Good Cops: One expert's look at police accountability and review

David A. Harris wrote a very interesting book, titled Good Cops, which is subtitled "the case for preventive policing". He spends a lot of the book discussing the promotion of change both in individual law enforcement agencies and in the profession as a whole and clearly enjoyed the experience. A lot of issues are discussed in his book, which makes for interesting blogging.

His book looks also at mechanisms including civilian review boards, early warning systems and internal reviews as different strategies to help ensure and promote the accountability which is a crucial component of preventive policing. Important, but not the easiest mechanisms to emphasize or support given what Harris acknowledges about the often stormy relationships between civilian review mechanisms and both police management teams and rank and file labor associations. 

Former Riverside County Superior Court Judge Dallas Holmes recently said in court during a hearing in relation to a Riverside Police Department officer's law suit against Riverside's own civilian review board, he never met a police chief who liked civilian review and the thorny relationships that often exist between police associations and civilian review mechanisms from coast to coast is even more well known and very often discussed. Riverside's own rather brief history involving civilian review brings this to mind. That history is no doubt still being written into this city's record.

In his book, Harris appears to prefer the auditor model of civilian review that's employed by cities like San Jose, California, Seattle, Washington and several others. He states that unlike civilian review boards which focus on individual complaints filed by citizens regarding contacts with law enforcement officers, auditors look at the larger picture of policies and procedures, addressing these things with the goal of improving an agency's operations and service to its officers and to the community. However, in both of the above cities, the auditors have been struggling to do their jobs in an independent manner outside of influence from city mayors, city councils and heads of police departments while clashing over issues including the expansion of investigative powers and disciplinary advisement issues.


In Seattle, there's the mayor's oversight panel and the city council president's oversight panel to evaluate the performance of both the police department's internal mechanism for investigating complaints as well as the auditor's performance. The council president insisted that the two panels won't interfere with each other but will instead complement each other. It will be interesting to see exactly how compatible the two processes are and exactly what lies ahead in Seattle, which has already seen tension between its civilian review mechanism and the chief of Seattle's police department, not to mention the already mentioned mayor over the issues of internal investigations and discipline. 

Controversy also arose in San Jose recently over the role of current auditor, Barbara Attard who wanted more direct involvement in the complaint process at the San Jose Police Department but was denied that by the city council which voted against the proposal. However, Attard recently received assistance from the Santa Clara County Grand Jury which not only stated that her office should receive complaints first but that the whole complaint process needed to be reformed. That's interesting given that the role of an auditor is to look at the larger picture, which would be critical in a situation like this where intrinsic problems are noted by an outside body like a grand jury and solutions are needed to improve accountability in a law enforcement agency's complaint process. Attard works very hard trying to do just that in a difficult job, bring improved accountability to the agency in an often challenging political environment. How much freedom will the City of San Jose give her? 


Attard's interview with the San Jose Police Officers' Association is here where she fields questions from its leadership with both aplomb and candor.


Riverside briefly flirted with the auditor's model for a very short duration, in 1999 when the city council established a research committee to look into possible civilian review mechanisms for Riverside to implement after its residents started pushing for civilian review. In April 1999, the Mayor's Use of Force Panel proposed a series of recommendations including the exploration of civilian review so the city council at the time created an ad hoc committee to explore its options including the auditor's model. The auditor of San Jose who preceded Attard was brought down to discuss the model utilized by her city and the role that she played in carrying out its mission. Maybe she impressed the committee too much while making it clear how precarious her position was in the scheme of things,  because the auditor model was pretty much dropped early on, in favor of committees which were comprised by city residents volunteering their time not paid professionals. 

What became clear is that of all the models, that of the auditor is the most dependent on the character, commitment and personality of one individual to carry it and the trust in local government to place one individual in that role. For San Jose, it appears that its current and past auditors who are both female have been strong, independent individuals committed to carrying out independent oversight of the department's processes and trying to maintain their independence from political pressure at City Hall and from the police department. Not an easy task at all and often very much of a balancing act. It's a constant tug of war, only a civil one that probably tests an auditor's commitment to the job and the faith of a city in its auditor. After all, the goal to hire the best person to fit a job where independence and initiative are the eminent qualities and then pulling on the reins of employees when they become too good at exercising them is what often seems to happen in reality. Also, there's competing interests involved much of the time, like accountability and transparency bumping into civil liability and risk management, often leaving community members on the other side and the outside looking in, wondering if their civilian review mechanism is that much different than the one that it's overseeing. 

