The imposition of a days-long information blackout by the Attorney General’s Office following the fatal shooting by police of a Claremont man last Sunday is standard operating procedure in New Hampshire. “Standard,” however, does not mean that this policy is wise, especially in light of the current national debate over the use of deadly force by law enforcement personnel. In fact, the delay is likely to breed mistrust in the objectivity of the Attorney General’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Cody LaFont.

The only information officials released initially was that LaFont, 25, was killed by police who were summoned to his house on Congress Street around 5 a.m. Sunday. Among the questions Peter Hinckley, senior assistant attorney general, declined to address in the immediate aftermath or in the days following was the nature of the call to which police responded, whether LaFont was armed or the name of the officer or officers involved. Nor did he give any timeline for when such basic information would be made public, although autopsy results were released on Tuesday showing that LaFont died from three gunshot wounds to the chest.

Meanwhile, reporting by staff writers Tim Camerato and Jordan Cuddemi indicated that LaFont suffered from depression, and that on at least one occasion previously he had called police to his home multiple times in a couple of hours, evidently in a state of agitation. His mother, Tracy McEachern, expressed confidence that he did not possess firearms at the time of his death, although a Valley News review of court records indicated that he was required to relinquish a rifle in 2013 in an illegal night hunting case. The picture that emerged was an all-too-familiar one of a tragic encounter between police and a mentally distraught individual. No video exists, because Claremont police are not equipped with body or dashboard cameras.

Not surprisingly, McEachern pressed for the release of the name or names of police officers involved. “They released my son’s name and age,” she said in the hours after the shooting. “I think it’s fair that the cop’s name is released as well.” But Hinckley maintained that withholding the name in fatal shootings is vital to the integrity of an investigation, whether the person who fired the shots is a police officer or a civilian. “The reason for that is that we want to be as objective and get the most information — and the most objective information — as possible,” he explained.

If that’s the case, the policy of non-disclosure actually undermines the rationale for it. Investigators should be seeking all possible information related to the shooting, and that can’t be accomplished without publicly disclosing the identity of the officer or officers involved. It is the job of those investigating to sift through everything that comes in, determine which is true and which is not, and which is relevant and which is not. By not releasing names of officers before investigations are complete, potentially important information could be lost. Perhaps the Attorney General’s Office also came to that conclusion, because the officer’s name was finally released on Friday — five full days after the shooting.

Aside from that, authorities need to recognize that withholding basic information can have other negative consequences, as the Upper Valley can attest. In the Zantop case in 2001, the Attorney General’s Office released almost no information for weeks about the murder of the two Dartmouth College professors, thereby inviting national media outlets to indulge in a frenzy of speculative reporting about the motive for the crime that, while it ultimately proved unfounded, caused untold grief and unnecessary pain to the couple’s friends and family. With the advent of widespread use of social media since then, the risk of this kind of thing is even greater.

The broader point, however, is that the time is long since past when people trusted implicitly that investigations of police shootings would yield impartial and objective results. The body count of civilians is too high and the number of officers held accountable too low for that to be any longer the case, especially now that many such shootings are documented on video and widely disseminated. Last year, a presidential task force on policing recommended policies on the use of force that include releasing a summary of events as soon as possible and within 24 hours. “Agencies should communicate with citizens and media swiftly, openly and neutrally, respecting areas where the law requires confidentiality,” it said, recognizing that a delay of even a few days can be damaging to public confidence in the outcome.

That approach recommended by the task force would be what is now known as “best practice,” in contrast to the substandard practice in New Hampshire.