Five days after an undercover officer in a T-shirt shot and killed her husband, Rebecca Insley picked up a Gastonia Police Department form and wrote down what she wanted: “a full and transparent investigation, and full accountability.”
She underlined the word transparent. Where the citizen complaint form asked for the officer names, she squiggled a question mark.
Police Chief Trent Conard wrote Insley back five months later. There was a “thorough investigation,” he assured her, but North Carolina law left him “unable to disclose the details.” Disciplinary actions, he said, were confidential — a part of officers’ private personnel files…