Document of Interest Provided By Councilmember Hamann on Civilian Review Boards

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Chapter 4: Staffing Citizen oversight procedures may require three principal types of staff: • Volunteer board members. • Professional investigators. • An executive director. 1 Talented and fair staff in all of these categories are essen- tial for citizen oversight to achieve its potential benefits. Incompetent staff will not be able to perform their respon- sibilities, while biased staff will create conflict that can grind the process to a halt. Staff must also be flexible. Fred Lau, the San Francisco police chief, said: The OCC [Office of Citizen Complaints] execu- tive director is extremely critical to the relation- ship to the police department. If I didn’t have a good working relationship with Mary Dunlap, it would be horrible. She is willing not to be rigid, sit down with department subject matter experts, and talk. She is tough and tenacious, but we have never come to an impasse—we’ve never had to go to the [police] commission for a tiebreaker. C ITIZEN R EVIEW OF P OLICE: APPROACHES AND I MPLEMENTATION 83 KEY POINTS • Citizen oversight bodies most commonly need three types of staff: volunteer board members, professional investigators, and an executive director. • Talented and fair staff are essential for any oversight procedure to be effective. • Because they may have no formal credentials, selecting board members is especially tricky. — Before recruiting board members, jurisdictions should establish the specific responsibilities they expect the board to assume.Then jurisdictions need to decide how large their board will be, members’ terms of office, and their honoraria, if any. — A common selection criterion is to include diversity. Permitting current or former police officers or sheriff’s deputies to serve is controversial. — The process of selecting board members can involve public hearings, private interviews, and word of mouth. — Training for board members can include lectures, materials review (e.g., department policies and proce- dures), attending a citizens’ academy, ride-alongs, and training as mediators. • Some oversight systems involve the use of paid investigators. — Investigators need to be able to handle the potential stress of interviewing sometimes angry complainants and hostile officers. — Many jurisdictions try to hire investigators with a law enforcement background. — Senior staff train new investigators. Novices also learn on the job. • Along with the police chief or sheriff, the executive director or auditor will have the greatest influence on whether the oversight system achieves its objectives. Most jurisdictions make considerable use of word of mouth to find the most qualified individual.