutions, some of which have already been put into practice in some locations, and others that would require future legislative action.
The first article in the series took a deeper look at some of the extreme cases where these officers have continued their pattern of misconduct after switching agencies. A CPP analysis identified at least 679 law enforcement officers active in 2022 who had been previously dismissed by another agency.
The second story explored the systemic factors that allow these officers to continue to carry a badge and a gun, finding that the state’s vague certification rules and inadequate records sharing between agencies allows wandering officers to slip through the cracks.
Increased transparency through public databases
Having comprehensive and well-maintained public databases that track police employment histories and misconduct would be an invaluable resource to hiring agencies, attorneys, prosecutors and the public, including journalists.
In 2020, both of the state’s standards commissions for law enforcement certification voted to support the creation of a publicly searchable database of decertified North Carolina law enforcement officers. However, the end result of that effort was underwhelming.
The NC Department of Justice did include an external link on its website that allows the user to search for an officer’s past agencies and current certification status, but it does not provide separation dates or reasons for separation.
As a result, this tool remains ineffective for identifying potential wandering officers, since it cannot say whether an officer had been fired or resigned from a job, or even when that officer separated from an agency.
CPP’s reporting revealed that up until 2022, the DOJ maintained publicly requestable employment data which included hire dates, separation dates and whether that officer was dismissed.
In 2022, the DOJ switched database systems and no longer keeps data in that format, making it nearly impossible for the public to know how many law enforcement officers working today have been dismissed from a previous job.
Advocates for law enforcement accountability have also called for public databases that track instances of excessive use of force or other allegations of misconduct, although those efforts have so far not resulted in any policy changes.
The opportunity exists for DOJ to rethink some of these policies. Legislators could also take steps to require specific data tracking and publicly searchable databases.
Tightening hiring and certification rules
An officer’s firing doesn’t necessarily mean that the state will decertify him or her.
This is not inherently problematic, because, as the UNC School of Government notes, many law enforcement officers are at-will employees. It’s possible that officers may be fired for reasons which don’t preclude them from being good employees somewhere else.
However, the recurrence of misbehaving officers could be reduced if the standards commissions received stronger statutory guidance on when they “shall” decertify an officer, rather than when they “may” consider it.
The state’s current rules are written in a way that gives the commissions significant leeway in making determinations whether to revoke, suspend or deny certification.
For example, the current laws do not explicitly require that officers be decertified if they have been convicted of a serious misdemeanor, or if they accumulate four or more lesser misdemeanor convictions. Instead, only misdemeanors with at least a two-year sentence result in mandatory decertification.
And while the Sheriff’s Commission must revoke or suspend certification if a deputy doesn’t keep up with mandatory training or minimum employment requirements, the commission that certifies police doesn’t face that rule.
The commissions may also choose not to decertify officers who are found to have made a material misrepresentation on their application. The same goes for officers who receive what’s called a “Giglio letter” from a district attorney, barring them from testifying in court because of a demonstrated pattern of untruthfulness.
While decertifications can and do happen for the above reasons, if the law made it clear that the commissions have to decertify officers or deny applications for certification in those circumstances, it could strengthen the current rules. That change would require either new rules to be passed by the commissions or legislative action.
The state could also adopt rules through legislation requiring that an officer be decertified if a civil verdict or settlement resulted in a substantial monetary award to another party as a result of their misconduct.
Nondisclosure agreements could be banned in such settlements to prevent the situation that has emerged in Washington County, where a former deputy went to work in a nearby county despite settling a lawsuit with the details withheld from the public. While a North Carolina law couldn’t limit nondisclosures in federal cases, the other aspects of such a rule could also apply to federal civil cases, since many such suits are brought in federal court.
Making background checks on officers easier
At the department-level, having all relevant information about officers’ pasts before hiring them is crucial.
But past employers can be reluctant to give up information in a former officer’s personnel file, even to another law enforcement agency, for fear of violating personnel or public records laws and risking legal liability, especially if the officer resigned rather than being terminated.
“Even a law enforcement agency that really wants to vet its officers before they hire them just might have to take the officer’s word,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project.
“They’ll only have a record of a resignation and the officer can be like: ‘I wanted to spend more time with family.’”
“That’s something I hear a lot in depositions when we’re asking somebody why they left their last agency,” Bonds added.
“Oftentimes we know that’s not the case, based on whisperings and the other things that we’ve heard, but it’s not always easy to find the documentation.”
