I think the bigger issue (which another article I read on this last week described, but I sadly can't find it right now) is that low punishment for when it's caught means its more likely to happen and not be caught. There were 3 cases reported in 2015, how many went unreported? If the culture is "oh it's fine, just don't be egregious about it" I expect it's happened a lot more than 3 times in the last year.<p>Do they not maintain proper audit logs? I work for Stack Overflow and I can't look at a user's PII without it being logged in multiple systems, do we have higher internal security than the police department?
The buried lede: one of the officers used the information to drive to the victim's house and threaten him, yet received only a written reprimand.<p>If the situation had been reversed, and that man had driven to a police officer's house to threaten him, I think that man would have been criminally charged or even shot on the spot.
What would be my penalty if I gained access and used the same information they did in exactly the same way? I would certainly be arrested, even if the data was publicly available.
The problem with State-run police is that they live under a different set of laws than the rest of us. We need to start treating all equally under the law, rather than having two classes of people: the State-connected, and the commoners.