Thread by @socialistdogmom

tonight’s police civilian review board meeting is in city council chambers. i’m the second person here and very pleased to be sitting in my preferred seat in chambers.

this board doesn’t usually meet in council chambers... we’re missing most of the board here a few minutes after our scheduled start time. maybe someone should go check city space & make sure they aren’t in the wrong venue.

the meeting hasn’t started yet but i’m not complaining because this is the only public body that consistently gets food that both actually feels like it’s open to public consumption & is something i would want to eat.
i’m comfortable saying boards that feed me get more leeway.

tonight’s agenda. starting off with public comment now.

the first speaker says he’s recently retired and only just moved here. he describes himself as a “compulsive data scientist” and has reviewed the arrest data by race & compared it to data from other localities.

“i am not a criminologist,” he says, telling the board “you tell me what your concerns are” and he can do further analysis that would be helpful to them.

board member sarah says one of the problems they’ve had is that the data they do have about things like use of force incidents was not presented in a computer-readable format, so analysis would have to be done manually.

someone in the audience says the data is available in JSON elsewhere on the website but that data may not include the race and gender data which... is kind of the whole point of analyzing the data, so i’m not sure where that leaves us.

no other takers on public comment tonight. it’s not a long agenda. once we’re through approving previous meeting minutes, it’s just discussion of the bylaws & preparation for tomorrow night’s community forum.

tomorrow night at legal aid justice center’s office, the board and the people’s coalition are holding a community input session on the board’s proposed bylaws! it’s at the same time as the city budget session and i’m extremely torn.

facebook.com/events/1068939…

the presentation for tomorrow’s community forum is a work in progress.

recapping what they’ve heard from the community so far about what’s important to us to see in a police civilian review board

harold from the legal aid justice center offers the suggestion from the audience that the CRB should get a line item in the budget to ensure they have sufficient funding to do their work.

board member josh says they need a proposal for council supporting a number for funding.
sarah says it wouldn’t need to be in the bylaws.
another audience member asks if the board is considered in the FY20 budget and sarah says to her knowledge, no.

“we’re gonna ask for a lot of money,” says sarah. “this is not a small expense.”

“none of this is written in stone,” says board member josh bowers. a representative from the national association for civilian oversight of law enforcement (NACOLE) told him this proposal is “innovative, but possible.”

josh is proposing a model with two mostly independent bodies — keeping their department facing activities (reviewing personnel files & IA investigations) separate from their other work. (i assume this would help with the issue of the confidentiality issues with those recor1W87

“both of these units need staff help,” says josh. “at least two staff members” would be hired to make this work.
(it isn’t unusual to have a staff member supporting a board/commission - think of it like charlene green from the office of human rights supporting the HRC)

“the auditor or the investigator [the names he’s given these staff positions] would not be calling the shots” within their respective unit, but would be a voting member on the body.

these staff positions should be someone with some relevant experience, but josh says they should also have community organizing experience. he cautioned against “giving yourselves over to professionalism” and says they shouldn’t be “straight city council or city manager hires”

i really appreciate the casual and open atmosphere of CRB meetings. they’re very receptive to audience participation. but this new guy behind me needs to not interrupt the presenter to ask questions about things we are DEFINITELY gonna get to if he just waits.

one note i have on this presentation so far before it’s finalized for the forum tomorrow — the acronyms CBIC and CBAR defined a few slides ago are brand new, really similar, and functionally meaningless and indistinguishable to me as a listener.

also, CBIC already stands for charlottesville business innovation council.
i demand a moratorium on unnecessary acronyms.

we’re deep in the weeds now

sarah asks to add to the current slide (the second one in the previous tweet) that if the investigator needs to subpoena someone/something, they can request it through the city manager. (this may skirt the thorny issue of granting the body subpoena power)

this (a truly public hearing on a complaint against an officer) seems... extremely unlikely to ever happen.

a public hearing, sarah points out, has many cons, such as the inability to consider any information from IA investigations or the officer’s personnel file, as those are confidential and would require closed sessions to discuss.

josh said it’s important not to get too granular at this stage what that public hearing would look like... and i agree we shouldn’t be getting too deep into details at this stage, but this sounds like something worth discussing because this doesn’t seem in any way feasible to me.

yes the nitty gritty of procedure doesn’t belong in the bylaws, i totally agree! but why write something into the bylaws that may not even be possible and will ABSOLUTELY make the police & others in power balk hard at the mere suggestion.

josh proposes using the same 4 outcomes internal affairs currently uses in investigating complaints

if the investigative body can’t agree on an outcome, the complaint would have to be deemed unresolved.
unclear what happens when the body disagrees with the findings of internal affairs, which will obviously happen.

an audience member asks if they envision the officer showing up for this kind of public hearing. he says it would be a huge step forward for public relations with law enforcement if they cooperated with a process like this, but seems skeptical it would happen.

sarah says this kind of public hearing would have no power to enact any disciplinary measure, which may help when it comes to voluntary participation.

i’m genuinely overwhelmed by the level of detail and ambition of this proposed model. in the sense that i’m just confused and puzzled and very skeptical.
i still can’t quite explain which is which re: the acronyms.

ok it’s not just me - the wrong acronym was used at least twice on that slide but i don’t know in which instances it was right or wrong.

