Getting Along with Citizen Oversight - citizen involvement in investigating complaints against police

FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,The,  August, 2000  by Peter Finn

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Unjust Criticism

Many officers complain that oversight staff members hold them accountable for minor infractions, such as placing the wrong offense code on a citation or failing to record the end mileage on a vehicle transport. Also, some administrators feel that complainants take advantage of the complaint process to benefit a planned or ongoing civil suit against an officer or the community.

Through educating civilian review members about police work and informing officers of the benefits that review members can provide, administrators can reduce some of these concerns. In one case, when a citizen, whose complaint a review board did not sustain, filed a civil suit, the city attorney had the oversight investigator testify. This investigator's testimony helped have the suit dismissed.

Lengthy Delays

Delays harm the credibility of the oversight process and cause officers considerable stress as they wait for their cases to be decided. [4] To reduce these delays, agencies first should avoid contributing to them by establishing their own time lines for each stage of the review process. Next, agencies should work with oversight bodies and local government officials to establish deadlines. For example, in Rochester, New York, the city council requires oversight members to review cases within 2 weeks after the police department has completed its investigation. To speed up the hearing process in Berkeley, California, the review board decided to allow the director to recommend that the board summarily dismiss cases without merit.

POLICE STRATEGIES

Faced with concerns about the oversight process, law enforcement administrators have discovered that they can take steps that may short-circuit future tension and lead to a successful relationship with oversight members. First, administrators can initiate citizen oversight systems. For example, the chief of the St. Paul, Minnesota, Police Department decided to implement an oversight system to gain citizens' perspectives on the behavior of the department's officers. The seven-member commission meets monthly to review cases investigated and decided by the department. The members, including two police officers, make their own findings and, in sustained cases, recommend discipline to the chief who makes the final decision.

In addition, when local officials begin talking about setting up a citizen oversight system, administrators can become involved in the planning process. This allows administrators to try to ensure that the oversight system has realistic and precisely specified objectives. Without well-defined objectives, an oversight system can cause the involved parties to have different expectations for how the process should operate and what it should accomplish. For example, specific objectives could--

* reassure the public that the agency appropriately disciplines officers who engage in misconduct;

* provide the public with a "window" on how the agency investigates allegations of officer misconduct;