Urbana City Administrator Pushes for Less Civilian Oversight of Police Complaints

At the October 26^th, 2020 City Council Meeting, Urbana City Administrator Carol Mitten presented an update on the status of Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) complaints and appeals.

For months, numerous residents have voiced concerns about the shortcomings of the CPRB, and the lack of public trust in the complaints and appeals process.

Mitten’s presentation focused on the dramatic increase in Urbana Police Department (UPD) civilian complaints in 2020 and the impact of City resources from the complaints.

The presentation was not discussed with CPRB members prior to the Council meeting.

According to Mitten:

• Average number of complaints in the past 10 years: 9 per year
• Number of complaints in 2020 (year to date): 92
• 86% of complaints (81 complaints) by a single complainant
• Number of appeals in 2020 (year to date): 62 appeals
• 97% of appeals by a single appellant

In the 12 years since the inception of the CPRB, the board had only held three appeal hearings. Appeal hearings are the crux of the civilian police complaint process – CPRB is tasked with hearing appeals on complaints in which the complainant is unsatisfied with the findings of the Chief of Police after an internal investigation (article here).

“Typically, we don’t have any appeals in a year,” says Mitten. She framed this as a norm, adding that most years, the board does not get many appeals, and that the complaints do not end up as appeals.

However, residents have brought up concerns that the small number of complaint appeals that CPRB sees is a problem, an indication of the lack of trust by the community.

Mitten told Council members that the complaints in 2020 had consumed 500 hours of staff time, costing $42,300 to date. She then projected that it would cost $120,000 to conduct hearings on all the current pending appeals.

However, it is uncertain how Mitten came up with her estimates as she clarified that “we do not track the number of hours that we spend.” Mitten’s numbers also seemed disingenuous as she failed to mention that appeals were being grouped to lessen the number of appeal hearings the board would conduct.

Mitten classified the complaints as administrative/procedural, car/minor operational (minor traffic infractions), complaints related to the Aleyah Lewis incident on April 10^th, 2020, and misconduct/other.

According to Mitten, the majority of complaints were lower level and less significant, and that she did not believe that the CPBR was created to deal with these types of complaints. Mitten added that administrative and traffic-related complaints should not be in the system and suggested amending the Ordinance to exclude these lower level complaints.

Mitten then listed categories of complaints/misconduct that warrant investigation in Chicago and Washington DC, as examples of how Urbana could limit the scope of complaints.

“I was kind of surprised when I got involved with the CPRB work and the ordinance, because there is no definition of misconduct, there is no framing of it, anything that anybody wants to put on a police complaint form about a police officer is fair game,” says Mitten of the Urbana’s civilian police complaint process.

This is not the first time Mitten has tried to re-define the meaning of “misconduct”. At the CPRB meeting on June 24^th, 2020, Mitten contradicted Section 321.5 in the Urbana Police Department Policies by claiming that a policy violation by a sworn officer may not be a misconduct.

“We need relief from these lower level complaints,” says Mitten, urging Council to decide if they want staff time to be spent on all the complaints.

Although the CPRB was not consulted by Mitten regarding her update to Council, CPRB members Ricardo Diaz and Scott Dossett joined the discussion to present their views.

“As much as I am quite aware that we have a good police department, I think it’s fair that we have and listen to residents in complaints and appeals at minimum so that we have a sense of everybody’s view of what is going on,” says Diaz.

He then adds, “I’m going to take every complaint as real and important, because right now, the way we are set up, they are that, because if procedure was followed, then it is a legitimate complaint.”

Dossett, the sole remaining original CPRB provided some context to the current influx of complaints.

“In my opinion, the reason for the increase in complaints is the perfect storm of (1) – the Aleyah lewis incident; (2) – poor performance by the CPRB in releasing periodic reports and in its routine function and (3) – the desire of the citizenry to reimagine the primary structure of the CPRB with an alternative approach to transparency,” explains Dossett.

“The poor performance of CPRB and especially in terms of its own control of its own complaint process which was not being observed and had been delegated to the UPD, and the lack of reporting reduces the trust of the citizen in the CPRB’s neutral position regarding incident review,” Dossett adds.

Dossett acknowledged the stress on the system caused by the current volume of complaints, and voiced concerns that there was no guidance in the Ordinance to guide the board on which categories the board should “triage” or defer, limit, or reject.

However, he added, “I am not yet convinced the appropriate resources are available to this board.”

Continuing with the discussion, Council member Shirese Hursey wanted to better understand the intended purpose of the CPRB when it was first established.

According to Council member Dennis Roberts, who had been on the council since the inception of the CPRB, the board was established to address community concerns about the innate bias of police stopping and monitoring black youth and individuals. Residents were also concerned about the lack of transparency and fairness if review of police misconduct was performed internally within the Urbana Police Department.

According to Roberts, advocates of a civilian police review system wanted the CPRB to have subpoena power and to be able to adjudicate officer misconduct. However, this was not possible due to police union contracts that regulate how police officers are disciplined.