“you can make this public hearing what you want because at the end of the day it’s merely advisory,” josh says.

“these are models for the optimist at heart, but the cynic in me is worried that at the end of the day,” this is just a place for someone to complain publicly and it amounts to nothing. “that is a real risk people need to reckon with,” josh says.

sarah says there is a risk to delegitimizing oversight in general - a public hearing would mean no consideration of IA investigations or personnel files and no power to compel participation. it could easily end up very one sided and looking illegitimate.

my schedule and my life in general are very inconsistent and unpredictable. the only real common thread most days is having to pee really badly but not wanting to miss any slides of a powerpoint.

the dillon rule is dumb as hell and the bane of my existence

board member ms rosia says it’s important that there is some kind of training for members of both bodies. josh says staff would handle some of that.
she also says it’s important for PHAR (the public housing association of residents) to have a seat at the table

sarah says she envisions someone from internal affairs would be present at meetings in an advisory capacity but would not be a voting member. no voting member could be a current member of any law enforcement agency.

also proposed as possibilities as ex-officio, not voting members: a city councilor and/or a retired law enforcement officer or other individual with policing knowledge.

former city commonwealth’s attorney dave chapman (that’s what we call the local prosecutor here in virginia) says they should be clear with the public about what changes to state law would need to be made for them to have the board they envision.

this conversation is important but i already consumed too much law talk today sorry

chapman calls this public hearing model “highly compromised” and says there’s a risk in leading the public to believe it’s viable.
josh agrees. “there is a real possibility this ends up being toothless. i don’t want to hide that.”

an audience member asks what problem having two boards in this model solves that having one body would not solve?
josh says the separation is important because they want access to internal affairs files.

josh says there would be a lot of resistance to the idea of allowing access to privileged information to a body that also conducted public hearings. that business would have to be walled off.

we are running up to the limits of my attention span. i’ve been listening intently and interpreting & transcribing dense complicated language since 1pm!

sarah is now briefly recapping a three-armed body she proposed at an earlier meeting. description of that model begins with the QTed post here:

https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1100548452814147585?s=21

i’m pretty sure most of the discussion of this model is the same as when it was originally presented but the document is too small to read

at least i got my favorite seat here in council chambers. (center section! third row! second seat in from the aisle on the left side of you’re facing the dais! please respect my need to sit in this seat and only this seat!)

ongoing confusion about the confidentiality of personnel records. sarah confirms the board would have to go into closed session to view and discuss personnel files.
the more access the board has, the less transparent it becomes, she says.

harold from LAJC says he was putting up fliers about tomorrow’s public forum & someone in the community expressed skepticism about the board’s future. he urges the board to be clear with the community that this is only a first step & they will continue to build.

“i think there is a real harm in getting this granular tomorrow if it is a false hope,” sarah says about josh’s proposed model

sarah is worried that proposing too many models this close to the deadline for their bylaws will complicate things and prevent them from meeting that deadline.

an audience member asks about the confidentiality of the officer named in the complaint. the complaint itself (and this the officer’s name) is confidential, but the complainant is free to name the officer in a public forum if they choose.

this is an elaborate reconstruction of “who’s on first”

“we have not done community engagement to the level i think the board should do,” sarah says, noting that she sees the same familiar faces at all of the meetings.

three hours deep into this meeting and i’m not sure we’re any closer to anything! even the very zealous data scientist who wanted to participate a lot has given up and gone home. the publication deadline for the local paper was like an hour ago, but they haven’t missed much.

former prosecutor chapman advocates for the importance of an investigator working for the board.

ms katrina asks if other board members heard city manager mike murphy say at the city council meeting that he’d spoken to the board & they said they liked the presentation at the last meeting. every board member said they did hear that and they had not spoken to him.

an audience member says she wants all complaints about police to be made directly to the CRB. (this model has already been dismissed for confidentiality concerns?)

bringing up “new” issues not on the agenda over three hours into the meeting, at nearly ten pm is a pretty annoying thing to do!

sarah asks if any board member wants to do an early morning interview with a local radio station... no takers. with that, the meeting is adjourned.
cville folks: please try to attend the CRB public input session tomorrow night at the LAJC office
facebook.com/events/1068939…

(unless you’re at the budget meeting, which is where i’ll probably be! so many meetings, not enough time! we should finally get the answer about what FY20’s tax rates will be!)