Examiner Editorial: Police watchdog agency deserves reprieve
Examiner Editorial
February 25, 2009
With San Francisco drowning in the red ink of a $460 million deficit, Mayor Gavin Newsom is now requiring all city departments to slice their budgets by 12.5 percent and to plan for an additional 12.5 percent “contingency” reduction. Citywide spending cuts are a necessary response to budgetary desperation, and they provide a fair method of spreading the pain.
However, there are some instances where the one-size-fits-all departmental ax creates irreplaceable service losses for the public. In such cases there ought to be some sort of transparent review process — or at least a determined effort to maintain key services with other funding sources.
The voter-mandated Office of Citizen Complaints, The City’s main watchdog agency investigating public grievances against police officers, is this sort of special case. The agency was created in 1982 by a City Charter amendment ballot in response to voter demand for an impartial body to investigate all complaints filed against officers.
But by 2007, the agency was targeted with a scathing audit by the Controller’s Office, which found that mismanagement and understaffing made it nearly ineffective. The audit said 40 percent of cases between 2003 and 2006 took longer than 10 months to resolve.
The majority of delayed cases had no work done on them for at least 30 days at a time. And sometimes, the Police Department actually refused to supply information the agency sought, or to follow up on disciplinary recommendations before the one-year statute of limitations.
Happily, the watchdog agency seems to have turned itself around since 2007. With new leadership and a larger staff, case closure is improving. Some 60 percent of complaints are now resolved in six months, and 75 percent are resolved by the nine-month investigation deadline.
The agency’s mediation program is a big success. Its 92 percent officer participation rate is the nation’s highest. Instead of waiting months or even years for a complaint to be resolved in a formal hearing, mediation allows the officer and complaining citizen to negotiate their issues in a neutral setting.
Even the Police Officers Association — which ordinarily might be expected to resist any independent oversight of its members — has cooperated with the agency to increase the number of mediations from a handful to more than 100.
But now, the next round of cuts to the agency’s $4.2 million budget would mean the already-burdened watchdog office could lose a staff attorney and an investigator, drastically slowing down misconduct investigations, reviving unacceptable backlogs and destroying those recent improvements.
Public trust in the behavior of our police is a primary community need, so we hope some way can be found to halt further staff cuts at the Office of Citizen Complaints.
