Citizen review boards need more clout
As the smoke began clearing from protests, it’s painfully obvious many people have lost faith in police.
There’s no simple solution to such a big problem, but it would help if citizens believed law enforcement officers were more accountable to the people they are sworn to protect.
The lack of trust leads to lament like this at last week’s meeting of Orlando’s Citizens’ Police Review Board.
“There’s no changes,” a board member said. “How many more people need to get beaten, tased, harassed?”
Good question. Citizen review boards are supposed to help keep cops in line. But throughout Central Florida (and the entire U.S), the process has been treated more as an afterthought — or window dressing — than a vital cog in the law enforcement system.
A lot of municipalities don’t even have review boards. And the boards that exist usually lack any real authority to probe alleged police misconduct.
Sometimes they don’t even meet because there’s nothing on the agenda, which is fine by law enforcement departments.
They are small groups of regular people who get to poke their noses into police policies and the disciplinary process. That reassures the larger community that everything is on the up-and-up.
That assurance has largely vanished since the George Floyd killing. It’s given way to the notion cops are wantonly beating, tasing and harrassing people, fueling a stark distrust in the law enforcement.
It’s way past time for things to change, way past time for citizen review boards to provide more than just P.R. cover for law enforcement.
Across the nation, the majority of review boards just review internal affairs investigations and department policies, but they don’t participate in the actual investigations of complaints against officers.
Other citizen review boards can conduct their own investigations.
Most boards in Central Florida come in the first form. The Orlando and Orange County boards have nine volunteer members selected by various government officials.
Orlando board chairman Richard Crabtree said his group canceled two or three meetings last year because there weren’t any investigations to review. He said listening to the complaints at last week’s meeting was a wakeup call.
“Maybe we’re not doing all we can do,” Crabtree conceded.
He said the board will start meeting regardless of whether there are any investigations to audit. It will review policies and try to find ways to make policing more effective and less confrontational.
The Orange County Citizen Advisory Council is reviewing the Sheriff ’s Department’s use-of-force policy. Department chiefs should welcome such oversight, though we’re not sure how receptive they’ll be.
When John Mina was Orlando’s police chief in 2018, he praised the city’s citizen review board. Mina was also running for Orange County sheriff at the time, and a few weeks earlier had told union members he was “extremely disappointed in our citizens review board.”
He said if elected sheriff, “There will not be a citizens review board like there is at the city of Orlando.”
There one like it in the county, which is part of the problem. Both lack the ability to do more than rubber-stamp findings the departments hand them.
The boards need more investigative power, but they also must know how to use it.
“If you enact that type of organization, you need to make sure it has proper training,” said Orange County board chairman Allie Braswell Jr.
Board members aren’t private eyes. They need to be able to hire staff that knows how to look under the rocks.
Citizen review board models have wide variations. The board in Oakland fired that city’s police chief earlier this year. We’re not necessarily calling for local boards to have such power, but they should have more input into complaint proceedings.
Whatever forms local boards take, they should be independent, properly staffed and fully supported by the law enforcement departments they oversee.
They need to have a high public profile. They need courageous, dedicated and diverse board members willing to rock the boat and unwilling to be co-opted. They need teeth.
Most of the people in those departments do their jobs well, so they should embrace measures from independent boards that help get rid of bad cops and revise policies that legitimize the use of excessive force.
While places like Orlando and Orange County need more effective boards, other places need to get them in place. Clermont and Longwood are among the cities considering starting citizen review boards.
“We put all the scrutiny on the larger departments, but atrocities and abuses of power are also happening in other places,” Braswell said.
Review boards alone won’t restore faith in law enforcement.
But public trust has never been lower, and the system needs all the transparency it can get if the smoke is ever going to clear.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.