I think it's also important to think about the constituents of an oversight body and you really need a diverse group. You need a diverse group in every sense of that word, in terms of diversity of perspective and age and ethnicity and education and experiences with the police. And so what you need are a group of people who are coming together with very different ideas, but who are committed to making police accountable and making their policies, their processes, their behaviors more transparent. You also going to need people who have some time. And it's really going to be helpful when you're thinking about police oversight in your community, you have people who are interested in the mission of accountability and transparency just because they are interested in the mission. It's not so helpful when people want to do oversight as a platform to something else. Oversight work is hard. For us as volunteers, it requires a lot of hours that are unpaid, but we do that work diligently because we really believe in the mission. And so that's going to be critical to anybody thinking about civilian oversight. If you have an oversight body in your community, you want to hold those people accountable. And we are out in the community, we structure our meetings so that they are open, but also such that we make it as easy as possible for people to give us feedback, for people to talk about their concerns. In addition to lodging complaints, we want to hear what people think we should be doing that we're not doing, we want to know what we should be doing better. We want to know what we should be doing more of. And so it's critical that an oversight body be accessible to everybody in the community. What kinds of things can civilian oversight do? Absolutely an oversight body can and should investigate complaints. It should also get intimately familiar with police policy. That's not always very easy, because in some municipalities, police policy is not readily or easily available. And so as a new oversight body, so Ann Arbor's Independent Community Police Oversight Commission is only a year old, and so we have had to really push for access to information. The Police Department is not used to having a body ask it the kinds of questions that we ask. They don't have personnel dedicated to answering our questions. And so one of the things that's happened is they'll say to us, hey, we've got to stop doing real police work to help get you information and we don't necessarily want to do that because we want to fight crime and you want us to answer questions about policy. So there is a learning curve, there's some growing pains. We often have to go back to City Council and say, hey, this is our mission, we need the tools to do this, we need you to make sure that it is clear to everyone else involved that we need information, and we need it in a timely manner. Our ordinance has a 30 day policy that the police have a certain amount of time to get us information and if your Police Department doesn't have a person dedicated to do that, as ours didn't, then it takes some time to get that kind of information because it's not the highest priority for them. It is the highest priority for us though and so, one of the things that any police oversight body has got to have is persistence. I think we need some patience, but we also need lots of persistence. And I think there is a limit to how far our patience should go. We have an obligation to the citizens of Ann Arbor to push for information, to get information out of the police and in order to do that, we need to be persistent about asking. So we've been around for a year now and the Police Department is now used to us asking questions and they now have a person who has many other jobs, but one of their jobs is interacting with us and getting us information. When we want to see body cam footage or dash cam footage or when we want to ask questions about policy, there is a person who's available to us to do that. That person has many other things to do, so it's not as speedy a process as we like. But going back to resources, that's one of the reasons why you need some administrative staff. You need a person whose full time job is to stay on top of paperwork, to make sure that complaints are being followed up on, to make sure that the oversight body has all of the information to investigate or review a complaint, but also to do the hard work of asking for information. I think one of the other things that's really important for civilian oversight of police is training of that civilian oversight body. So one can actually become certified in Civilian Police Oversight and that's really important and involves reading case law. It involves reading text about civilian oversight. It involves learning how to do the profession of civilian oversight. That is accessible to everyone through the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement Organization, NACOLE, so there are a lot of trainings on their website that they make available to groups. Lots of people ask us, if you're interested, clearly just come to us all the time and say we want civilian oversight in our city, in our town, how did you do it and what do you suggest. So I'd suggest a bunch of things. One, I'd suggest reaching out to oversight bodies in your state. Even if your city is different from another city, I would still reach out to that group, and ask them what they do, how they do it, what their challenges are. I think civilian oversight is important. I think civilian oversight is increasing. I think civilian oversight of law enforcement is here to stay. And one of the most important things is that it is effective. And so you can't come into civilian oversight with just good intentions, you have to be willing to learn. And that means learning about the literature, reading books about civilian oversight, reading former