The NC Sheriff’s Association recommended in 2020 that the state legislature pass a law requiring applicants for certification and lateral transfers to sign a waiver authorizing the release of all personnel records and investigative files in the possession of a previous employer.
It also recommended new laws protecting the agencies releasing those records from civil or criminal liability and the implementation of a new commission form to ensure that agencies are actually requesting and providing personnel records as necessary during the hiring process.
The legislature passed some, but not all, of those recommendations in a law that took effect last year, requiring hiring agencies to review the complete personnel files for any agency for which an applicant has worked in the past five years. That law also added protections for the agencies providing those personnel records.
However, the law wouldn’t apply to any investigative records that may not be included in an officer’s personnel file. It also didn’t direct the commission to create a process to ensure that agencies are following those new rules. The five-year limit on how far back an agency must go would also allow some officers to return to police work despite potentially serious items in their personnel files.
State Sen. Danny Britt, R-Robeson, who sponsored the bill, didn’t respond to CPP’s request for an interview before publication of this article.
Improving the applicant pool for officers
Cheeks suggested a lack of quality candidates, while vacancy rates have remained high since a mass exodus of officers in 2020, is a part of the issue.
While job vacancy statistics are nearly impossible to come by for most law enforcement agencies, some state leaders, including the heads of the State Highway Patrol and the State Bureau of Investigation, have raised the alarm in Raleigh about declining recruitment and stagnant salaries.
Larger agencies may be especially tempted, Cheeks said, to hire potential problem officers just to fill needed positions.
“When you need, let’s say … 900 officers, and you’re only getting 130 applicants a year, then you have to start really weighing and evaluating what you’re willing to take a chance on,” he said.
On the other hand, Cheeks said the High Point Police Department is a “perfect size” where he can keep his hiring standards strict without worrying much about the department’s vacant positions.
Still, though, many of the agencies CPP’s investigation found to be hiring previously dismissed officers aren’t large departments like Cheeks suggested, but smaller ones in rural areas of the state.
For those agencies, it could also be an applicant quality problem. Lacking the budget for competitive salaries, or a strong local recruiting pool, they might be forced to settle for wandering officers who are willing to work in subprime conditions for lower pay.
A report published by the NC Sheriff’s Association in 2020 stated that recruitment was suffering as a result of low salaries. One source cited in the report placed North Carolina in the bottom 10 states for law enforcement average salaries.
Since then, lawmakers’ stalemate over passing a state budget has paused many proposed raises and bonuses for law enforcement across the state. Meanwhile, pay for most local law enforcement is dependent on the available resources of the municipal or county governments for which they work.
Without larger systemic changes or help from state or federal sources, poorer, rural areas will continue to struggle to offer competitive salaries for their police officers and sheriff’s deputies.
The legislative reality
Many recommendations for improving police accountability notably gained the most traction in 2020, amid nationwide movements for criminal justice reform.
Six years later, the legislative appetite for increasing accountability in law enforcement has changed, said Marcia Morey, a Democratic lawmaker in the NC House and former Superior Court chief judge.
Morey sat on a task force convened by former Gov. Roy Cooper in 2020 to address racial inequities in policing and the criminal justice system. Some of the recommendations made by the task force included changes to Standards Commissions rules, including giving them authority to decertify an officer who is found to have used excessive force.
“Really, it was a brilliantly conceived (task force) involving advocates, law enforcement, local and state and elected officials, previously incarcerated people,” Morey said. “We divided up into four groups (and made) 122 recommendations.”
Some of those recommendations eventually became law, but many others did not.
“Unfortunately, a lot got left on the table because it was seen as a partisan endeavor,” she added.
In December 2024, the task force was quietly dissolved. The link on its webpage that supposedly directs users to its final report is broken.
However, the attitudes of state lawmakers could be swinging back around.
Longtime Senate leader Phil Berger was ousted by primary challenger Sam Page. Ironically, Page was one of the sheriffs who helped draft the Sheriff’s Association’s 2020 report addressing wandering officers and made transparency a core tenant of his campaign.
Morey hopes a change in leadership in the General Assembly, paired with dissent over what many see as a lack of accountability for federal ICE and border patrol agents who swarmed Charlotte last year, can bring back a desire for law enforcement reform.
“I don’t think it’s partisan,” she said. “I think it’s improving public safety, improving the public’s trust in law enforcement.”
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