At the Board Dinner, Jamie introduced me to an old childhood friend of his. He had been wanting to talk with us for a long time. Apparently his niece’s partner is leading a coalition of community groups in Austin who are trying to create a non-governmental police oversight organization. He setup a call with me and told me about what they’re working on. Here are my raw notes from the call.
When they began the negotiations last year, community groups were invited to act as observers the negotiation process but then their initial demands were ignored. Then the police union walked away from the negotiating table and they are now operating without a union contract, thus resorting to state law.
1999 beginning of contract process, came into force in 2001
police union contract also established the OPM and CRP
(CRP was just 7 volunteers, council member appointed/approved)
-> 3 people in particular spearheaded it
CRP now dismantled
OPM was shut down for a couple weeks then reopened this winter
Union sued the city to shut down OPM
OPM was never sufficiently resourced
Operating with an interim police monitor for past year
Have a real budget now, have a real police monitor named(no longer“interim”)
Farah Muscadin(actually from Chciago)
Police contract set to expire in sept 2017
Negotiations began in March
Coalition got involved in April
Collected demands from stakeholders(community)
Includes local ACLU
Delivered demands to mayor
Relied a lot on campaign zero analysis
Started advocating for group of 8 changes
Sat in on negotiations, in the back of room
Discovered pretty soon that nothing was really going to come through
Citizen Review Panel ended after repeated attempts to renegotiating police contract and falling state law
The police union pulled away
Now back to state law because there’s no
Ideal relationship between“this nonprofit” and the OPM
We’d like to move Internal Affairs from inside the police dept to under the OPM
2000 officers on the force
6 people in Internal Affairs(on two year rotation)
New nonprofit wants to be the initial information gatherer on Front lines
And have a team of preliminary investigators then pass along collected info to the OPM and
more info in the public about complaints
make any info the nonprofit can gather, make it public and also pass it along to the OPM
By Mark Wilson - American-Statesman Staff
Community activists are pushing for a plan to redo the city of Austin’s police oversight body as a nonprofit, community-driven entity that could take complaints and conduct preliminary investigations in cases of police misconduct.
Austin’s Citizen Review Panel, which was established under a meet-and-confer agreement between the city and the Austin police union, was suspended in January after contract negotiations came to a halt at the end of December with no new agreement in place.
Activists who spoke out against the contract back then had complained that the oversight body was ineffective and didn’t have the teeth to provide real accountability and oversight.
In a letter to the City Council announcing the suspension of the panel’s activities, interim City Manager Elaine Hart said“any effective measure of public oversight for ongoing investigations of potential police misconduct is through a negotiated agreement with the(Austin Police Association) that is ratified by both the Association and the Council.”
Members of the police watchdog group Austin Justice Coalition, however, say that’s not the case.
Activist Kathy Mitchell told members of the city’s Public Safety Commission on Monday that the way forward was to keep police oversight out of contract negotiations altogether and, instead, establish a nonprofit board built and run by members of the community completely outside of the umbrella of the Police Department.
Such a board would take complaints and conduct preliminary investigations to substantiate claims before forwarding them on to the city, Mitchell said.
Ideally, she said, an interim board would be put in place for a year while details about what the review panel would look like in the long term are hashed out with the community.
Members of the Public Safety Commission expressed concerns about legal questions surrounding the establishment of such a board and how its members would be selected in the long run.
It’s unclear what direction or position the city might take when deciding what shape a new review panel could take. That picture might become clearer after Feb. 15, when the City Council is scheduled to vote on a stopgap measure to provide special pay to officers that was lost when the contract expired.
Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday has said the union is ready to get back to the negotiating table as soon as the city is ready. On Tuesday, Casaday said the union is willing to look at options in which police oversight is taken out of the contract, but the union is still waiting for guidance from its membership and the new city management.
Austin Justice Coalition members also called on city leaders to remove internal affairs investigations from under the Austin police umbrella and hand them over to the city auditor’s office for greater independence.
Sam’s FOIAs from Austin: