In Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Black residents are three times as likely as whites to have police officers use force against them, Tiffany Crutcher is on a mission to get civilian oversight.
More than 140 such review bodies are operating nationwide, but the influence they have varies considerably — many don’t have much. An oversight proposal supported by Tulsa’s mayor last year struck advocates and some city council members as too weak. Crutcher — whose brother was outside his stalled SUV in 2016 when a Tulsa police officer shot and killed him — wants a review agency with enough authority to prompt change.
The weekend after George Floyd died gasping for air under an officer’s knee in Minneapolis, hundreds joined Crutcher in a march toward Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum’s house. The following Monday, she and other advocates met with Bynum and his police chief and extracted a promise: The city, which says its collective bargaining agreement with the police union stands in the way of stronger oversight, will attempt to negotiate for that authority in arbitration.
As people protesting police brutality nationwide push for broad reforms, strong civilian oversight is one of the demands. But it’s hard to get. The story for more than 70 years has been a struggle between community advocates working to enact it and police trying to block or defang it, with elected officials choosing sides. State laws often serve as stumbling blocks. And year after year, officers keep killing unarmed people like Crutcher’s twin brother Terence, many of them Black men.
The mere presence of an oversight body is no cure-all: Minneapolis has three. Richard Rosenthal, who ran oversight entities in two U.S. cities and one Canadian province, said keys to success include wide-ranging access to police information, paid staff to dig in, a mandate to look at systemic issues as well as individual complaints and political support for recommendations.
“Avoid doing it on the cheap,” he said. If elected officials create an office that meets the bare minimum to look like oversight, “in the end, it’s not going to have the impact.”
Communities keep trying: Roughly a dozen oversight entities were started in the last year or two, according to the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. The group has been inundated with calls in recent days from people who want to create or strengthen local oversight.
“I can’t emphasize enough that we want community oversight with real power,” said Crutcher, who put her work at her Alabama physical therapy clinic on hold to focus on Tulsa police reform. “The fact is, this keeps happening over and over again without consequence. Nobody is held accountable.”
A QUESTION OF POWER
The first civilian police review board dates back to the 1940s. But many early examples of community involvement in policing, including in the 1960s, “were really PR efforts,” said Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“Police chiefs would create these community advisory committees,” he said. “They were always people he picked.”
In 2000, despite renewed efforts to make citizen review meaningful, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the system as a whole remained weak. Most review boards could do no more than make recommendations, the commission said, and few had subpoena power to extract records and ensure witness testimony. Efforts to strengthen these bodies were often met by stiff resistance from police.
A good deal of what that report described 20 years ago remains true today. Half the panelists on the Minneapolis Office of Police Conduct Review, for instance, are police officers — a structure that replaced an all-civilian office in 2012 with the hope that it would improve relations between the community and its police.
The new body has upheld less than 19 percent of the roughly 2,000 complaints they considered from 2013 through 2019, according to statistics provided by the city. Nearly all involved relatively minor infractions that were handled with “coaching,” Andrew Hawkins, chief of staff for the Minneapolis Department of Human Rights, said in an email.
Just 39 complaints over those seven years led to formal discipline. And most of those weren’t ones filed by the public, said Dave Bicking, a board member of the Twin Cities watchdog group Communities United Against Police Brutality.
“Officers treat this whole process as a joke, literally, to the point where we heard many, many stories from people who have been involved in something and say to the officer, ‘I’m going to file a complaint against you,’ and the officer laughs at them,” Bicking said. (cont)