It's just as well that Riverside didn't implement an auditor's model, the mechanism also very much liked by Dr. Samuel Walker from University of Nebraska, Omaha in his latest book, The New World of Police Accountability.

After all, Riverside's got its hands full trying to rein in what it does have, the Community Police Review Commission which consists of a board of city residents appointed by the mayor and city council to review complaints. This model, a hybrid of several including those used by Berkeley and Long Beach, also utilizes an executive director or manager to oversee its operations and its operating budget. However, no executive director or manager so far has survived long past the city manager who hired him. Part of that has to do with politics, but there's also the issue of serving different masters. The city manager's office. The city council. The commissioners. The community. Which entities among these can actually fire individuals in these positions? Not the community. 

The history of executive directors or managers has been somewhat rocky in Riverside, not surprisingly given the political climate's tendency to change with the seasons and with each city manager. The city council itself is in constant flux and has been for nearly 10 years as one voting bloc rises for a short period of time, then falls in an upcoming round of elections at the polls. Like with everything else, that's impacted civilian review.

So who have served as executive directors or managers and how have they fared? 

Don Williams, a former Houston Police Department sergeant had worked for the County of San Diego's review board before coming to Riverside after being hired through a search process which included "city" and "community" panels by Interim City Manager Larry Paulson and worked for the commission under former city manager, George Carvalho. Williams was removed from that position by Interim City Manager Tom Evans who reduced what was a full-time position to part-time and assigned it to then Community Relations Director, Pedro Payne who would oversee both the CPRC and the Human Relations Commission.

People in the community had their doubts about whether or not Payne could pull off both positions and some felt that he was intentionally set up by the city to fail. But he didn't. He eventually became full-time executive manager of the CPRC and that's when he was set up to fail by being placed in an "at will" position by City Manager Brad Hudson. Hudson began imposing restrictions on Payne, most likely after city council members who opposed the CPRC directed him to do so. Payne was forbidden to attend community meetings because it would give the perception that he favored the community and was anti-police, even though Payne tried hard to increase outreach opportunities with the police department including roll call training sessions and also meetings with newly hired police officers.

Not that it did him much good as he "resigned" by the end of 2006, after the city launched its campaign to dilute the effectiveness of the CPRC not long after it reached its only sustained finding of misconduct on an officer-involved death that came under its purview for investigation. That's the incustody death which recently cost the city about $395,000 through a settlement after less than two years of litigation. Not surprisingly, the city attorney's office which had been missing in action during the first six years of the CPRC's existence even nixing an appearance at a special workshop in its honor in 2004, was now sending representatives or the City Attorney Gregory Priamos, himself at its meetings. New directives were clearly being given out at City Hall. 

After a search, interview and screening process that took place after Payne's resignation, the team of Hudson and his assistant city manager, Tom DeSantis hired Kevin Rogan, a licensed attorney and former Pomona Police Department captain. Rogan had the law enforcement "credentials" that Payne lacked. Has he faced similar restrictions as Payne did? How wide exactly is the tightrope that he's crossing? The community is not privy to such things or exactly what the relationship is between the commission and City Hall, both in terms of the direct employees and the city council they serve at the will of. The community is left hoping that it's got an independent system in place it can trust. But where does it stand? 

One applicant for Payne's job, who did very well in the screening process gave me a call and peppered me with questions about the CPRC, and all its players. The exodus of commissioners, one right after the other, that took place within nine months caught his eye. So did the obvious, and that's when he asked, if the strings of the executive manager were being pulled by the city manager's office. The answer is pretty obvious if the question is even being asked by someone outside the city, but it's also incomplete, because one can be both  a puppet and the puppeteer and what's become clear is how much invested those on the seventh floor are in the operations of the CPRC, which is as one councilman called it, a "special" commission. 

When Rogan took over the position, community outreach was at its nadir, according to the monthly reports released by the CPRC. Several neighborhoods filed fewer complaints through the CPRC. One, the Eastside, stopped filing them altogether. One of the community organizations based there, the Eastside Think Tank, was handling the complaints it received from community members directly with the department through an informal process, according to a recent article in the Press Enterprise.  Yet go to a community meeting in the Eastside with complaint forms in two languages, English and Spanish, and after the meeting, your hands are empty. What's the CPRC? Where do you file complaints? How does it work? And then you answer the questions for those who haven't been able to do so while all this back room intrigue was apparently going on. 

