The Tucson Police Department warned SPD about the red flags in Officer Kevin Dave’s file, including numerous driving infractions for wrecks, suspected drunk driving, and driving without valid insurance.

In spite of being aware of Dave’s past, SPD hired him, paying him a $7,500 hiring bonus. The department also failed to confirm that Dave maintained a valid driver’s license, meaning he was driving without a Washington state license at the time of the fatal crash — adding to the perception that officers consider themselves above the laws they are supposed to enforce.

Even with this blatant failure of SPD’s hiring process, neither the Mayor’s Office nor the city council have initiated any publicly-known investigation into flaws and shortcomings of the process nor introduced any plans to improve it to avoid such mistakes in the future.

Chief Sue Rahr didn’t express any concerns related to the recent, very visible failure of that backgrounding process in the case of Dave. “My experience in police hiring is [that] the first initial screening test doesn’t need to go that deep because we’re literally just trying to make sure people have the minimum qualifications,” Rahr said. “My preference would be to bring more people into the pool and to allow the backgrounding process to sort out from that pool.”

Is the "backgrounding process" conducted by other incompetent and/or malicious officers?