Dear Mayor Frey and Council Members,
You will soon be making appointments to the latest version of civilian oversight in Minneapolis, the Community Commission on Police Oversight (CCPO), I am concerned this is all going to be more of the same. Specifically, I believe we need to ask: Will the new oversight system increase the public’s belief that MPD officers are being held accountable? If not, how will that unchanged trust affect the attitude many have about policing in Minneapolis in general?
I see that among the qualifications for serving on the new commission is that the applicant “does not have a record of taking actions which would undermine public trust in the individual’s ability to conduct civilian oversight of law enforcement in an equitable and non-discriminatory manner.” This really is a curious “requirement.” Of course, the public needs to trust that people appointed to this commission are there to fulfill the commission’s ordinance-described mission. That’s a given.
But we shouldn’t expect public trust in the commission to result only from trust in the individual commissioners. Also needed is a trust in the oversight process itself, in the structure that has been created to improve the conduct of MPD officers. Trust in the Police Department will never happen unless there is trust in the accountability procedures developed for that department. The very existence of civilian oversight is because of a lack, or a perceived lack, of trust by many people in the community. They felt, or City officials thought they felt, that the Police Department was failing to hold officers accountable through the Internal Affairs process. Unfortunately, though we’ve had several versions of civilian oversight in Minneapolis for more than 30 years now, whether the community has trusted those accountability structures and processes has rarely been asked.
For example, in past Minneapolis surveys that have asked residents about their satisfaction level with various City services, departments, and agencies, we have never asked about residents’ satisfaction with or trust in the civilian oversight system. Even though police accountability often becomes a very high-profile issue, we seem not to care whether the public trusts the mechanisms that supposedly have been designed to create that accountability.
Not only have we not asked this question of the public, other than for a couple of years in the mid-1990s we haven’t even asked the participants in the oversight process, the people who file complaints, and the officers against whom complaints have been filed, what they thought of the process. Was it fair? Was it timely? Did it meet expectations? We have no idea what they have thought.
I have raised this issue numerous times over the years, beginning in 1990 when Minneapolis’s first civilian oversight system was created, presumably to increase community trust. Only when the country’s foremost authority on civilian authority, Professor Samuel Walker, developed a brief exit survey form specifically for the City of Minneapolis, did we ever systematically ask the participants in the process what they thought about the process they had been a part of. Unfortunately, we did that only for a couple of years in the mid-1990s.
In subsequent reincarnations of civilian oversight, we stopped asking for that feedback. That is absurd. In a system created due to a lack of faith by significant segments of the community in the previous police oversight process, not to try to find out whether a new oversight structure has increased trust — both by participants and by the general public — is unconscionable. It’s creating government structures for the purpose of creating government structures (or maybe to pacify community outrage), instead of creating government structures to serve the public, to meet a public need.
Moreover, there seems to be a trend of decreased community involvement in creating civilian oversight structures. That is no way to build the needed community trust in the oversight process. For example, in the 2012 restructuring of civilian oversight, the planning was all done in secret. Even the fact that an entirely new process was being developed was kept secret. From everyone, even from the members of the then-existing Civilian Review Authority Board. Until then, every redesign of civilian oversight had included the public from the outset. And now, with this latest change, we’ve gone even further. The eventual new process of oversight, unlike previous versions, which had been included in City ordinances describing the general outlines of the process, is being developed entirely behind closed doors by the Civil Rights Department. Zero community input. It’s as if we are trying to minimize public trust in the process. It’s as if we’re saying to the public: “You want civilian oversight? This is it. Take it or leave it.”
So how should we begin to build trust in the oversight process, and thereby build trust in the police department more generally? Chief O’Hara’s proposed department restructuring, which seems to elevate the importance of accountability and building community trust in those processes, is a good step in that direction. It shows he realizes that building legitimacy through holding officers accountable is as important for effective policing as the operations side of the Department is.
But I believe more is needed. Certain features are essential for building trust in the accountability system, and it seems to me we have yet to come close to incorporating those features in any of our previous versions of civilian oversight. At a minimum, those are transparency, timeliness, and flexibility. I will write more about them in part 2 of this email.
Yours,
Chuck Turchick
Ward 6
