Martin Kaste
NPR
Late last month, a scuffle cut
short a St. Louis Board of Aldermen meeting where a committee was to discuss a
proposed civilian review board for the city's police force. Robert
Cohen/Courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch hide caption
itoggle caption Robert
Cohen/Courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Late last month, during a meeting of the St.
Louis Board of Aldermen, a shoving match broke out among members of the public
— some of them off-duty police officers.
The cause of the tension was a
proposal to create a new civilian oversight authority for the police. Advocates
of police reform like civilian oversight, but police officers say the boards
are often politicized and unfair to them.
The concept of civilian police
oversight isn't new. In 1965, New York Mayor John Lindsay proposed including
civilians on a review board as a way to address complaints from minority groups
about police misconduct. But the move backfired; the police union and
conservatives such as William F. Buckley rallied against civilian oversight,
and voters later defeated the idea in a city-wide vote, returning the the board
to police only. It took more than two decades for civilian oversight of police
to be restored in New York.
The idea fared better in other
cities. In Kansas City, Mo., the Office of Community Complaints was the
brainchild of a personal injury lawyer named Sid Willens. He says his eyes were
opened to the problem of police accountability in 1965, when he tried to get
justice for a client who'd been badly beaten while handcuffed. Willens says the
police department's internal investigation simply confirmed the officer's version
of what happened. "It's like having the fox guard the chicken house,"
Willens says.
Willens proved that his client
had been mistreated — and in the process, he concluded that the Kansas City
police needed what he called an "ombudsman," an independent entity to
address complaints. The department resisted at first, but in 1970 gave in.
"Once the cops got used to
it, it worked," Willens says. "And it's still working, because what
you're doing is simply trying to do what every business tries to do, [which] is
get rid of the rotten apples. And there are very few overall."
Today there are more than 200
civilian oversight entities around the country, though their powers to
investigate and punish officers vary. The entities are usually the product of
contentious negotiations with police unions, which tend to distrust them.
"You need to have an
appropriate mindset towards policing," says Jim Pasco, the national
executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. He believes civilians just
aren't qualified to judge whether a cop followed a department's rules governing
use of force.
"The fact of the matter
is, an officer has to make a split-second decision involving life or
death," Pasco says. "And the civilian review boards tend to, by
definition, be made up of civilians who have no particular experience or
insight into what went through that officer's mind, what the circumstances were
and how desperate things can become in that nanosecond."
Pierce Murphy, the director of
Seattle's police oversight entity, the Office of Professional Accountability
(OPA), doesn't agree. "I don't think it necessarily takes having been in a
squad car or walked the beat to be able to take the evidence, weigh it and
decide whether the rule is followed or not," he says.
Murphy's office investigates
police misconduct. While police sergeants work for him, he's a civilian, and
he's the one who decides whether to pursue a case. The city is now trying to
put even more distance between the OPA and the police department, in response
to Justice Department pressure for reform.
Murphy has moved his office two
blocks away from police headquarters. This way, he says, "People don't
have to go to the police department if they want to complain about the
police."
These days, when federal
authorities investigate a city's police department, one of the main things they
insist on is a civilian review of complaints. It's a philosophy that's in
ascendance again in the post-Ferguson landscape, but it's one that officers
continue to resist, not just in St. Louis, but in other cities as well, such as
Newark, N.J., which announced the creation of a review board last month.
In St. Louis, after the shoving
match, a Board of Aldermen committee gave preliminary approval for the creation
of a civilian oversight authority. The full board may vote on it in April and
May. Mayor Francis Slay told reporters he supports the bill.
