Advisory Panel – Citizen oversight or placebo ?
In my neck of the woods...
After several incidents alleging police misconduct, which led to expressions of public concern, the City of Charlottesville, VA, has named a Police Advisory Panel.
One incident on September 28, 2007, involved claims by pedestrians of a Charlottesville police officer driving recklessly towards them. The same police officer then arrested both pedestrians when they verbally condemned his speed. The pedestrians also claim that excessive force was used during the arrest.
According to the trial testimony as reported in The Hook, the two pedestrians, Richard Silva and Blair Austin, were walking towards a parking garage after a birthday dinner in a local restaurant. At the same time Charlottesville police officer Mike Flaherty was speeding towards a call - Silva and Austin were in his path.
Silva threw up his hands and spoke words such as or similar to, “Slow you’re a**” or Slow the f*** down,” at which point Flaherty hopped out of his vehicle and arrested Silva. Austin asked Flaherty why he was arresting Silva. Flaherty then pushed Austin back, knocking her to the ground.
Flaherty charged the couple with being drunk in public and Austin with obstruction. Both Austin and Silva filed a complaint against Flaherty, the results of which are unknown.
Austin and Silva were found not guilty of all charges.
Another incident on November 5, 2007, involved Albemarle County police officer, Gregory Davis, in his police vehicle, striking a handicapped person, Gerry Mitchell, in a wheelchair. While Mitchell was recovering in the hospital he received a ticket from a Charlottesville police officer who investigated the accident. The Albemarle police officer, Gregory Davis, was not charged.
Eventually charges against Mitchell were dropped.
Here is a video clip of the accident:
After these two events and other issues of public concern, the Charlottesville City Council discussed increasing police oversight. The Police Advisory Panel is the result.
As reported by WCAV TV in Charlottesville:
The group is intended to build a bridge between the police department and the people they serve. Charlottesville's Police Chief says it should help strengthen the vision of community policing.
"There are several components to make community policing effective, public trust and open lines of communication are two," according to Chief Tim Longo.
Chief Longo says this new police advisory panel, will help achieve that goal.
"This would be a liaison, a group that would serve as a means to communicate the departments message back out to the neighborhoods that we serve," he says.
Chief Longo says he's looking forward to the opportunity to make the best use of the panel.
He says, "I hope they...begin to see me as a resource of information that will help each one of them and the community as a whole better understand what we do and our service to our community."
"Right now we're talking about citizens advisory panel to the police but in fact this is a group that may be a voice to local government as a whole," Chief Longo adds.
This group will not be involved in matters of police misconduct or disciplinary action, that responsibility stays under the Chief of Police, within the department.
With all due respect, here is what I have to say about it:
The Charlottesville Police Advisory Panel, as described, is not true civilian oversight of law enforcement.
Without true civilian oversight, all that remains is self-policing.
With self-policing, because of police culture, there is still too much room for police misconduct to remain unchecked even in the best of police departments.
Self-policing does not work.
It does not work with young children. If you think it does, try leaving a roomful of kids alone and telling them, “You kids behave now, ok?” Try it with a room full of teenagers and watch what happens.
It does not work with society. “All you citizens out there, we won’t have any police from now on so you all be good. Obey the speed limits and give yourself a ticket if you go over, ok?”
It does not work on Wall Street. “You lenders and big corporations, we don’t have anything in place to watch over you so make sure you behave properly with finances and don’t get our economy in a bind. See to it yourselves, ok?”
It does not work with government leaders. “You government leaders, we don’t have time to keep an eye on you and verify all that you say is true, so please look out for our best interests, ok?”
And it does not work with police departments.
Yes, there are ethical police officers striving to serve the public but the opposite is also true.
Police culture is strong and for many reasons it does not allow for effective self-policing. For true public safety in any law enforcement agency, there must be true civilian oversight. KM
Clearly this line by itself identifies this group as a PR arm of the police department:
"...a group that would serve as a means to communicate the departments message back out to the neighborhoods that we serve"
I mean, it's not even designed to take information from civilians back to the department or city, let alone accept, process, review, or investigate complaints from citizens.
Civilian oversight it clearly is not. Propaganda organization seems to fit better.
Thanks for sharing those incidents as background information to the story, very helpful in understanding the context.
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I agree. It sounds like a shiny PR tool for the police department to educate the public on the elements of its job that we don't understand rather than listening to city residents offer input and offering a process that involves true oversight.
I love civilian oversight and have fought hard for it in my city for over eight years but I've seen especially recently in my own city how police, government, city managers, attorneys etc. can manipulate it and water it down to being totally dysfunctional and ineffective. The latest thing is elected officials (who've always opposed civilian review) send threatening letters to commissioners accusing them of being anti-police when they express concerns about there being two fatal OISs close together. That's a threat of censorship. And most of the commission is hostile to community members and favorable to police because most of them are either active or former police.
Complaints are down. Well not down, but down for the commission. I heard about three dozen in the past couple of months, quite a few involving one officer but you complain against him and the police and the commission exonerate him over and over. He goes back in the neighborhood to the people who filed against him and everyone else and gloats about it. Then he starts harassing them. So the commission doesn't provide anything but potential risk to their safety and wellbeing and that of their families as well. The fear and wariness spread among the neighborhood and people stop filing.
The families of those shot get rude treatment. One commissioner even complained about one woman whose son was unarmed, in a car crash and shot five times. Hopefully at least unaware of what happened to him. She had to listen to them vote to exonerate the officers on the second anniversary of his death. She spoke passionately for justice, fairness and even shared her tears with these commissioners, who joked, laughed and in one case, even flirted with male police officers as she spoke.
There really has to be something better than this. But I'm not sure at this point, what that is.
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Now that our police commission has to wait months, or a year or longer for the police department's permission to initiate investigations into officer-involved deaths, the police department has been releasing these "progress reports" to the public on its own investigations for the various phases. Let's see, phase one must be releasing the criminal record of the person shot and phase two, that will be releasing the toxicology reports.
As far as the officers' backgrounds being disclosed? Nothing, in fact in one case they're withholding the name of the officer involved for "safety reasons". Rumor is that the guy who did this one had anywhere between 2-4 prior shootings on his record whoever he is.
What's really ironic is that on one of the shootings, the officer involved was fired several years ago for very serious misconduct, possibly planting a weapon and lying on a report. He was reinstated in arbitration (easy enough in my state) and the city council voted first not to take him back and then reversed that vote to hire him back.
You can't blame the police department b/c City Hall has more to say about its operations than any police chief does. The city manager tried to make every position down to lieutenant be "at will" but not to the police chief. The last time this was attempted, the police unions came to meetings and protested and it turned out that at least with top management positions in the department what they were doing wasn't legal.
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