Document of Interest Provided By Councilmember Hamann on Civilian Review Boards

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C ITIZEN R EVIEW OF P OLICE: APPROACHES AND I MPLEMENTATION 15 SUPPLEMENTS TO CITIZEN OVERSIGHT (CONTINUED) OCC addresses supervisors who share responsibility for officers’ misconduct by charging them with failure to super- vise the accused officer properly.In Banta v.City and County of San Francisco (1998),the presiding judge of the Superior Court dismissed a challenge to OCC’s power to add an allegation against a sergeant for failure to supervise. In the last analysis, supervisor accountability extends to the chief or sheriff, who must exercise active responsibili- ty for ensuring that his or her officers and deputies comport themselves appropriately. If the chief executive will not or cannot ensure proper conduct, it is the obligation of the mayor, city manager, or city council to find a new chief and the duty of the voters to elect a new sheriff. remain untouched. As one commentator observed, “The solution to rotten apples is to fix the police barrel.”12 Some police chiefs and sheriffs agree that they should be held accountable for preventing misconduct, and, if they fail, they should be dismissed. One chief commented, “If IA is not up to snuff, give the chief a chance to fix it, and, if he doesn’t, fire him. So the solution [to police misconduct] is to hold the chief accountable.” Some complainants who lose their cases (and even some who win) feel dissatisfied with the process, the results, or both. Others are frustrated that they cannot find out what the chief’s or sheriff’s finding was or whether and what kind of discipline was imposed. According to Jackie DeBose, a member of Berkeley’s board, “I have run into several citizens who lost their cases, and they were livid— they felt they had been done an injustice.” The Vera Institute of Justice in New York City surveyed a sample of 371 citizens who had filed complaints with the city’s Citizen Complaints Review Board.13 The Vera Institute concluded that “the investigative process itself has a sig- nificant negative influence” on citizen satisfaction because of how long the process took and the lack of contact with and information about the subject officer and the final out- come. Some complainants, and a small minority of the public, will not be satisfied with any actions oversight bodies take. These individuals may have unreasonable expectations of how the police should behave or unreason- able hopes for what citizen oversight procedures can accomplish. Finally, oversight procedures in some jurisdictions have exacerbated tensions among local officials, police and sheriff’s departments and unions, and citizen groups and activists. This worsening of the status quo has occurred for many reasons, such as unrealistic expectations on the part of activists or unrealistic apprehensions by police and sheriff’s departments about what the oversight proce- dure would accomplish; failure to involve all affected parties in the planning process; biased oversight staff; inadequate funding leading to long delays in case pro- cessing; and political motives for setting up the proce- dure on the part of local officials. Despite these limitations, local government officials, law enforcement managers, and citizens in many jurisdictions believe that citizen oversight can be of value. The follow- ing chapters illustrate the potential benefits of citizen review as well as its limitations. Notes 1. Walker, Samuel,Achieving Police Accountability, Research Brief, Occasional Paper Series, no. 3, New York: Center on Crime Communities & Culture, 1998: 5. 2. Snow, Robert, “Civilian Oversight: Plus or Minus,” Law and Order 40 (December 1992): 51–56. 3. Luna, Eileen, and Samuel Walker, “A Report on the Oversight Mechanisms of the Albuquerque Police Department,” prepared for the Albuquerque City Council, 1997: 121. 4. Walker, Samuel,Citizen Review Resource Manual, Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 1995.