This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters.
These days, Austin Handle works almost as many late nights as he did when he was a police officer.
He spends hours on the phone with officers from across the U.S. and Canada who need help navigating the perils of reporting their coworkers’ misconduct. It’s been his primary role as a board member of The Lamplighter Project, a support group for police whistleblowers.
“We live in a world where they’re very confused. We live in a world where every time you speak up, people tell you that you’re not supposed to, that it’s not the right time, or that it’s not the right place,” Handle, 29, told a room full of lawmakers and civic leaders commemorating National Whistleblower Day on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
The annual event marks the anniversary of Congress passing the first whistleblower law in 1778. But while protections for whistleblowers in other government agencies and the private sector have increased in the past few decades, reforms in policing still lag far behind. Unlike most other professions, policies at many law enforcement agencies require officers to report internal misconduct. But in most agencies they have to report wrongdoing up the chain of command, which often includes the same people they are implicating.
Four years ago, Handle’s career as a police officer in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody came to an abrupt end. His bosses fired him in what he said was retaliation for posting a viral TikTok video during a brewing sexual harassment scandal within the department. In the video, Handle promised to expose claims of corruption among some members of the Dunwoody Police Department’s leadership.
Handle’s supervisors tried to have his law enforcement certification revoked, arguing that he was untruthful in an unrelated internal investigation. They also tried to stop him from collecting unemployment after they fired him. Both moves are tactics my former colleagues at USA Today and I found common when we published a series of stories in 2021 about the plight of police officers who break law enforcement’s code of silence.
Although a Georgia labor board ultimately ruled the claims against Handle were baseless, the “untruthful” label still haunts him. He hasn’t been able to land another job in law enforcement, despite having a clean record. That’s a startling contrast from officers with checkered disciplinary pasts, who often have no trouble landing jobs in other law enforcement agencies. Take as an example former Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson, who was charged with first degree murder in the shooting death of Sonya Massey in Illinois earlier this month. According to published reports, Grayson jumped from one police department to another, leaving a trail of red flags that included ignoring a supervisor’s commands to stop a high-speed chase, lying on his reports and mischaracterizing his 2016 Army discharge for serious misconduct.
Back in 2021, I watched and listened as one decorated officer after another broke down in tears describing how their fellow officers threatened, followed and in one case, arrested them after they reported misconduct. Some, like Handle, had been fired or quit. Others were still trying to work alongside the coworkers they’d reported.
All of the whistleblowers were scared. And many were lonely, isolated by both eroding public trust in police and by the loss of community they experienced after breaking the “blue wall” and becoming pariahs among their peers.
Experts told us that change was coming, complete with a slate of acronymed initiatives and laws to demolish the code of silence engrained in police culture. Programs like the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement Project (ABLE) and New Orleans’ Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC) trained officers on how to police each other and prevent misconduct in real time.
Even after the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act fizzled in Congress, there was hope for the Special Inspector General for Law Enforcement Act — a bill that would, in part, create a federal hotline to field anonymous misconduct complaints from local, state and federal law enforcement officers.
But that bill failed, too. And subsequent efforts, including a stalled bill in Colorado to legally require police officers to report their coworkers’ misconduct, also fell under strong opposition from police unions.
None of this surprises Francesco “Frank” Serpico. Arguably the most famous police whistleblower in U.S. history, he’d grown jaded about police reform long before our first conversation three years ago.
It’s been more than a half-century since the days when his life story became so iconic that Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster movie. Made in the 1970s, “Serpico” earned Al Pacino an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of how Serpico outed his fellow NYPD detectives for taking bribes. Serpico received death threats, and fellow officers abandoned him at a scene with an armed assailant. After the gunman shot Serpico in the head, dispatchers relayed that shots had been fired but not that an officer was wounded.
Now 88, Serpico has outlived all of the men who left him for dead.
In his view, little has changed. He often follows up our conversations by texting me news clippings like this one chronicling police corruption, followed by an eyeroll emoji.
“It’s like the old expression, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same,’” Serpico told me about police whistleblower reforms when we caught up on the phone recently. “These things aren’t going to change overnight, if they change at all.”
Handle still sees potential for a cultural shift in police departments. He told lawmakers Tuesday that officers like him are the ones that people say they want in their communities. The supervisor he exposed resigned during an internal investigation, and a jury recently awarded $180,000 in damages to one of the victims.
Handle moved out of Georgia and is still thinking of applying to a police department near his new home.
“Whistleblowers of all types will never be safe or truly protected until we protect law enforcement whistleblowers,” Handle told the crowd Tuesday. Referring to police officers, he added: “They will be the ones one day, locally and at scale, to enforce the protections we create.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that it was Frank Serpico’s partners who told dispatchers that shots had been fired.
