Three St. Louis police associations have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to keep the city from expanding civilian oversight of their police department.
Last month, Mayor Tishaura Jones signed into law a bill that strengthens the city’s two existing agencies — the Civilian Oversight Board and the Detention Facility Oversight Board — and moves them into a Division of Civilian Oversight, a larger entity within the state’s Department of Public Safety. The new division allows oversight officials to access use of force and misconduct complaints, independently investigate misconduct claims, and has director power to discipline law enforcement officers.
“When we put the public back in public safety, we are creating an environment where all members of the community are working towards accountability and safer neighborhoods in the long run,” Jones said during a news conference for the bill signing earlier this month. “If you’re a good officer focused on serving the community … you have nothing to worry about.”
Local police groups say it’s not that simple. In their lawsuit, the Ethical Society of Police, the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association and the St. Louis Police Leadership Organization requested an injunction injunction to keep the law from going into effect. Their complaint? The new legislation gives the civilian-led board too much power to discipline police, which would ultimately push officers out of the force and drive up crime rates.
“We have a horrible situation already recruiting and retaining police officers. Police officers are stressed that … they’ll be targeted by anti-cop groups,” Sherrie Hall, attorney for the Ethical Society of Police, told NBC News.
The mayor’s office said it could not comment on pending litigation. Representatives for and against the measure met at a hearing Wednesday, but Circuit Court Judge Jason Sengheiser didn’t make a ruling on the matter.
Such resistance is common, but despite the opposition, civilian oversight is already at work across the land. There were about 200 oversight entities in the U.S. prior to 2020, according to the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. And in November 2020, after a swath of police violence protests across the country, at least 10 cities and counties approved civilian oversight measures, according to a report from the Lawfare Institute and the Brookings Institution.
One of those cities was Columbus, Ohio, which that year passed a measure to establish a civilian-led board that would launch police misconduct investigations and recommend discipline. Until then, Columbus was the largest city without a review board, City Council President Shannon Hardin said at the time, and voters overwhelmingly supported the measure at 74%.
Similar measures passed elsewhere, like San Diego, which replaced its community review board with a Commission on Police Practices to review misconduct complaints and discipline measures. In Philadelphia, an initiative passed to create the Citizens Police Oversight Commission, with power to issue subpoenas and review police policies.
“The more power and authority the agency is given, the more likely it is that there will be opposition on the part of the police,”
– Richard Rosenthal, Independent Police auditor of pasadenia, california’s community police oversight commission
The St. Louis’ measure grants its new oversight agency the authority many cities and counties have unsuccessfully fought for. City officials held in their response to the police groups’ lawsuit that the groups can’t accurately assess any supposed harm the bill will do before it goes into effect. City officials also said that not implementing the law would do great harm to the city.
To that, Hall countered, “We know we have harm already. People are leaving the force over it and we’re already understaffed.” A spokesperson for the St. Louis Police Department could not confirm the claim, and the St. Louis City Department of Personnel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
History has shown that where there are attempts to improve police accountability, there is often pushback from law enforcement agencies. The Newark Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 12 famously tried to block a 2016 ordinance that gave the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board subpoena power to obtain internal police documents and the authority to investigate officers. The state Supreme Court ultimately stripped the entity of subpoena power.
“The more power and authority the agency is given, the more likely it is that there will be opposition on the part of the police,” said Richard Rosenthal, who served as the independent monitor for Denver’s oversight agency from 2005 to 2011. He is now the independent police auditor of Pasadena, California’s Community Police Oversight Commission.
Police oversight is nothing new
Police oversight of some form has existed in the U.S. since the 1800s, but the first modern civilian review board was established in Washington, D.C., in 1948, in response to use of force by police on Black people, according to reports from both NACOLE and other police oversight experts. Historically, the country’s civilian review boards have faced fierce police opposition, lack of resources, limited power and, as a result, had trouble cutting down police violence and increasing accountability, according to the reports. The number of such boards has slowly risen over the decades, but began to skyrocket after 2010, the reports show. Today, almost all large U.S. cities have some kind of oversight agency, mostly under one of three models: investigation-focused, monitor-focused, or review-focused, with the review-focused model being most prevalent in the country, according to a NACOLE report.
It is difficult to determine the efficacy of the boards overall when their scope of authority varies so widely from place to place. But some agencies have been held up as models of success.
Rosenthal called Denver’s agency the “gold standard” of civilian oversight. In 2004, the city replaced its civilian commission with an independent monitor, and the new entity boasted community collaboration and new leadership. This proved crucial for the agency, which was then able to uncover inadequate police discipline and create a new system for identifying officers accused of misconduct, Rosenthal said.
New Orleans’ Office of the Independent Police Monitor has also seen success, according to Stella Cziment, the acting independent police monitor. The office helped create the New Orleans Police Department’s Use of Force Review Board, which, among other things, requires officers to release their body camera footage of officer-involved shootings within 10 days.
“We’ve definitely impacted and helped reduce officer-involved shootings and use of force. Officer-involved shootings are happening less and when they are happening, they’re adhering to policy and to law,” Cziment said. The number of officer-involved shootings has decreased drastically, from 20 in 2012 to nine in 2020, according to a 2020 report from the office. Incidents of “serious uses of force” also declined from 79 in 2019 to 44 in 2021, according to an annual report.
“We’re definitely doing a lot, and our priorities are sound. But we would like to be doing so much more. We’re a very small team and we’re currently requesting additional funding to be able to expand our team.”
