News-Record.com

Thursday's No. 2 editorial.

Pursuing baseless allegations that Greensboro police officers intentionally destroyed evidence related to the 1979 Klan-Nazi shootings would be both futile and pointless.

An internal investigation concludes that, in 2001 or 2002, officers did indeed discard five to 10 boxes of newspaper clippings. Yet doing so clearly wasn’t a violation of departmental policy or state law.

That should be enough to persuade the U.S. Justice Department to drop the matter. It got involved after the state NAACP asked for a determination if any wrongdoing had occurred.
The City Council rightly said it would welcome an investigation. But much of this turmoil could have been avoided if city officials simply had responded several months earlier when the allegations first surfaced.

They chose not to, saying the information came from a then-anonymous source. So, in February, several local ministers went public with allegations that material relating to the deadly confrontation involving Nazis, Klansmen and protest marchers in an east Greensboro neighborhood was mishandled. Further, they claimed evidence was withheld from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission convened in 2004 to revisit the incident.

These were explosive charges, if true. But the nearly three-month internal police probe determined that only news clippings about subversive groups of that era were thrown out.

Although all of the files legally could have been destroyed in 1999, the city maintains 49 volumes of records pertaining to the shootings, and all were made available to the TRC.

Those documents correctly should be saved for posterity. In retrospect, keeping a few boxes of news clippings on the shelf would have been worth the trouble as well. But discarding them certainly doesn’t amount to a conspiracy to destroy evidence. That material is readily available elsewhere.

While some past departmental actions may merit outside scrutiny, it would be a waste of time to further investigate this one.