How effective are police oversight boards? In NC, they have little actual power
Updated July 13, 8:20 a.m. See story for details.
In March 2019, a white police officer shot and killed Danquirs Franklin, a 27-year-old Black man, in the parking lot of a Charlotte Burger King.
Body-camera footage shows officer Wende Kerl repeatedly telling Franklin to drop his weapon. When he moves his hand, she shoots. The video outraged community members who say Franklin was in the process of dropping his gun when he was shot.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department decided after an investigation that the shooting was justified, but Charlotte’s Citizens Review Board disagreed. After Franklin’s family appealed the department’s decision, the board voted unanimously in February that CMPD had “clearly erred” in its finding.
But City Manager Marcus D. Jones sided with the Police Department, according to a letter Jones wrote to the review board, the mayor and the City Council. Kerl returned to duty late last year and was assigned to a non-patrol investigative position with CMPD. .
Demands to increase the power of police oversight boards have gained traction as protests in North Carolina against police brutality continue into their second month since the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis.
The Raleigh City Council voted unanimously this month to ask the state to grant more power to the city’s new Police Advisory Board, which was formed in February.
Subpoena power would allow the board to compel witnesses to testify or force the Police Department to provide additional evidence. Without it, Council Member Jonathan Melton said in a phone interview, the board “lacks the ability to provide any sort of oversight.”
“It’s really important in this moment for Raleigh to indicate that we will work towards a true community oversight board if we are given that authority,” Melton said.
In its recommendations to the CMPD after the Franklin shooting, the Charlotte board requested that CMPD support the board in pushing for this power, too. CMPD rejected the request.
“True justice is never going to happen unless our family member lived and could come back alive,” said Kinard Barnett, Franklin’s cousin. Last month, Franklin’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city.
Barnett is also pushing the city to increase the power of the police oversight board, to give the city council the final say on the board’s determination, and to make the oversight process more accessible.
“I’m hoping that that’s a part of my cousin’s legacy: that there’s some change in the system,” he said.
How other cities’ boards function
Boards in Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Durham have faced similar limitations, as will the board that city councilors voted to form last month in Fayetteville. Support for creating a board has gained traction in Wilmington in recent weeks, too.
Without more authority, boards like Charlotte’s can only review materials that police used in their own investigation of an incident.
In some cities, the boards’ powers are even more limited.
The Raleigh board, according to the city’s website, will not “conduct investigations, hear testimony, or contribute to disciplinary action” or respond to citizens’ complaints. Instead, board members will review department procedures and engage in “educational outreach on Raleigh Police Department directives.”
Members of the grassroots group Raleigh Police Accountability Community Taskforce, who have been pushing for a police oversight board since 2015, declined to even apply for the new board because of its lack of oversight power .
In a statement published June 16 on Twitter, Raleigh PACT wrote that because the board would not be able to conduct investigations, it “will not provide Raleigh citizens, especially those heavily and unjustly impacted by racialized police violence, with any power to hold police accountable. Rather this advisory board threatens to serve as rubber-stamp collective to support police and council’s bare minimum efforts to create a vibrant, healthy Raleigh for all of its citizens.”
A list of demands the group presented to the Raleigh City Council on June 2 included subpoena power for the proposed board to “effectively review and investigate grievances.”
The Raleigh Police Department declined to comment to The N&O on Raleigh PACT’s letter. Last year, Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown said in a meeting with citizens and activists, including Raleigh PACT, that she opposed the creation of a citizen-led oversight board.
“The citizens review board won’t be the be-all, end-all, either. Part of that is simply because police, like all of you and everyone else here, we are human. I must ask at what point does performance become so restricted that officers simply cannot do their jobs? They are the ones running toward danger at the risk of their own lives,” she said.
How the state might help investigators
The boards in North Carolina that are currently allowed to review how police departments responded to citizen complaints have done so only a few times in recent years. Rarely have their findings diverged with those of the department.
“The problem with [the boards] right now is that they have very little effectiveness and very little authority to hold law enforcement accountable because of the laws in North Carolina,” said Dawn Blagrove, executive director of two anti-racist organizations, Carolina Justice Policy Center and Emancipate NC.
Blagrove and other advocates met with Gov. Roy Cooper last month to request an executive order giving the boards subpoena power. When asked by The N&O if Cooper will do that, a representative from his office said “the newly created North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice will consider a wide range of measures, including civilian police accountability boards” but offered no further details.
Repeated attempts to amend state law to give civilian oversight boards additional power have failed.
A 2015 bill in the state House that aimed to prohibit racial profiling would have also authorized citizen review boards to conduct independent investigations. The bill sponsored by Democratic Reps. Rodney Moore, Jean Farmer-Butterfield, Cecil Brockman and Graig Meyer never made it out of committee.
A bill in 2017 specifically written for this purpose also died in committee. One of the sponsors of that bill, Rep. Amos Quick, a Democrat representing the Greensboro area, filed a similar bill in 2018, which didn’t receive a committee hearing.
“That tells you all you need to know right there that someone, whoever was the decision-maker, did not think that this rose to the level of not only getting a committee hearing but also being brought to the floor,” Quick told The N&O in a recent phone interview.
Quick has drafted new legislation he plans to submit as an amendment to a forthcoming regulations reform bill. He says legislators representing other large cities also plan to push this issue in the legislature in the coming months.
“We’ll keep filing these bills as often as we need to so they get the hearing they deserve, and the vote that they deserve and hopefully it won’t take a national tragedy closer to home that will cause others to see the importance of these types of laws,” he said.
There’s support from some officials at the city level. Durham Mayor Steve Schewel told The N&O he intends to put it on his legislative agenda.
