The Long Beach City Council took the first step towards adding reforms to the Citizen Police Complaint Commission on the November ballot.
The Citizen Police Complaint Commission is a group of council-appointed civilians who review evidence and make disciplinary recommendations on police complaints. The commission does not have disciplinary authority, which falls on the city manager.
Criticisms of the power of the Citizen Police Complaint Commission
The commission, created by voters in 1990, has been criticized in recent years. In 2020, former CPCC Commissioner Porter Gilberg called the commission a “farce” with “no decision-making power.”
The Police Department has regularly destroyed officers’ disciplinary files (approved by the City Council, though the document destruction was halted in 2020).
As of June 2020, the City had spent a total of $31 million settling lawsuits for officer use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and officer-involved shootings.
The CPCC does not have direct access to LBPD information such as incident reports, officer statements, dispatch records, or body-worn camera footage associated with the police event that led to a complaint. Instead, they must subpoena information from LBPD.
The CPCC cannot compel officer statements—based on an opinion from the City Attorney’s Office that such statements involve personnel information that is withheld under the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act.
Those criticisms led the council to fund an independent external review of the commission by consultant Polis Solutions (Polis) and Change-Integration Consulting. After a nearly year-long review, Polis presented their findings and recommendations to the council at its Feb. 15 meeting.
Polis-Change Integration team member Kathyrn Olson said that the CPCC model has “inherent limitations” due to redundancy, a lack of community engagement, and a “lack of provision for access to information that is necessary for thorough investigation.”
She noted that current limitations “undermine the accountability and transparency to important goals of civilian oversight” and that community trust of the commission “is in doubt,” according to Polis’s stakeholder interviews.
Consultant’s recommendations for CPCC reforms, addition of auditor/monitor to look at systematic issues
Polis recommended appointing an auditor/monitor who would conduct systematic reviews of police policies, training and operations, as well as oversee the Internal Affairs Office in their investigations.
They would be involved in all officer use-of-force investigations. The auditor would be hired by the city council and report back to them on their decisions and findings. Olson noted that it is “vital” that the auditor has “broad, direct access to department information and databases and personnel.”
Vice Mayor Rex Richardson called the addition of an auditor and charter amendments “systemic solutions to systemic problems.”
Currently, the CPCC, Internal Affairs Office and the city manager review complaints separately, creating “redundancies,” Olson said.
The CPCC would not investigate individual complaints under the recommendation.
“Keeping in mind that they haven’t even had, you know, access to all the information that’s necessary for a thorough investigation,” Olson said. “So they’ve been making investigations based on sometimes limited information.”
Rather than reviewing individual complaints as they do now, the CPCC would work in a community engagement capacity, bringing back recommendations and resident feedback to guide the auditor/monitor’s work.
“The bottom line is that the commission is going to fill that community engagement function that’s been missing for 30 years,” Olson said.
Polis also suggested interim changes to the CPCC that can be made before a ballot measure, such as increasing transparency and providing commissioners additional and ongoing training.
“It’s critically important to have training. The current model allows us to appoint a commissioner, […] they get a few hours of, you know, orientation by staff, and then they’re off, right?” Councilmember Al Austin said. “And then they’re making decisions on cases that may require knowledge about how a police officer is actually trained.”
The CPCC could also take up community engagement by visiting with neighborhood groups, attending city-sponsored events and explaining the role of the CPCC to residents.
More substantial interim changes include sharing city manager case outcomes with the CPCC (including rationale of why the commission’s recommendation was adopted or not), providing the CPCC with all relevant information considered by Internal Affairs, and seeking subpoena enforcement from the City Attorney’s Office.
Council members reluctant given price of restructuring
The total price tag on Polis’s recommended changes is $1.43 million, about $901,000 more than the CPCC’s current budget.
The model would include the auditor/monitor, an audit manager, a manager for critical incidents, two investigators, a communications officer, an executive assistant and current commissioner stipends.
With the current challenges facing the City’s coffers—homelessness, housing, crime and an economic recovery—many council members expressed hesitance to move forward with the pricey structure.
“I will just say that we had better not put something on the ballot that we can’t afford. It’s just that simple,” Councilmember Daryl Supernaw said. “I don’t mean to simplify this, but that’s what we’re staring at right here.”
City Manager Tom Modica said he’d work to whittle down some of the recommended staffing to make the cost more palatable to the council.
Councilmember Al Austin noted that the CPCC isn’t as staffed or funded as when it first came to fruition—though he too was hesitant at the cost.
In a 2020 interview with the Signal Tribune, CPCC Manager Patrick Weithers said, “Over the past two years, we haven’t had a lot of staffing. There was even one point where, before I took this current role, when I was still an investigator with the CPCC, I was literally the only investigator for quite a few months.”
That same year, former Councilmember Dee Andrews said, “This commission cannot continue to be a box to check while reviewing complaints. If we are being completely honest, I have never heard from a single commissioner or this commission more than once. I have never had a briefing from them like other commissions made it a point to do so.”
How the CPCC reforms will, or won’t, make their way to the ballot
Since the CPCC was created by charter amendment, any changes to the structure of the commission will have to be voted on via ballot measure.
Though the council voted to move forward with starting the ballot measure process, it’s unclear whether the item will make it to the ballot.
The Tuesday meeting was the council’s opportunity to provide direction on how they’d like the charter amendment to be structured, but no council members made substantial changes to the recommendation, despite expressing concern with the price and structure.
The vote put into motion the drafting of the charter amendments as well as the beginning of meet-and-confers with affected employee labor groups, including the police department.
It’s unknown how long those meet-and-confers will take, and if the council makes any additional changes to the charter, city staff will have to restart the meet-and-confer process, potentially delaying the ballot process.
On the current schedule, May 24 will be the last day the City has to post notice of the first public hearing of any potential amendments to the city charter.
If the ballot measure doesn’t go on the ballot this year, the council won’t be able to attempt CPCC charter reforms until the 2024 election.
