In January 2021, there were 20 interim commissioners. As more members left, the work piled up on those who remained. The commission also changed its quorum rules to make it easier to meet and close cases.Īnderson, who served as the commission’s chair of community outreach, said some volunteers were spending 15 to 30 hours a week on oversight work.īurnt-out commissioners started tendering their resignations. The department generally waits for the commission to review the file, unless that process exceeds the year that’s allocated. Per state law, the San Diego Police Department has a year from the start of an investigation to discipline officers for misconduct. Members turned their attention to the most serious cases, such as shootings and other uses of force by officers, and started prioritizing cases that were set to close soon, said Doug Case, acting chair of the interim commission. Then that summer, in the wake of Floyd’s death, demands for greater police accountability led to a spike in complaints against police, further burdening the already overworked oversight group. When the pandemic struck in 2020, it took the Police Department months to give the new review board internal access to its files - something the old board had been working for years to arrange, Anderson said. The commission’s predicament was complicated by a storm of unanticipated challenges, members said. But it was clear that provisional board didn’t have the members to fulfill its oversight obligations, current and former members said. In the meantime, the council established an interim commission made up of members from the previous review board. For more than a year and a half, the city and community advocates wrestled over the ordinance. The measure replaced the old Community Review Board on Police Practices with a new Commission on Police Practices, an independent oversight board that had subpoena powers and could investigate allegations without having to rely on Police Department resources.īefore it could be created, however, the city needed to draft a legal framework that would govern how the new commission operated - a process that included a lengthy meet-and-confer with the police union. In November 2020, a little over five months after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, San Diego voters overwhelmingly passed Measure B. “We needed more commissioners to do that work.” “As far back as early 2021, we were communicating clearly and explicitly to the city council that the workload was growing,” said Patrick Anderson, a UC San Diego professor who served on the old and new oversight boards over four years. “We’ve taken the same approach to the nomination and appointment process.” “We’ve acted with a balance of urgency and attention to detail to” implement the commission, Elo-Rivera said. “There’s something very wrong with what has happened with this process, and there’s been no adequate explanation for why this process has taken so long.”Ĭouncil President Sean Elo-Rivera said in a statement that city staffers came up with an “an entirely new process” for community members to nominate applicants, and that once those applicants were in, city officials had to review the submissions to ensure they were eligible. “The City Council’s handling of the creation of the commission has actually created more distrust between the community and the City Council and the Police Department,” she said.
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