Police-conduct review board eludes spotlight
LR panel unknown, unused
Four and a half years ago, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. broke a tie of the city’s Board of Directors, casting the vote to create the Little Rock Citizens Review Board.
The review board, according to its proponents, which included Scott, was intended to provide an additional layer of oversight over investigations into citizen complaints of police misconduct by reviewing completed investigations and the department policies that played a role in those investigations.
As it turns out, the review board that was created with a bang has since been little more than a whisper.
In the four years since its first members were confirmed by city directors, the review board has received requests for — and completed reviews of — just two internal investigations into a citizen complaint — both in the fall of 2020.
Since then, the review board has done nothing in three years, despite the community outcry and subsequent political pressure that prompted its creation.
That pressure and outcry were originally sparked in February 2019 by the death of Bradley Blackshire at the hands of now-former Little Rock police officer Charles Starks. Scott, who had only become mayor a month before and who had campaigned on police reform, acknowledged that there were deep divides between residents and the city’s police.
“No one is above the law. In every relationship, particularly between our law enforcement and the communities they serve, requires accountability, clarity and transparency,” Scott said in the days after the shooting. “I believe that relationship between Little Rock and our law enforcement is in need of repair.”
The review board was supposed to be part of that repair effort, and was one that Scott and his original pick to lead the city’s embattled Police Department, Keith Humphrey, both supKYIV,
ported. That didn’t stop the fervent opposition from the local police union, nor did it fully assuage department critics who believed that not enough had been done.
“I was really skeptical about it. … Frank Scott initially started it as a kind of Band-Aid for what we were asking for [in the aftermath of Blackshire’s death],” said local community activist Dawn Jeffrey, an outspoken critic of police.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Morgan, president of the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police, said that the union’s opposition to the review board stemmed from the belief that it was copying what the Little Rock Civil Service Commission already did — a view mirrored by some city directors like Lance Hines.
“I thought it was duplicative of the Civil Service Commission,” Hines said in December. “I think it was the mayor checking a box, because of some pressures he was getting from some parts of our community that we needed this Citizen’s Review Board,” Hines said in December. “Well, even if they make a finding, they don’t have the power of law to do anything other than review it.”
Thursday marked the fifth anniversary of Blackshire’s death. Today, there is little information available about the Citizens Review Board. When faced with questions about the Citizens Review Board and its activities, Scott, the Police Department and the board itself did not provide many concrete answers.
The mayor and the review board’s chairperson, Nikolai Fisken, both declined multiple interview requests for this story.
Efforts to interview current Little Rock Police Chief Heath Helton were unsuccessful. The department did not make him available, despite multiple requests since August. A Little Rock police spokesperson, Mark Edwards, disputes that the department had declined the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s requests to interview the chief.
Aaron Sadler, the city’s spokesperson, sent written statements in response to the Democrat-Gazette’s requests to interview Scott and subsequent written questions in July and December of 2023. Fisken was sent written questions in December after he declined to be interviewed. He referred those questions to Sadler, who declined to answer them.
“These questions imply both that you believe the [review board] isn’t doing enough while at the same time saying the Board isn’t needed. Neither of these implications are rooted in the facts,” Sadler told the Democrat-Gazette.
Additionally, public records for the board were not readily available. Getting the city to hand those records over involved weekslong delays and multiple phone calls to city attorneys and Police Department staff.
Even when the city said it had handed over all the records in its possession, annual reports that the Citizens Review Board is required to create yearly for city directors were not included. At least one report has been created, however, despite it not being released, as obtained meeting minutes from a June 3, 2021, meeting indicate the review board edited the annual report during the meeting. Additionally, some meeting minutes and agendas were not included in the records received by the Democrat-Gazette.
Multiple attempts to determine why the reports were not produced have not been successful, with emails documenting that the Police Department employee assigned as the board’s city staff liaison, Laura Martin, had previously dealt with issues with the cloud drive that was supposed to store the board’s files.
Without the annual reports, there is no definitive overview of the review board’s activities.
A BOARD UNKNOWN
When contacted by the Democrat-Gazette in July 2023, Sadler said the low number of reviews that the review board has conducted is a “testament to the professionalism of our men and women in uniform and the respect they have for the community they serve.”
