LA MESA APPROVES NEW POLICE OVERSIGHT BOARD

The La Mesa City Council voted 3-2 on Tuesday to create a new police oversight board and retain an independent police auditor to investigate serious incidents and misconduct complaints involving La Mesa police officers.

Mayor Mark Arapostathis, Vice Mayor Akilah Weber and Councilman Colin Parent voted to approve the ordinance. Council members Kristine Alessio and Bill Baber voted against it.

The city’s Police Officers Association had requested the ordinance first go through a meet-and-confer process whereby the officers union could request changes. Lawyers for the union argued in a pair of letters sent to the city that the ordinance would have “a significant and adverse effect on the wages, hours, or working conditions” of the police officers.

But attorneys retained by the city argued that such a process was not warranted because the board can only make recommendations about policy decisions and officer discipline.

According to the city, the new Community Police Oversight Board will direct the independent auditor to investigate all serious incidents involving police, like shootings and in-custody deaths. The oversight board will also have discretion to direct the auditor to investigate misconduct complaints.

The city would contract with an auditor as needed rather than hire one full time.

The board will review each audit and make recommendations, in coordination with the auditor, to the police chief regarding “further investigation, processes and dispositions.”

The board and auditor will also regularly review and make recommendations as to the Police Department’s policies, procedures and practices for regular operations; hiring and promotions; internal investigations of misconduct; community-oriented policing; and “all other areas of policing or La Mesa Police Department policies, procedures, practices and training that the CPOB finds appropriate to review.”

“I am so relieved,” said Janet Castaños, a member of the Citizen Public Safety Oversight Task Force that crafted the proposal for the ordinance. “Now the real work begins.” Castaños was one of the community members who began pushing for more oversight following an incident in January 2018 in which a La Mesa police officer was recorded twice bodyslamming a handcuffed 17year-old girl at Helix High School.

The task force’s work took on more urgency earlier this year when La Mesa became the focal point of local protests against police aggression and racial injustice. Last month, the task force presented its proposal to the council.

“This has been a good three years of work by community members, and a good nine months by the task force,” Castaños said. “The board will now have to be formed, and bylaws created. There’s a lot more work to do. But there’s relief that we’ve taken this big step forward, and we’re glad to get moving in the right direction.”

Weber, who has been a proponent of community members’ police oversight efforts, tweeted her appreciation Tuesday night to the residents of La Mesa, the oversight task force and Arapostathis and Parent for voting with her to approve the ordinance. The demands for the meet-and-confer process by the Police Officers Association threatened to derail the ordinance, and members of the task force who helped craft it viewed the union’s requests as a way to delay the oversight efforts. Ten members of the task force crafted their own letter denouncing the perceived stall tactic.

But the union lawyers wrote that they were not against the ordinance.

“On behalf of the LMPOA, we would like to make clear that there is no opposition to the creation of the Board, itself,” Attorney Bradley Fields wrote in an Oct. 9 letter addressed to the mayor. “That said, as outlined in ... (the previous) letter to you, there are a number of areas of the Board’s and of the Auditor’s jurisdiction that require the City to meet and confer with the LMPOA over the ‘impacts and effects’ of the decision to create the Board.”

Parent said during Tuesday night’s council meeting that he strongly considered the union’s request and took it seriously. But he argued that a legal note from attorneys for the city made it clear the meet-and-confer process was not required.