Dear Council Members,
In your upcoming vote on the settlement agreement with the MDHR, I hope you will realize how important transparency will be in this process. However, I am not optimistic about that when I see that the Council meeting on Thursday will be mostly a closed session. I hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to have all of the discussion in closed session and then come back and merely vote in open session, only at that point revealing what you voted on. That’s the process the Council typically uses on legal settlements. Especially on police-related issues, that contributes to mistrust of you, the Police Department, and the process.
Early on, Council Member Wonsley was pushing for community input and feedback once the City-MDHR negotiations had concluded. Lately, though, I haven’t heard those concerns being repeated. Here’s why I think the greatest transparency possible is essential.
Not everyone who is going to be involved in implementing the agreement is convinced that the MDHR findings are accurate. For example, I know that some OPHR staff feel the accountability section of the findings report had errors in it. Commissioner Lucero even told me she agreed with me about an error I pointed out in that section, but that she wouldn’t say so publicly. She said it was up to the City Attorney to raise that objection in the negotiations. (This is the problem with lawyers: the almost sacred adversary process takes precedence over truth.) I am sure that rank-and-file cops similarly believe there are errors, overstatements, or inaccurate conclusions in the report. That’s why we all need to see the underlying factual data that supports the MDHR findings.
If implementation of a settlement agreement is going to proceed efficiently, buy-in from those on the front lines is crucial. No one is in a better position than rank-and-file police officers to create obstacles to that implementation. When Chief Tim Dolan was refusing to discipline police officers in CRA-sustained cases, the Council insisted on creating Police Department buy-in to civilian oversight by having police involved in that process. If you believe police buy-in is needed for that process to work, as you seem to have suggested in your latest revisions to civilian oversight, surely you can see that officer buy-in is needed to implement a settlement agreement.
Moreover, if public trust is at all important on police issues — and you all keep saying it is — then the public needs both to see in detail the factual bases of the MDHR findings and the ability to weigh in on the settlement agreement before you vote on it.
I urge you to bring the greatest transparency possible to this settlement agreement process.
Yours,
Chuck Turchick
Ward 6