People often say that community members aren't vested in the CPRC as they should be, but how can you be vested when the city removes the community from the process  and implements changes unilaterally to a commission that was placed in the city's charter in 2004 by city residents not willing to lose it to a city government that didn't want it. Community members aren't as vested as they would be, if the city leaders that are elected believed that it was a mechanism that belonged in part, to the community. But do they? Examine the actions for the past 18 months and you'll find the answer to that question within them. 

When's the last time the city ever asked for input on the process of changing the CPRC, which it clearly has done to its detriment? How about never, especially after the majority of the city council fired former city manager, George Carvalho in 2004 not long before the other fateful vote at the polls when not six months after an anti-civilian review majority was elected to the city council, financed handsomely by political contributions from the Riverside Police Officers' Association. That's probably why there's several groups of individuals researching the possibility of circulating ballot initiatives involving the CPRC, not the least of which is intended to address the increasingly politicized appointment process. 

When I talked to Walker in 2003, I asked him about the trend of police unions trying to weaken or even eliminate civilian review through the election process and he told me that it was a process that began after the litigation by unions against civilian review in the courts reaped few benefits. That was about to play out in the 2003 election cycled in Riverside, though it might have begun as early as 1999 and certainly by 2001, peaking in the 2003 cycle which brought two councilmen to the dais who opposed civilian review. But it didn't take long for the city residents to take their vote, when the opportunity arose in response. 

All this intrigue and actions involving a rather weak form of civilian oversight makes one wonder what Riverside would have done with anything stronger. If anything stronger and independent had been implemented, it probably wouldn't still be around. 

But what if Riverside had taken the road less traveled like San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas? What if Riverside had chosen to go the route of the auditor model?

It's likely that if Riverside had utilized an auditor process instead of its current hybrid model, the city would likely be changing auditors like some people change outfits. One per season. However, people like Walker advocate for this model in spite of it all. It's a crusade that's been more successful in the western part of the United States than anywhere else, but it's not likely such a process would have taken root in Riverside. 

The Core Principles for an Effective Police Auditor's Office written by Walker, outlines what he expects for successful performance by an auditor's office. 

The topic of civilian review is not heavily discussed in Harris' book but is listed as one potential mechanism of several for change. 


Harris dabbles with civilian oversight mechanisms as a means to change a department's culture, but spends more time and energy tackling the very sensitive subject of consent decrees (which are probably on Mayor Ron Loveridge's list of least favorite words, if the legend is true) which are agreements drawn up between cities and counties which have law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice, under a law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1994. Often a list of reforms meant to change a department's pattern and practices is to be implemented in a designated period of time, often decided upon by a judge. Sometimes, cities get released like happened with Pittsburgh and sometimes they don't, like in the case of Los Angeles. 

The first city to be placed under a consent decree was as stated, Pittsburgh and here is a study conducted by the Vera Institute after its completion. At least a dozen law enforcement agencies including those in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, Ohio were under investigation.



The Riverside Police Department was mentioned in the book, during a discussion of pattern and practice investigations. The trend that Harris noted was that more avenues were opening up for these large-scale probes through laws being passed by the state legislation that were similar to those passed by Congress authorizing investigations of police departments by the U.S. Department of Justice through its prosecutory office as well as its Civil Rights Division. One state that passed such a law was California and the State Attorney General's office initiated an investigation of Riverside's police department. Walkill, New York was another city that chose this route, entering into its agreement several weeks after Riverside did. 

Riverside's police department was also subjected to a federal investigation of its pattern and practices but it followed a different path after the election of George W. Bush in 2000 changed the face of the justice department. The federal agency investigated several areas of the department including its canine unit and use of force issues, but not in a more general fashion, though the United States Attorney's office and the Special Litigation Division of the Justice Department sent out a team of individuals to interview community residents in the summer of 2000. I was interviewed one day and two days later, passed by two officers, one of whom said fairly loudly, "I better not say anything to her. I might get into trouble." I guess word travels fast but that investigation as wide-sweeping as it claimed to be in July of 1999, had no public resolution in terms of concrete measurements of gains and thus substantive change, unlike its state counterpart. 

