Police Accountability. It’s a controversial topic in Oakland, a double-edged sword, which cuts deeply into the fabric of the community.

On one hand, there are the tough-on-crime folks who maintain that desperate times call for desperate measures, and that we should not only maintain higher levels of police staffing, but that police should be allowed to do their jobs, no matter what it takes.

On the other hand, there are the civil rights activists and those concerned about police abuse, who point to cases like the shooting death of Derrick Jones as proof that police are out of control and need to be reigned in.

Where’s the middle ground? The Citizens' Police Review Board.

This City Council-established, city-funded department is responsible for reviewing and investigating complaints of police misconduct brought forth by members of the public. Headed up by Acting Manager Patrick Caceres, the CPRB walks a tightrope between community concern, citizen responsibility, administrative function and bureaucratic policy-maker.

The CPRB is the external counterpart to the Oakland Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division; complaints of police misconduct brought to IA’s attention also are referred to the CPRB as a matter of course and vice versa. The complaints filed will then be noted, recorded, investigated - and if enough merit is found in the complaint - subject to evidentiary hearing review. At that time, the board will deliberate and, based on the outcome, can either recommend dismissal or uphold a complaint.

A complaint that is upheld ("tolled") can typically lead either to a recommendation of disciplinary action against an officer or a recommendation of a change in department policy. Policy changes tend to be somewhat rare, however, and generally result from a clear pattern, supported by data of either ongoing misconduct or situational misconduct resulting from implementation of current policy.

RESOURCE: How to file a police misconduct complaint in Oakland.

The number-one complaint reported to the CPRB, Caceres said, is excessive use of force. “That’s something that we’ve seen each year.”

He said right behind that is verbal misconduct, or rudeness.

“Sometimes an officer might say something in the process of an arrest, [and] the complainant may see it as rude or vulgar or unnecessary,” he explained.

The third most common allegation is failure to act. In that scenario, Caceres said, “A complainant believes that a police officer should have done something, which they didn’t do. For example, maybe they didn’t take a crime report, or failed to make an arrest, or they failed to come out to the scene for a crime, or they just didn’t conduct the action in the way that the complainant expected it to occur.”

Once a complaint is filed, it’s CPRB’s job “to figure out whether or not the officer followed all of the proper procedures determined by the police department,” Caceres said.

If a complaint progresses to the hearing stage, after both sides tell their stories, “our board will, in evidentiary hearing process, deliberate, like a jury would, to determine what are the final findings based on the report prepared by our investigators, and the testimony that was provided at the evidentiary hearing.”

Allegations reviewed at evidentiary hearings can lead to various outcomes.

“Allegations can be unfounded, not sustained, exonerated, or sustained, if the Board determines the action complained of did occur," Caceres said. "And/or they can make specific policy recommendations based on the incident. For example, based on the information, there may be a policy change based on how officers use their Tasers or how officers conduct searches. And that will be included in the final CPRB case summary of the case.”

Allegations of misconduct in and of themselves aren’t always easy to determine – the CPRB has to sift through the available facts, which may not be known until a criminal investigation is completed.

“Most cases are not clear-cut, to be honest with you,” Caceres said. “There’s very few [cases] that we can look at on the face and say, you know, there’s no merit to what that person’s alleging. For those that we can, we do try to filter them out and close them as quickly as possible and then, for all the others, we go forward with a complete investigation.”

CPRB investigators, Caceres said, do a thorough job of checking out any reported incident, collecting police reports and medical records, as well as any corroborating evidence such as witness statements, to determine where a claim is meritorious or unsupported by evidence.

CPRB Investigator Karen Tom said her investigation process might consist of the following: “I take a look at the complaint, I interview the complainant and any witnesses they might have … . I’ll pull the police report, any related computer-aided dispatch, any type of photographs I might be able to get, and then if there are any other documents, such as a police report, there’s court documents sometimes, people who submit written statements, I’ll review those things, and then, I put the information together and see whether there’s any corroborating evidence, or not.”

In the past, Caceres said CPRB recommendations have led to changes in OPD policy, specifically in the case of vehicle pursuits. And while many complaints made by the public aren’t upheld, the board does keep track of data from each reported incident, which may help to identify patterns of misconduct and lead directly to policy change in the future.

“We also collect data on patterns and trends,” Caceres said. “So while there may not be enough information to sustain an allegation on a particular officer or in a particular circumstance, if there’s enough of them, where it appears that there’s a question, then perhaps there needs to be further investigation into the policy or the practice, or for a particular officer, maybe their behavior, because while there may not be enough evidence, we might see that there’s an ongoing issue.”

Some of this data is available in the CPRB’s Annual Reports (the 2010 version is expected in May). In addition, regular reports of pending cases are on file at the city of Oakland’s website. The CPRB delivers reports to the City Administrator, City Council and the police chief, yet limited resources, Caceres said, prevent the board from pursuing investigations into all cases made against the police. He adds that the complete collection of empirical data from all complaints against the police, for instance, might provide some evidence whether the gang injunctions represent an effective crime deterrent or simply large numbers of members of the community unnecessarily targeted.
 
Last December, CPPB took a bold step into having a greater influence on policy matters with a public policy forum, centering around the topic of bias-based policing. The event, which included speakers such as IA’s Paul Figueroa, Attorney Jim Chanin, East Palo Alto Chief of Police Ron Davis and Univerisity of California, Berkeley, Professor Jack Glaser was a success, Caceres maintains, and bodes well for the future of police accountability as a topic, on a local community level as well as within the law enforcement community and among public policy analysts.

The policy forum helped to raise the CPRB’s profile, which adds to the discussion around Mayor Jean Quan’s efforts to fully fund the board, which could make comprehensive intake of all citizen complaints a reality. As proposed, Quan’s plan will place additional civilian investigators under the CPRB in place of sworn officers in Internal Affairs - effectively adding a great deal of transparency to OPD’s activities. Though that move may be unpopular in some quarters, it is undoubtedly welcomed in others.

Greater visibility, not to mention more leverage on policy matters, would help to counteract CPRB’s biggest problem: by and large, the citizens of Oakland may not know of its existence, and therefore may not report a complaint, which could conceivably lead to a change in how the police can better operate within the community.

Caceres said his hope is for “people to understand that the CPRB exists, and that in addition to filing a complaint with Internal Affairs, that they also [can] file a complaint with the Citizens’ Police Review Board.”

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About Eric K Arnold

Eric K. Arnold has been writing about urban music culture since the mid-1990s, when he was the Managing Editor of now-defunct 4080 Magazine. Since then, he’s been a columnist for such publications as The Source, XXL, Murder Dog, Africana.com, and the East Bay Express; his work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, Wax Poetics, SF Weekly, XLR8R, the Village Voice and Jamrock, as well as the academic anthologies Total Chaos and The Vinyl Ain’t Final. Eric began his journalistic career while DJing on college radio station KZSC, and remembers well the early days of hip-hop radio, before consolidation, and commercialization set in. He currently lives in Oakland, California.