However, there may be another reason for the low number of reviews — the city and police haven’t been telling complainants about the review board in the first place.
Several people who submitted complaints about their interactions with police say that they weren’t even aware that the review board existed.
Meanwhile, the city didn’t even have a website for the board until July 2023, days after the Democrat-Gazette contacted the mayor’s office about the board.
That website does not contain instructions for how one could ask the board for a review, and multiple conversations with city employees and elected officials also failed to shed light on what the process was.
The Democrat-Gazette also obtained and reviewed hundreds of citizen complaint forms filed by individuals against members of the Little Rock Police Department. Every complainant the Democrat-Gazette was able to contact said they had never heard of the review board, nor had the department or any city employee informed them of its existence as part of the complaint process.
The exception was Jeffrey, the local activist and police critic, who knew about the board due to her activism.
Jeffrey is also one of only a handful of people who have filed a complaint against an officer where the subsequent investigation resulted in publicly disclosable discipline. The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act allows for public disclosure of disciplinary records if they were generated in the course of, or as a result of, a suspension, termination or demotion.
The complaint she filed involved a Feb. 23, 2021, traffic stop initiated by Little Rock officer Jalen Salaam after she made an obscene gesture toward him. Jeffrey filed a federal lawsuit against Salaam and one other officer on Feb. 12, alleging that she was illegally detained and that her First Amendment rights were violated due to the stop.
The internal investigation file indicated that Salaam knew who Jeffrey was. Jeffrey was in the midst of legal proceedings at the time on charges connected to the firebombing of Little Rock, North Little Rock and Arkansas State police vehicles in 2020. Jeffrey pleaded guilty to one count of possession of an unregistered destructive device in 2022 in federal court, and the other charges against her were dropped. Salaam told an officer on the radio that he was going to be on Jeffrey’s Facebook after he realized her identity.
Jeffrey later received a letter informing her that Salaam had violated department policy. The letter did not specify the discipline he would receive. He was suspended for two days, according to police records.
She then appealed the case to the Civil Service Commission in order to educate herself on the process, she said — but only because she thought the review board and the Civil Service Commission were the same thing.
When informed that the commission and the review board were not the same entity, Jeffrey said her misunderstanding could have been prevented if the Police Department had provided information about the Citizens Review Board to her, as it does for the Civil Service Commission in the letters it sends to complainants.
Had she known about the differences, Jeffrey said, she likely would have initiated both a review request and an appeal to the commission, in order to put “everything on the record in as many places as you can.”
“The disciplinary action [Salaam received] didn’t match the trauma that me and my daughter experienced,” Jeffrey said. “I think I would have been a little more at peace with the situation … if [Salaam] simply would have apologized. He never apologized to me. He never apologized to my daughter.”
LeAndra Glover filed a complaint against Sgt. Caleb Monroe after a Sept. 28, 2023, incident where she was placed in cuffs and not told why at the Walmart on South Bowman Road. Glover said she went to the retail store with her child, and Monroe accused her of bringing her child in the store to steal.
Glover, who is Black, said she asked Monroe if he would have leveled the same accusation if she was white.
After the encounter, Glover said she “called everyone she could think of, the mayor’s office, everybody.”
“What I realized in Little Rock — because I’m not from out here — but I realized in Little Rock, the police put fear in these people. They’re scared of them,” Glover said. “I have heard from several people that there’s so many police misconduct filings for the Little Rock Police Department, but nothing happens.”
Glover said she received a letter from the department on Nov. 28, 2023, saying that Monroe had followed department policies during his interaction with her.
She said she had never heard of the review board, like the other complainants, and that no one from the city or the department informed her that it might have been an avenue for her following the conclusion of the department’s investigation.
Similarly, Christopher Surguine filed an unsuccessful complaint against officers Shuhao Kou and Madelyn Weatherford following a June 2021 interaction that left him with bruises, and anxiety and suspicion when near police.
Surguine said he was aggressively “ripped out of my car” and shoved up against
the vehicle’s door after police received a call from someone reporting an individual who was brandishing a gun, without officers giving him the chance to get a word in.
