Citizens to Champaign Police Review Board: Complaint Process is Broken

On May 8^th 2019, several citizens attended the Champaign Citizen Review Subcommittee (CRS) meeting to voice their grievances with the Champaign Police Department’s handling of citizen complaints. The CPD has had a complaint procedure for decades, but due to repeated issues with officer misconduct and corruption within Champaign’s department, the City Council created the CRS in 2017 in order to give citizen oversight to the police complaint process. Citizens argue that the introduction of the CRS hasn’t fixed anything.

Emily Klose of Champaign spoke during audience participation and walked the CRS board members through the administrative obstacle course that she’s been navigating for more than a year. Klose’s story begins April 18^th of 2018, when Champaign Police Officer William Killin illegally audio recorded a phone call with Klose, a recording which was later distributed by City of Champaign without any regard for Klose’s privacy. Klose decided to submit a police complaint but was met with endless obstacles. Lieutenant Tod Myers accepted the official complaint form but pretended it wasn’t an actual complaint, then when Klose pushed back, Assistant City Attorney Laura Hall and Community Relations Manager & Compliance Officer Rachel Joy tried to bury it. Frustrated, Klose appeared and spoke in front of the Champaign City Council, and only then would the city actually begin to follow their own ordinance. However, Klose says things only became worse thereafter. The complaint review, performed by Officer Bruce Ramseyer, was done entirely without her being allowed to give a statement or input. When Ramseyer independently determined that his fellow Officer Killin hadn’t done anything wrong, Klose appealed to Champaign’s City Manager, Dorothy David. Klose says David avoided her for 3 months, and ultimately was only able to meet with David after retaining an attorney. “I felt completely blocked out of the whole process.” Klose wants the CRS to reopen her complaint and review it with appropriate input and documentation.

Christopher Hansen of Urbana also spoke at the meeting. Hansen had mustered a police complaint so ripe with treachery and lengthy with misconduct and corruption that he launched a website specifically for it. Hansen pointed out that the citizen trust in the police complaint process is so low that his armature website, which he didn’t do anything to promote and is “just a big block of text,” garnered more Champaign police complaints in the first 12 hours than the Citizen Review Subcommittee has received since its founding in 2017. Hansen went on to explain various failings in the complaint process, beginning with the 30 day time limit, which he says is an abysmally small amount of time given that pending criminal charges and efforts to get public records can take months or years. Hansen also claimed that most people won’t submit complaints simply because there doesn’t seem to be a point – the board has no real power. Hansen closed by saying that “the amount of resources, and tenacity, and stick-to-ititiveness it takes to follow this through are enormous.”  He queried the board, “I’m wondering what you expect others to do, who don’t have those resources?”

Tamara Buch, also of Urbana, explained that the police complaint process is extremely intimidating. Buch contrasted the tedious police complaint process with her work environment at Busey Bank, where she says any employee can submit an anonymous workplace complaint with “two clicks”. Buch says the complaints are investigated quickly and extensively by Busey staff.

Another citizen stood up to take issue with the tight relationships among all of the city staff handling complaints, asking, “do you see how incestuous this is?”

Chairwoman Emily Rodriguez remained receptive and responsive to citizen input, often repeating back what citizens were saying, and even asking questions at times (a meeting tactic that is very oddly considered taboo by city staff). Rodriguez asked staff to schedule a special meeting to discuss changes to the police complaint process, starting with the elimination of the 30 day time limit. Fellow board member Melissa Keeble agreed. Board member Alexandra Harmon-Threat agreed with the general sentiment, saying that only “6 complaints clearly means that something is broken.” Board member Demario Turner echoed the other statements and said he had some of his own concerns about the complaint process. “If this supposed to be a fair and just process, I think that we we’ll need transparency and equality, we have to encourage an environment that’s trustworthy. Otherwise, it’s just the perception of the police policing the police, or investigating the police, and the complaint being investigated through a police lens.”