You would hope that a state agency that regulates alcoholic beverage sales would be as transparent as, say, vodka. (Or at least as translucent.) But the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is turning out to be as transparent as a pint of Guinness.

The agency generally doesn't get a whole lot of publicity. But that changed a few months ago when agents raided a gay bar in Fort Worth and a patron wound up with a serious head injury that somehow never did quite get explained really well.

So you'd think that the TABC would, in the wake of all this criticism, try to be more open. You'd think. Instead, they dodged requests by the Austin American-Statesman to identify the TABC agents who shot a man on Aug. 16 who had been fleeing Austin police officers. As Eric Dexheimer writes on the Statesman's Focal Point blog, TABC also wouldn't identify the man whom they shot, who died several days later.

Police officers do not get to keep their identities secret in a free society. Police officers who shoot people -- whether they're totally in the right or totally in the wrong -- do not get to keep their identities secret in the United States. Maybe in China. Probably in China. Certainly in North Korea. But not here.

It's not just that police officers are paid with our tax dollars. As the daughter of a man who has been a police officer for 29 years now, one who is listed by name in the local phone book (before our county got 911, people having their houses broken into at 2 a.m. would look up my dad's last name in the phone book and call our house -- true story) I think there's an even more fundamental concept at stake, one even more basic than who-pays-whom.

To do their jobs, law enforcement officers are entrusted by us -- through our various levels of government -- with special, broad authority in some circumstances. Everything they do, they are acting in our name and on our behalf -- yours, mine, all of ours.

That's true if they perform heroic feats, like catching that dude in California who kidnapped and held Jaycee Lee Dugard prisoner for 18 years, but it's also true if they do things they shouldn't do, like take bribes or hurt innocent, or even not-so-innocent, people.

Their special, broad authority has limitations on it, limitations imposed by us collectively as a society. In North Korea, the police can just arrest whoever they want, whenever they want, but not here. In North Korea, the police can shoot anyone they like. But not here.

But it comes down to this: The public has a right to second-guess the actions of police officers, especially when someone winds up seriously injured or dead. I have a right to know who those officers are -- those who were involved in shooting the man in Austin on Aug. 15 and those involved in the Rainbow Lounge raid in Fort Worth -- and to seek other information under the state public records law regarding whether the officers have ever been in any prior police-involved shootings, whether they have prior disciplinary records and how much experience they have on the job.

Using that information, I have a right as a citizen to form and voice an opinion about whether the officers in question should have shot this man or whether the officers who raided the Rainbow Lounge were right in doing so.

Will TABC see the light?

UPDATE, 1:53 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, 2009: Read TABC spokeswoman Carolyn Beck's response to this piece.

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