“We need to be freed up by the state legislature to have a civilian review board that’s effective, and we’re not free to do that,” he said. He said he’s in favor of subpoena power on the condition that boards be professionally staffed rather than made up of volunteers.
Another review board limitation is that the complaint process requires people to seek recompense from a system they likely distrust.
“When you have certain communities who have such a devastating and adverse relation with an institution, it’s hard for you to get them to avail themselves of a process that is overseen by the same institution that they have the adverse relationship with,” said DeWarren Langley, who has chaired Durham’s police accountability board for 10 years.
The Durham Police Department declined to comment for this story.
Could Charlotte’s model work elsewhere?
In North Carolina cities where a police oversight board is currently active, here’s how the process generally works:
To get a case reviewed, a person must submit a complaint about the conduct of a police officer to the police department, which the department’s professional standards office reviews.
If complainants are not satisfied with the outcome, they can appeal it to their city’s board, whose members are appointed by the city council, city manager or mayor. The board then reviews the materials the police department used in its own investigation and issues a position on the department’s findings and/or recommendations for policy change.
Some boards, like Charlotte’s, can ask the department to overturn its determination, which could lead to disciplinary action against an officer. Others, like Raleigh’s new board, will only make policy recommendations.
In all four cities that currently have active boards, few residents make it through the appeal process. According to a review of police review board activities by The N&O, only a few hearings were held by these boards in total between 2014 and 2018. In only a couple of instances did the conclusion reached by the board diverge from that of the police department.
Not a single hearing led the police department to overturn the determination of its investigation or take disciplinary action.
Similar patterns have played out in cities across the country. In Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with killing George Floyd, had faced at least 17 misconduct complaints, none of which resulted in serious punishment.
Since Minneapolis’ Office of Police Conduct Review was formed in 2012, there have been 2,600 misconduct complaints filed by members of the public. Twelve led to an officer being disciplined, according to The New York Times.
In some cities, police oversight boards have the power to launch full investigations or to discipline officers.
Oakland launched one of the strongest boards in the country in 2016, when voters passed by an 83.2% majority a ballot measure to establish an independent Police Commission. That ballot measure amended the city charter to grant the commission subpoena power, as well as the authority to fire the city’s police chief, which it used successfully in February of this year.
“We have unfettered access to police department records, officers are required to come do interviews with us as a condition of their employment, and three we have the ability to move discipline forward even over the objection of the chief of police,” said John Alden, executive director of the Community Police Review Agency, which is overseen by the Police Commission.
The agency hasn’t had to invoke subpoena power yet, but Alden says the fact that they have it has fostered greater transparency.
“The department has provided things when we ask for them,” he said. “Why go to the point of fighting over that when we all know how that’s going to work out?” he said.
There are still limitations, some of which could be resolved through a ballot measure the City Council is putting on the November ballot. It would allow the Police Commission to have its own legal counsel and inspector general.
NC man’s family calls for justice
In North Carolina, especially tense moments with police have highlighted the boards’ limited power.
After the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department determined the 2016 shooting of African-American man Keith Lamont Scott was justified, his family appealed to Charlotte’s Citizens Review Board.
“What the board was concerned about was whether or not deescalation had been attempted and whether the matter had potentially been escalated further than it needed to so that it ultimately ended in the shooting,” said Julian Wright, a private attorney who advises the board.
The board determined in an initial hearing that there was “substantial evidence of error regarding the chief’s determination that Mr. Scott’s shooting was justified.” After a three-day second hearing, the board was evenly split 4-4. There was a vacancy on the board that city staff had known about for more than a month but that the city had not filled.
The board could not recommend that the chief reverse his decision without a majority, and instead, in 2017, issued policy recommendations: deescalation training and official policies of deescalation and of a “duty to intervene,” according to Wright. It wasn’t until last year that the department adopted a deescalation policy, and it wasn’t until June that it adopted a “duty to intervene” policy.
Scott’s family members are awaiting trial in a wrongful-death lawsuit they filed in 2018 against CMPD and the city.
After UNC and Chapel Hill police responded with pepper spray and arrests at 2018 protests that led to the toppling of the Silent Sam Confederate monument on the university’s campus, the town’s Community Policing Advisory Committee requested a third-party investigation into UNC’s response. It also recommended that the town limit Chapel Hill police involvement on campus.
UNC never responded publicly. Without any formal oversight role or control over campus police, the committee lacked any recourse.
Some advocates are calling for moving beyond civilian review boards, rather than pushing to strengthen them.
Tyler Whittenberg, chief counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, says the boards can run counter to broader reforms to defund the police and to invest in alternatives to policing.
“Civilian review boards typically lie within the police departments, so you’re actually adding resources to the police department — you’re actually adding funding, not defunding,” Whittenberg said.
“They’re meant to placate a public that is angry and tired and upset and wants no more police violence, no more extreme criminalization of Black and brown communities and so they say, ‘OK, we’ll invite you to the table,’ but once you’re at the table you can’t actually change any policies or determine what disciplinary action to take.”
Other advocates share Whittenberg’s vision, but see stronger oversight as a step on the way to these goals.
“To be much more community-based, much less militarized, much more about conflict resolution much less about adding to the penal stem — that is what we reimagine law enforcement looking like,” said Blagrove.
“But until that does (happen), we need some intermediate steps to make sure that they’re not killing us and abusing us and dehumanizing us in the streets.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2020 at 5:50 AM with the headline "How effective are police oversight boards? In NC, they have little actual power."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified the sponsor of a 2015 racial profiling bill. It was state Rep. Rodney Moore, a Democrat. Also, the last name of Dawn Blagrove was misspelled.