president Barack Obama's Task Force report on 21st century policing. It also means understanding and learning about the political climate in your area. In Ann Arbor we have a City Council and we have a Mayor who is a part time Mayor and he is basically a member of City Council. The person who does most of the administrative work for the city is the city administrator. And so learning who has the power to do what, who has the time to do what, who has the responsibility for doing what in your particular area, is really important. If you don't have civilian oversight in your area and you want it, you're going to have to marshal the power of the people. You need a significant number of people to sway your city administrator, your Mayor, your City Council and influence them that it's important for them to do so. And then you need them to convene somebody to do that and then you need to oversee or pay very close attention to their selection process. I think one of the things that we've seen across the country, and NACOLE documents this as well, is that when oversight bodies are handpicked with the Mayor or City Council's political friends or influencers then it doesn't have much buy-in from the public. And so in our case there was a task force that worked for several years after the Human Rights Commission decided that it was important to have such a task force and they studied issues around oversight. Some of the members flew across the country to look at other oversight models. That commission, that task force did a lot of work. When the Police Oversight Commission was formed, though, none of those people were placed on the Police Oversight Commission, and that was due to political reasons. So they had raised so much hell during their process, that the City Council in Ann Arbor was very leery of them, and so they didn't appoint them. They appointed actually one person who dissented from the group to the Police Oversight Commission. And so, it was very clear as we came on that there was a huge political price to pay for speaking out and for speaking truth to power. But we have continued in that vein nonetheless. And so when I said that it requires persistence, I mean that in so many different senses of that word. it requires persistence to stay on top of the police and to make sure that you're pushing for access to information. But it also requires persistence in dealing with the very people who have given you the power to do your job, for example. So we have had to constantly remind our City Council that we are independent, that we don't work for them, that we work for the people. And that's a challenge that all civilian oversight bodies have. Do we want to work with politicians, with our City Council? Absolutely, and that's necessary. We need them to take our recommendations. But what we found is that there was a pressure for us not to cause trouble and that if we caused trouble any of us would not be reappointed to the commission. And so when a commission is new, you probably have a staggering of terms. Some people will be appointed for one or two years, others will be appointed for two or three years or three or four years, so that you have people rolling off and being reappointed or new appointees coming on at different times. So the whole board doesn't turn over at once, right? And what you want are people on your commission who are brave enough to do the important work even though they might not be reappointed, and that's a significant challenge. And we see that at all levels of governmental interactions, right? In Congress, we see people not making waves because they want to be reelected. And in oversight, I don't believe we have that luxury. And so even though my first term was a one year term, I was extraordinarily outspoken about the assistance we weren't getting and the ways in which I felt City Council was failing us even. And so I had to understand that I needed to speak truth to power even if I wasn't reappointed. It turns out that I was reappointed and so now I'll serve another three years and have the opportunity to continue to lead our group. One of the things that we think about though, with a new oversight commission is leaving it in a space where it could exist for perpetuity. So in our case, we're not just doing civilian oversight, we're trying to set up systems that will last for the next 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years. And so it's really important for us to document what we're doing and be very organized about what we're doing. And again, that leads back to resources and staff. And so it's very important for us to think about those kinds of things as we do that work and be persistent about that. It's important to make sure that everybody on the team is willing to do some work. Civilian oversight, at least right now, at least not in Ann Arbor, is not a job where you can show up at a meeting once a month and then go back to your regular life. There are many of us who worked 20, 30 hours a week on police oversight in addition to our actual professions. There are a number of us who worked 20, 30, 40 hours per week on civilian oversight, in addition to our professions. Certainly the work gets intense if you have a crisis in your community. The work has gotten intense because of the national focus on civilian oversight. When there are officer involved deaths across the country, the lens gets a lot sharper on police oversight and then suddenly the community becomes more aware, which in our case is a wonderful thing because we've been able to garner a lot more support. But lots of times civilian oversight bodies work in obscurity and they toil away doing really boring work, thinking about police policies, thinking about how to improve them, thinking about how to make things more transparent and then thinking about how to make police more accountable.