Council member Jared Miller added that the Ordinance was inherently flawed the board is not empowered to provide meaningful oversight.

“Oversight implies that you have some sort of authority to factor in, when there is misconduct, there is consequence to that misconduct, and in this Ordinance, I don’t, I’m failing to find anywhere where there are real, actual consequences that can come from a decision from the CPRB,” says Miller.

Roberts disagreed with Miller.

“If there was a serious issue, there is a couple of consequences that could happen. I mean, you know, of course this could have to be pretty much a serious and pretty apparent issue that would have to be adjudicated, but certainly, initially, an officer could be put on administrative leave until a decision has been made. And you know, I thought that perhaps that would have been a very wise direction, you know, concerning the April 10^th (arrest of Aleyah Lewis) event,” commented Roberts.

Roberts added, “Secondly, if that proved to be that there was truly something that had been egregiously experienced, you know, an officer can be let go. You could terminate an officer’s employment with the city, the mayor can do that, the mayor can do both of those things.”

Miller then proceeded to ask if the CPRB had ever found an incident of wrongdoing by a police officer.

According to CPRM member Scott Dossett, CPRB has never found an incident of wrongdoing by a police officer. He was quick to add that this did not mean that the complaint process was not fruitful for the complainant.

“One of the strongest tools that the board has which it hasn’t exercised is this ability to take all complaints, categorize, present, and try to tease data out of them,” says Dossett. “Those opportunities have been missed, and I think we need to stop missing those opportunities,” he adds.

Dossett was referring to the failure of the CRPB in the past few years to access all complaints and provide reports containing information about geographic pattern, disposition of complaint, findings and action taken, demographic information, and frequency of complaints against a particular officer.

During the course of the discussion, administrative or procedural complaints, as well complaints against traffic infractions by police officers were trivialized and referred to as “lower level”, “less significant”, “nuisance”, “frivolous”, “less serious” complaints by Mitten, Mayor Marlin, and some Council members.

Council member Roberts even went as far as to call the complaints “almost like harassment of staff and the CPRB”.

In response to Mitten asking for the complaints to be excluded from the CPRB complaint process, Miller asked, “What do we do with these complaints that we are now all calling nuisance complaints about not using a turn signal or not fully stopping at a stop sign, things of that nature. You know, if I can get stopped and written a ticket for violating the law, why is a police officer not held to the same standard?”

“How would you feel about a police who sat at a particular stop sign and gave everybody who rolled a ticket?” answered Mitten.

Miller remarked that if Council was going to create a triage system to exclude certain complaints, there needed to be a process for accountability. He stressed that minor complaints, if excluded, needed to have their own process.

Council member Bill Colbrook responded to Miller’s concerns, saying that UPD should already have a progressive discipline process to deal with the different types of complaints. Colbrook assured Miller that he was not suggesting that less serious complaints should fall to the wayside.

Miller however, pointed out the flaws of the current system. “We don’t have a transparent system of accountability to show that progressive discipline. If I wanted to go right now to look at, you know, how that policy is being implemented within the police department, guarantee you I can’t find out how it is. There’s no way that information is publicly available right now. It’s kept completely internal. So, what we as regular citizens are left with is just wondering, well I guess we hope they are doing the right thing, even if we have no way of knowing it. And that’s the inherent problem both in transparency, accountability, discipline in police departments everywhere across the country, cause it is all kept behind closed doors. Public employees are given weapons that can kill people and go out on the streets everyday, and I understand what that risk and how dangerous that job can be and I’m not trying to say police couldn’t in some forms serve a great purpose in our society,” says Miller.

As Mitten pressed on for a decision from Council on how to move forward, Miller exasperatedly urged Council to listen to what the public voicing out for months.

“Carol, when you know, you are asking us, what do you want us to spend our money on, I throw myself back into April, when all of this stuff first came up. And I’ve been saying this since then, that people are telling us that they want us to spend our money on different vehicles to answer calls for service. Do I want you to spend money dealing with a complainant that’s making complaints about police officers at stop signs? No. Do I want us to spend time re-writing an ordinance for a board that provides no real discipline for police oversight? No. I don’t want to spend City time on either of these things, because none of them are getting us to where we want to be. None of them show leadership from our City. We’re supposed to be “the progressive City”, we’re supposed to be the people who are thinking … I don’t mean that in a political, ideological way. I just mean that in … we’re supposed to be thinking forward. Some things we do great on, in this avenue, we’re doing horrible on. And it’s just, I don’t know, I just don’t know how else to like, make it clear that these things need, that we are focusing on the wrong things. And I think that what this complainant is doing is trying to make it so bad that we have no choice but to talk about how broken the system is in order to try to fix it because it is in such bad shape that it is … the problems are so big,” says Miller.

In conclusion, Mayor Marlin suggested the Committee of the Whole focus on coming up with a filter/triage system to selectively process complaints.