McDonald: Existing Police Oversight is an “illusion” Recent events creating appetite for citizen, lo
The spate of recent police shootings is prompting renewed calls for a civilian oversight panel to monitor Kansas City’s law enforcement.
Lora McDonald, executive director of pro-social justice group Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity (MORE2), said the group hasn’t formally gone before city leaders to push for the creation of the panel, but informal conversations around a citizen oversight board have been received favorably by high ranking administrators including Mayor Sly James and Chief Darryl Forte.
McDonald said the existing police accountability body, the Office of Community Complaints, is an entity too firmly ensconced within the police department to view their activities objectively. What exists is what McDonald described as an “illusion that it’s a citizen-run office” but is actually a starting point for internal investigations with limited rigor.
McDonald envisions a civilian oversight board as a set of council appointees, a group with racial balance and diverse backgrounds. For example, she said someone with immigration experience is badly needed in local policing citing reports that some officers, against the stated position of the Kansas City Police Department, are reporting undocumented immigrants they come in contact with to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A civilian panel would help standardize local law enforcement’s policy of noninvolvement in immigration matters, McDonald said.
A civilian oversight board would also add an important missing component to Kansas City’s police department, local control. The police force is overseen by a state board of commissioners. Mayor James is a member by virtue of his office. The remainder are state appointees. Kansas City is the only city in the nation in this kind of arrangement. Until 2013, St. Louis’s police department was also state controlled; that year, St. Louisans voted to have the police force managed locally.
McDonald said state control creates a disconnect between the department and their public, which has little recourse against police wrongdoing.
To the question of how effective a group of untrained civilians — private citizens with perhaps no previous law enforcement experience, perhaps no firearms or combat training, for example — would be in overseeing a police force, McDonald acknowledged that this is an important objection.
It would also be an important feature of the panel, to be untrained eyes and objective judges to police activity.
“The point isn’t to have experts on policing,” McDonald said. “… there are things that are just plain wrong.”
Citing close acquaintances who have moved out of Kansas City in part because of negative interactions with the police, she said civilian oversight is a necessary next step to a mature and overall better police force.
“The situation we have right now … (the Office of of Community Complaints is) so steeped in police culture that is removes their objectivity,” McDonald said.
