Baltimore police are no longer publicly releasing names of officers who discharge their weapons, a change that defies years of accountability. I'm not exactly sure what prompted this change at this moment; last year, police spokesman Sterling Clifford floated the idea, which we at the newspaper first learned about when attempting to obtain the information. An article at the time prompted the mayor's office to say it would review the proposal before it took effect.

Today's column in the print edition is about this issue as well.

Now, a new spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, has taken up Clifford's quest. He says it's in part to protect officers from retribution and that he finalized his decision after doing several ride-alongs with officers on the street.

It's possible there have been threats made on officers, but so far there hasn't been any convincing evidence put forward. Guglielmi told me last night that the department investigated 23 cases of threats against officers last year; he did not say how many involved officers who shot people.

He also cites a backlash against Officer Salvatore Rivieri, who was on patrol in the Inner Harbor last year when he was caught on tape berating a teenage skateboarder. Yes, the department released the officer's name, but he also shouted it loud enough so that it was heard on the tape that was posted on YouTube -- followed by, "The sooner you realize that the longer you're going to live in this world."

That's an example of an officer whose identity we want to protect?

In the early 1990s, a police officer shot and killed a suspect and was later indicted on manslaughter charges. He was convicted, but the case was overturned on appeal. He had shot an unarmed teenaged driver in the back of the shoulder during a traffic stop, and he argued that his gun accidentally discharged whe the youth backed the car up and hit his hand. The department said his neglegence rose to the level of criminal misconduct.

The shooting sparked protests, and people spraypainted his personal van with the words "killer." But all that happened after he had been indicted and his name made public throught the courts. The Police Department also named him the day after the shooting, and criticized him for failing to notify the dispatcher that he had fired his weapon, delaying the response of detectives. Also in the 1990s, after a police officer shot a youth in the back of a head during as struggle for a gun, protesters marched through the streets holding coffins with the officer's names on the side.

The point is we've had far more controversial police shootings in the past than we have now, and no thought, at least publicly, was floated then that names of cops be withheld.

This is not the time to withhold information from a public that already distrusts the police.

Today's column shows what we learned about Officer Charles M. Smothers a few years ago when he shot a man outside Lexington Market. He was was on the force despite being on probation for shooting at his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. In another case last year, we learned an officer who shot and killed somebody had shot four people in the past.

This is all information we should know, and can't know without having the names of the officers. Yes, other Police Departments do not release names. But others, such as Prince George's County, do. We can go back and forth forever on who does what. Baltimore should do what's right for Baltimore, and we should be building trust instead creating new ways to undermine it.

Gary McLhinney disagrees with me. He's a former long time union chief who represented Baltimore police officers, later served as chief of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police Department and is now a labor consultant. He told me he's been to 200 police involved shooting scenes and that naming officers before investigations are complete "puts them and their families in jeopardy."

He said the officers' children often get teased and made fun of in school. "A department that wants to take care of their officers shouldn’t be releasing the names," he told me. "The name is not being redacted from reports. It's just not being publicly announced the minute the bad guy hits the pavement. Let’s find out the facts. The media is quick to put on so called witnesses ... There's a lot of erronious information that comes out after a police shooting, a lot of it from the Police Department itself. What needs to happen is that everyone needs to calm down to ensure a thorough and fair investigation is completed."

City police say they will release the name of the officer if the department rules the shooting unjustified. If it's justified, apparrently they won't release anything. My problem is that the department doesn't relese the outcome of any internal investigation as it stands now, regardless of how it turns out. And public disciplinary hearings called trial boards are almost impossible to attend because the city refuses to give us a schedule.

That does nothing to assure the public that the case has been handled appropriately.

Last year and the year before, city officers shot and killed about one person a month. One officer was indicted on manslaughter for shooting an unarmed man during a scuffle. You have to go back to 1996 before you find another criminal indictment for a police duty-related shooting. Police do investgate shootings for violations of internal policy -- the shooting may be legally justified but still violate the department's own rules and procedures.

This is dated, but since access to city police has been curtailed in recent years, I have only this to offer. In 1999, I was allowed to review more than 100 internal files on investigations involving police misconduct, including shootings. What I found was that officers were more likely to be disciplined for accidentally shooting their gun while handling it in the locker room than when shooting at a human being.

Time after time I sifted through files that contained only a few pages even though the shootings were listed as "out of policy." Those involved cases in which officers opened fire on cars -- in one case, the officer said he fired at the windshield when investigators concluded the rear window had been shot out. Another officer who fired at someone and missed, only to have a stray bullet graze a child in the head, was written up only for failing to properly report the missfire.

The vast majority of police involved shootings are justified. But the cases in which an officer was recently indicted, the Smothers case in which the officer shouldn't have been on the street at all and the case in which an officer has shot five people over the course of his 19-year career, demonstrate the need for accountability.

Some police argue that their names should be shielded to keep them safe; other police say the names are part of the public record and they owe the public a complete accounting of when their members use deadly force. I worry that this new policy will result in the release of some names and not others.

For example, an officer who shoots and wounds a drug dealer, and then charges the dealer with a crime, will probably see his name in the court charging documents and then in the newspaper. If the person he shot dies, there's no one to charge and then the name won't be released. And if the department insists that releasing the name hinges on the outcome of internal investigations, then we need a system in place to make that information available.

The public needs to be able to assess the integrity of officers hired to serve and protect. Now we'll never know how many times an officer has shot someone, whether berating a youth over a skateboard is part of a troubling pattern or simply the product of a bad day. We deserve to know.

One more bit of irony. Late last year, an officer coming back from the District Courthouse on North Avenue saw a man stabbing a woman on the street. He stopped, jumped from his car and when the man didn't stop, shot him. A woman bystander told the officer to shoot the man and finish him off; the wounded man, who had attacked his wife, begged the officer to shoot him again.

Rightly the officer refused. The woman died. The man survived. Police refused to release the name of the officer, yet his name became public when the man he was shot was charged with killing his wife. We wrote a story about the case, included the officer's name -- Joshua Laycock -- and what the bystander had urged him to do.

City police had one complaint -- that this newspaper didn't make the officer into more of a hero. That from a department that wouldn't release his name and declined our invitations to interview him or his commanders.

In the end, this new policy means the citizens of Baltimore will know less about the men and women who protect them. It will be harder to find out about officers like Smothers, who shouldn't have been on the force and whose shooting, while ruled justified, cost taypayers $500,000. And it will be harder to learn about officers like Laycock, who tried his best to save a life and might well be a hero.