Surguine said he “hated” to file the complaint, but that the incident “kind of freaked me out, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. … I didn’t know what the right thing to do would be.”
“I almost felt like my life was in jeopardy for something that I didn’t even have anything to do with,” Surguine said.
Surguine said he’d never heard of the review board. If he’d known about it, he said, he could have tried to get the investigation into his complaint reviewed, noting that he didn’t think that investigators made the effort to fully investigate his complaint.
“I didn’t really have the means to follow up on it. I mean, who wants to go against the police officers?” he said. “Nine times out of ten it’s going to be a losing fight.”
Michelle Deininger, Yasmine Heard, Gina Wayne, Trenton Humphrey and Corey Taylor were other complainants contacted by the Democrat-Gazette who said they had never heard of the review board and that neither the city nor the police informed them that it was available to review specific types of complaints.
Ryan Davis, who filed the first review request that the review board took up officially on Sept. 3, 2020, and who is active in the Little Rock community, said he believed the reason the review board hasn’t been utilized more is because most people aren’t aware that it exists in the first place.
City Director Brenda Wyrick, after learning about the low number of complaints, said that it was likely that the community is simply unaware of the board’s existence.
“I would think that there would be information provided along the path somewhere,” Wyrick said. “But looking at this now, after this has been in place for a while, knowing that I’ve not seen anything … and I’ve been told [the Citizens Review Board meets] on an as-needed basis only, then it makes it sound like that maybe people are not informed that they have this path to go.”
FINGER-POINTING
City directors, Edwards and Sadler all disagreed on who was actually responsible for informing complainants about the Citizens Review Board and how citizens can request a review.
Neither of the written statements provided by Sadler in January or December addressed the specific process for requesting a review.
“It’s our understanding that residents are made aware of the internal processes related to complaints against a police officer — from internal investigations to the Civil Service Commission process to CRB. To the extent there may be a lack of awareness about the CRB, we are glad you are raising that awareness through your reporting,” Sadler wrote in December.
While many complainants reported receiving a letter at the conclusion of the investigation into their complaint, the letters included language about appealing the department’s decision to the Civil Service Commission and didn’t mention the Citizens Review Board.
After interviewing complainants, the Democrat-Gazette renewed its requests to interview the police chief about the Citizens Review Board. Edwards’ reasoning for why the interview had not been scheduled was that the department was not involved with the Citizens Review Board, nor was it the department’s responsibility to inform complainants about it.
“How is it the Police Department’s job to do that [inform complainants]? The Citizens Review Board is done in conjunction with the city,” Edwards said.
The board’s assigned staff liaison, Martin, is an employee of the Little Rock Police Department. The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Democrat-Gazette with the city regarding the board were redirected to the department for fulfillment.
“The only thing the chief is going to say is, ‘What is it that they want to talk about?’ And I’m going to say, ‘The Citizens Review Board,’ and he’s going to say, ‘What do you want me to talk about? Why not talk to the city?’” Edwards said later in the call when discussing why Helton had not been made available for an interview.
Meanwhile, members of the Board of Directors had differing opinions on who was ultimately responsible for informing the public about the review board, but all who were interviewed — Ken Richardson, Joan Adcock, Hines and Wyrick — agreed that they had not heard anything about the board in years. And none of them recalled seeing the annual reports the Citizens Review Board is required to create for city directors each year. Hines noted that was “probably because they don’t exist.”
But Hines disputed that the Police Department bore responsibility to tell complainants about the review board.
“If [the Citizens Review Board is] not being advertised by the city, then that falls on the mayor and his administration. … If it’s going to be that big of a point of emphasis that he needed to pass the ordinance to create it, then that’s on him and them to advertise and make people aware of it,” Hines said.
Richardson took a different tack, saying that the Little Rock Police Department does bear some responsibility for informing complainants, but that they are far from the only ones who should be doing the work.
“I think they, along with the city board, along with city hall … people should know about that,” Richardson said. “I think there’s a collective responsibility.”
Wyrick said the questions about the review board had left her with some of her own.
“I didn’t really know this was all going on,” she said.