Earlier this year, State Attorney General Jerry Brown initiated a probe of Maywood Police Department after news of wide-spread corruption and misconduct in what's called, the "second chance" department where about one-third of its force including its police chief had been fired from previous law enforcement jobs and/or convicted of criminal conduct. Not exactly a surprise that Maywood's "success story" as some would have called it, was what ultimately put it under a microscope. 


Some police chiefs almost seem dedicated to cutting off such investigations at the pass by initiating their own set of reforms, possibly because the two words, "outside" and "oversight" together form no doubt one of the most feared phrases in law enforcement management. The chief of Denver's police department once sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department with his plans for reform neatly laid out. Denver had been the location of several controversial officer involved shootings including those involving mentally ill and developmentally disabled people not to mention a law suit filed by Latino officers who were backed by a national advocacy organization alleging racial discrimination in the workplace.


A task force was set up in Denver that included representatives of community organizations and of the police and fire departments, to increase diversity in these professions. Here is the report the committee submitted to the mayor of Denver including recommendations it developed to address this issue. Denver's also implemented other reforms in an attempt to improve the pattern and practices of its department.


In San Antonio, Texas, Chief William McManus decided to hire a consulting firm to examine what it calls its "high-risk" policies and procedures including use of force in the face of actions taken by about 30 local civil rights organizations to ask the Department of Justice to investigate the department. McManus' focus is somewhat narrower than that wished by community residents who complained about a variety of misconduct involving San Antonio's police officers. There's a photograph of McManus walking to a meeting with city officials past blown up photographs of battered women who were assaulted by police officers outside several night clubs. 


When Harris wrote about changing the police culture of departments, he drew from examples where there had been some success in that area. He drew some common denominators from those situations, which contributed to positive change.


(excerpt)


Reconceptualizing and changing the mission of policing.

Measuring what matters in police departments, so that police departments do what matters.

addressing the recruiting puzzle, because who becomes a cop has a lot to do with what kind of police department citizens get.

Changing the training that police receive to include an emphasis on human rights equal to the emphasis on crime-fighting strategy and tactics.


Changing incentive and reward structures, so that prevention and service-oriented police behavior are encouraged at least as much as arrests and emergency response.



Harris also states that the crucial elements to foster positive and long-lasting change are having leadership in place who remain committed to achieving the goals set for change over a long period of time, the "generation" of officers that Harris believed in "problem solving becoming the standard". The entire profession has to change to fulfill what Harris envisions it to be. Recruiting and hiring new officers who can be taught the newer way of doing things to replace those in the preceding generation too entrenched in the old "culture". But who is it that teaches newer officers? The field training officers, the supervisors, the watch commanders, in other words, the "older" officers especially in a police department like the Riverside Police Department where the average officer is 23 years old and has about 2 1/2 years on the force. And in a "young" department like that in Riverside, what are the roles played by lateral officers who are hired in part because of their more advanced experience, in instituting this training to newer officers? 

Penny Harrington, a former police chief and founder of the National Organization for Women and Policing said that the field training officers are the "ambassadors" of the culture in the department. She's been an amazing and courageous resource for women who are interested in both the profession and the issues surrounding gender and policing including this one. And she's got a really good manual in print on answering what Harris calls the "recruitment puzzle" by devising and discussing strategies on recruiting and retaining female officers in law enforcement agencies, an especially perplexing and difficult task for most police departments. Despite advances in recruitment and more opportunities, the national average for percentage of women in law enforcement only stands at about 12%, a number which hasn't changed much in recent years, in part because many agencies are steeped in sexism. Riverside's own average is around 9% and any change has been very slow in coming.

 

So changing police culture or the way police agencies do business in communities and with them has to employ the more experienced officers even in law enforcement agencies like Riverside's that have seen high turnovers, the kind that usually accompany internal turmoil and consent decrees with the Los Angeles Police Department being another example. So is it a combination of both, the old guard and the new blood that must foster change within an agency? As Harris stated, bending granite or carving wood? 

The model for what Harris addresses in changing the mission statement of officer training can be exemplified by the newly developed mental health crisis training developed by the Riverside Police Department within the past year. That was a major step. Hopefully with more to come like it. Less than a year old, it's a new program that's already receiving a lot of attention from other law enforcement agencies in the country. 

To be continued. 

Other articles and works by Harris are below.


A Lack of Respect which addresses racial profiling after 9-11.


Bending Granite or Carving Wood, which examines the role of recruitment and hiring in changing the police culture. It's included as a chapter in Good Cops.

Confronting Ethnic Profiling in the United States