A community-based police oversight board revealed it has reviewed more than three dozen cases while updating Oklahoma City residents on its progress and purpose Thursday.
Since it began meeting in April, the Community Public Safety Advisory Board has reviewed 39 cases — including 22 formal complaints from residents, 14 officer-involved shootings and three in-custody deaths.
The revelation comes as the nine-member oversight board is trying to bring more visibility to its work and to build more trust between community members and police. The Community Public Safety Advisory Board is an independent body that evaluates the complaint investigative process and the results of completed department investigations involving Oklahoma City public safety officers.
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The board conducts most of its business at City Hall in executive session behind closed doors, due to the cases involving personnel issues. However, after the end of the closed session, the board’s chair announces the case number and whether the board is providing a letter of “support” for the police department’s actions or a letter of “recommendation” on how the case could have been handled differently.
So far, the board has sent the chief letters of support for nearly all of the cases reviewed, with the only letter of recommendation being for a most recent complaint reviewed at their Oct. 15 meeting. Andrea Grayson, the city’s Public Safety Partnership implementation manager providing administrative support to the board, said it was important to clarify to the public that the cases the board reviews are already closed.
“The true influence of the board is after the fact,” Grayson said. “Say the board did give a letter of recommendation on a specific case — the influence of the board would be in a future case. If that type of situation came up again, then the chief of police would be able to review our past recommendations on that type of a case. What the board is really reviewing are the actions of the department. Was the action of the department sufficient?”
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Why was the board revamped?
The revamped oversight board, officially established by a city council majority last year, was born out of 39 recommendations made in March 2022. The recommendations — a result of the work of the mayor’s Law Enforcement Policy Task Force, the Community Policing Working Group and the city-hired consultant 21CP Solutions — ranged from prioritizing de-escalation at a higher level, improving officer wellness and exploring alternative responses to mental health calls.
A previous Oklahoma City Police Citizens Advisory Board had existed for two decades, but critics argued it wasn’t able to meaningfully accomplish change because its membership was appointed by the police chief, the head of the same agency of which the board was supposed to provide oversight.
Grayson said another huge problem with the previous board was that most residents — including some city officials — did not realize it existed because of the board’s lack of visibility.
The new board now is made up of members representing each ward, nominated by individual city council members and approved by the council as a whole, as well as an at-large chair appointed by the mayor.
“Council did a fantastic job putting these people together,” Grayson said. “The board is extremely balanced and they are dedicated. They review some tough cases, they review high-profile cases and they really dig in. Sometimes they argue and fight, but they come back together to get the real work done.”
How can residents submit complaints?
Capt. Jermaine Johnson, a longtime Oklahoma City police veteran working with the Office of Professional Standards, regularly presents cases to the board. He said complaint forms against an officer can be accessed and submitted online, by mail or in person to any police station.
The police chief is expected to review the complaint to determine if it should be investigated by the accused officer’s supervisor or by the department’s Professional Standards division. The assigned case supervisor should notify the person who submitted the complaint of next steps, and an investigation occurs, with reports being forwarded to the department’s chain of command.
Johnson said there are multiple classifications regarding a complaint: “unfounded,” if the alleged act did not occur; “exonerated,” if an act occurred but did not qualify as misconduct; “not sustained,” if evidence neither clearly shows nor disproves misconduct; and “sustained” if an alleged act did occur and qualifies as misconduct. (It is also possible for an accuser to withdraw their complaint.) Once a case concludes, the investigative report is presented to the advisory board.
Johnson also noted that current board members were outspoken in their willingness to express opinions and voice their issues with a case. This is markedly different than Johnson’s experiences with the previous version of the board, where he recalled that, “regardless of what happened, everybody was okay” with how cases were handled.
“I don’t think anybody is above reproach, and at times it’s uncomfortable,” Johnson said. “It makes everybody stay on their Ps and Qs, so the way this thing has been revamped is good for all of us.”
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Ward 2’s representative on the board, Nicole Maldonado, is a twentysomething Hispanic community organizer who said she did not have any law enforcement expertise. But after being offered a seat on the board by Ward 2 City Councilperson James Cooper, she said she decided to join after realizing the board would need more perspectives from everyday people.
“We need to have a more diverse city group of people, bringing their experiences, ideas and perspectives to these types of spaces, in order for us to actually represent those issues in a more equitable way,” Maldonado said.
One way Maldonado’s presence on the board has already proven helpful is her suggestion that the complaint forms be made available in Spanish and Vietnamese, in addition to English.
“I am this kind of person that I think a small win is a good win, and I think that’s how we should move forward,” she said.
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What outreach is the board doing?
Maldonado, Cooper, Grayson and Johnson spoke to residents attending a Ward 2 public education session Thursday evening at the Will Rogers Garden Exhibition Center, where the city’s Public Safety Partnership shared information on the complaint process, the board’s review process, and the mission of the board.
The board’s chair, Dianna Berry, a prominent lawyer and former personnel director for the city, also came to observe the session, as residents began asking about the board’s future outreach and efforts to build trust.
“I think the residents were able to provide information and concerns that they have,” Berry said. “We were able to listen to those concerns, and I think it will make us a better board in the long run.”
The board’s work, administrative support for the board, and public education sessions address four recommendations from the 21CP report on police reform, Grayson said.
But for the future, the board is working on providing additional levels of transparency. Assistant City Manager Jason Ferbrache, who oversees law enforcement policy implementation, said the board is exploring how to potentially broaden the board’s review process to include 911 dispatch calls, as the city’s police and fire departments begin ramping up a mental health crisis intervention team.
“We were intentional when we came up with the name of the board, to call it the Community Public Safety Advisory Board because we envisioned the role of the board expanding to really look at complaints and issues with all of our public safety,” Ferbrache said.
The board’s bylaws state that each member’s ward should hold a public information session at least once a year. To Cooper, the Ward 2 councilmember since 2019, the board is a substantive example of changes for which he helped advocate since he was elected.
He recalled how the twofold crisis in 2020 of the pandemic and the social unrest that followed after the murder of George Floyd informed city officials’ work on police reform. Cooper is also an outspoken critic of the traumatic effect of violence on the city’s youths amid a nationwide crisis of school shootings and gun deaths.
“It is about healing childhood traumas that are ailing our students, that are putting them at risk for taking their own lives with guns or taking their colleagues’ lives with guns, from aging into adulthood without access to mental health care and then making them more likely to be the perpetuators of crime,” Cooper said. “Like Clay Bennett once said, there is no such thing as an expendable Oklahoman. We either believe him, or we don’t.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Cases reviewed by OKC public safety advisory board include shootings, complaints
