NEW NORFOLK POLICE OVERSIGHT
Chief Larry Boone has approved a new Citizen Oversight Board, which will allow communities to provide input into the ongoings of local officers.
NORFOLK — Like most police forces, Norfolk’s has long relied on its internal investigators to root out officer wrongdoing — letting the police police themselves — even though many residents, especially in the city’s poor, black neighborhoods, don’t trust them to do so.
But that could be changing. Police Chief Larry Boone said he supports creating a civilian board that would oversee his department. City Manager Chip Filer said civilian oversight of the department is one of several kinds of police reform that Mayor Kenny Alexander has asked him to research, with marching orders to present his findings at the City Council’s July 14 meeting.
And Councilwoman Andria McClellan last month told The Virginian-Pilot she doesn’t support releasing use-of-force reports in which police officers detail how they hit, pepper spray, Taser and shoot people. But, McClellan added, she and other city leaders should create a citizen review panel that would have access to those reports.
“That would be another layer of oversight, and I think that’s what people are looking for,” she said.
But not all civilian oversight is created equal. Liana Perez, director of operations for the nonprofit National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, said Norfolk’s leaders will have to decide what they want from oversight and how much they’re willing to spend.
The association, in its 2016 report “Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement: A Review of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Various Models,” identifies three main models that vary in how much independence and authority they have, as well as in how much they cost.
The main models: review-focused, which are the most common and have the least power. Typically they consist of civilians who review police internal investigations after they’re done and make recommendations. They have limited resources and usually don’t do their own investigations, but they ensure residents have some input and can increase public trust.
investigation-focused, which have civilian investigators and conduct their own reviews of complaints against officers. Such boards can either replace or be in addition to police internal affairs units. Such systems are expensive to run and often face pushback from police, but can lead to greater public trust because their investigators are independent of the police.
a u d i t o r / mo n i t o r-f o - cused, which are the newest and least common kind of oversight board. Such boards have independent investigators who typically examine broad patterns in complaints, rather than individual cases. They can make recommendations that lead to systemic change in departments, but can be less effective in increasing public trust since they don’t investigate individual complaints.
Since the start of the protest movement sparked in part by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police on Memorial Day, Perez said she’s gotten “a ton” of calls, many from city managers and mayors saying “we need to create oversight like yesterday,” and trying to figure out what form it should take. (Perez said she hasn’t heard from Norfolk.)
The most common question she gets: What’s the best model?
“My response is always … what is going to be most effective in your community based on what you’re trying to accomplish in your community?” she said. “So it’s really a process of (figuring out) what the community’s needs are.”
Virginia Beach has a “review-focused” board, the Investigation Review Panel, which was created in 1991, two years after clashes between police and thousands of black college students who’d come to the Oceanfront for Greekfest.
Butch Bracknell, who chaired the panel for two years, called it “a token gesture, with no real power to hold the police department accountable,” in a June 21 opinion piece he wrote for The Pilot.
His knocks against the panel he once led echo many of the criticisms of the review model generally: The panel only reviewed cases after the department’s internal affairs division finished investigating, and that review often happened months later. The panel didn’t have the power to compel witnesses or demand someone turn over evidence. And there are no transcripts of their proceedings that the public could see
Moreover, neither the police chief nor the city manager are required to respond to any of the panels recommendations, Bracknell wrote.
“If you were creating a process that appears to be an accountability mechanism, while providing minimal real oversight, t he Virginia Beach IRP is what you would construct,” Bucknell wrote. “Thirty years later, while the Virginia Beach Investigation Review Panel remains the paper tiger it was designed to be.”
Perez said Bucknell’s description of civilian oversight of Virginia Beach’s police is not uncommon. Officials in some cities will “prop up” a civilian oversight group for show, but deprive it of any of the tools it needs to do actual oversight.
“That is very crippling right off the bat,” she said. “It has to be appropriately resourced, and I’m not just talking financially.”
Perez’s advice for cities like Norfolk that are starting to consider civilian oversight: Include everyone in the discussion. That means police — if they’re on board, they’ll be much more likely to cooperate with the oversight. It also means community groups such as those who advocate for the homeless and people with mental illness, since gaining their trust is crucial.
Carol Archbold, a criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University and co-author of “The New World of Police Accountability,” said Norfolk should define what success will look like. Many cities in the past have defined it as getting fewer citizen complaints, and thus, consider their oversight project a failure when those complaints go up.
“T h a t ’s kind of backwards, because when you create a board like that, especially when it’s separate from the police department, more people are going to be willing to come forward because they’re not afraid,” Archbold said.
Whatever model it chooses, Archbold said, Norfolk needs to regularly have independent reviews of the civilian board to see how well it’s meeting the city’s goals and whether anything needs to change. She said that kind of followup has been lacking in many cities.
Some of the more effective boards Archbold has studied are those with greater independence from the police departments they oversee and more power to investigate them — they have subpoena power, access to police records, input into disciplining officers, and authority to evaluate the police department’s policies and practices.
“The more power that they have…the more authority or input they have, the more successful they have claimed to be,” Archbold said.
Jonathan Edwards, 757-739-7180, jonathan.edwards @pilotonline.com