Baltimore's chief police spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, took to the radio yesterday to defend a new policy of not naming officers who fire their weapons. It was not a pretty hour of radio. He got taken to task by David Rocah, a staff attorney with the ACLU and David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter and author. In his defense, he had Bob Cherry, the head of the Baltimore police union.

The debate raged just days after a city police officer shot a man in Northwest Baltimore and hours after that man died Sunday night of his injuries. Citing the new policy, city police refused to release the name of the officer but did say he had been involved in two previous police involved shootings.

Guglielmi said the main reason for this policy is concern for the safety of officers. He has reiterated the potential for threats and retaliation in interviews and yesterday on Marc Steiner's radio show on WEAA, as did the police commissioner while testifying in front of the City Council.

Before getting to the show and more information about the latest shooting involving a city officer, let me direct you to a new web site put by the Chicago Police Department's Independent Police Review Authority. For the first time, the authority is releasing to the public the results of investigations into shootings by police. The names of the officers aren't there, but this goes a long way toward assuring the public that its police are investigating these cases. See below for a sample of one of the reports.

Yesterday on the show, we heard time and time again that Baltimore officers are thoroughly investigated by both city prosecutors and the department's internal affairs division. Trouble is, we rarely hear when a shooting has been ruled legally justified and within policy by the department. What Chicago is doing, even without the name of the officer, is putting the case out there, showing how thorough the review is and giving the public an idea that something is being done.

Just a few hours before airtime, Guglielmi answered a long-standing request from the Baltimore Sun to detail the 23 threats made against officers last year. At least nine were considered significant, the spokesman said, but none directly involved an officer threatened because of a police-involved shooting. According to the numbers supplied by Guglielmi, 60 percent of the threats were "threats on police after making an arrest," 15 percent were anonymous, five percent were by suspected gang members and five percent came after a trial (in which the names of the officers are part of the public record regardless of whether they're names are printed in the newspaper). One of the threats was one officer threatening another officer.

The concern here is that police officials are justifying the policy of withholding names because of threats even if those threats are not related to police involved shootings. By combining the two numbers, Guglielmi and the commissioner certainly implied there was a cause and effect, both in interviews and to the City Council, which at the very least is misleading.

On the Marc Steiner show, Guglielmi repeatedly brought up the safety issue, the ease with which names can be traced to address in the Internet age and, by questioning the policy, people are forgetting "the families" of the officers who might suffer. Never mind that again, not a single one of the threats last year were due to a police involved shooting. Simon mentioned rightly that plenty of citizens who testify are targeted and in some cases killed (a case of deadly witness intimidation is going on right now in federal court) and by Guglielmi's argument, no names should be released in any case. Why should citizens be named and cops not if safety is the real issue?

Guglielmi and Cherry kept saying that the only thing the public loses under this new policy is the name, and that everything else is available. But we lose much more than the name; we lose the ability to question, to second-guess, to hold our police officials and by extention the government accountable.

Without the name, we have to trust when Guglielmi says that an officer involved in a fatal February shooting was involved in a previous shooting that was ruled justified. The spokesman told David Simon that in the previous case involved the officer being dragged behind a vehicle, when in fact she jumped into a car after a drug suspect tried to flee, got into a struggle with the suspect over her weapon, which discharged, and then the suspect got hold of her gun and threw it out a window of a moving car.

Simon accused Guglielmi of lying about the previous incident to cover it up, arguing that's the reason not to trust the government to tell the whole store. "We release all information that is pertinent," Guglielmi said at one point. Simon answered, "You release the information that you think is pertinent."

And that's the point. After that shooting in February, The Baltimore Sun requested the police report from the officer's previous shooting in 2005. It's a public document. Guglielmi's office faxed over a copy but blacked out both the name of the officer and the name of the suspect. It was done, we were told by one of the spokesmen in his office, to prevent us from pulling the court case which would contain the officer's name. That's how far the department is willing to go to further this policy. We were able to obtain the court file anyway and obtain the name.

Pressed on blacking out the public police report, Guglielmi said on the radio show that it was an "oversight" to also black out the name of the suspect. Rocah said it's illegal to black out anything on a police report. "You can't redact a name by accident," Rocah said, to which Guglielmi responded, "I apologize for redacting the name." The spokesman then said The Baltimore Sun had requested the reports in connection with the previous two police shootings from the officer who shot and killed the man Friday night. He said on air at 5:30 p.m. that the reports had been provided to the newspaper.

That wasn't true. At that time, we did not have the reports. I called his office and was told they had been faxed internal documents, not the reports, and were still working on getting the correct information. The department sent us one of the police reports by 6 p.m. but said there was difficulty obtaining the second report. This time, Guglielmi's staff did not black out the name of the suspect who had been arrested (they did erase the name of the officer involved in the shooting) but The Sun's police reporter, Justin Fenton, was able to find out the name and it is published in his story on the shooting today.

That story also quotes the City Council president and the chairman of the City Council's public safety committee saying they remain concerned about transparancy in the department and that they might have been misled on the issue of threats. They should be concerned. Members of the public safety committee did little to press the police chief on the policy.

Simon and Rocah both reminded Guglielmi that we don't live in a police state with cops with no badges who can arrest people in secret. Withholding the name of officers who fire their weapons deprives the citizens of this city an important tool to check the conduct of the people who are empowered to deprive of them of their liberties and kill them if necessary. We have open justice in this country and people are entitled to face their accusers.

At one point, Simon told Guglielmi: "State officials cannot go against state law."

Guglielmi: "David, nobody is going against the law." He added, "That's why we have courts."

Rocah: "You might find yourself there."

The names of these officers will come out. There have been seven police involved shootings in this city this year, four of them fatal, involving eight police officers. One name was made public by the police commissioner. Others emerged in public court documents or were confirmed by law enforcement sources.

The officer involved in most recent shooting on Friday of 30-year-old Shawn Cannady is Jemell Rayam. Police say he fired into a car after it struck his partner during a drug investigation. He hit the driver, Cannady, in the chest. In October 2007, Rayam shot a man during a traffic stop after the man tried to drive away. The victim was shot in the hands and was later convicted on second-degree assault.

Just a few months earlier, in June 2007, Rayam was involved in an exchange of gunfire with a drug suspect on Barclay Street in East Baltimore. Rayam was injured in the exchange, suffering a graze wound to the toe. The suspect was wounded.

Here's a sample from the Chicago Police Department site on a closed investigation to a police shooting. It's only two paragraphs from a 10-page report. There are no names, but at least it gives af full accounting of what happened and includes statements from witnesses (again, though, without names):