City
Council
Although an ordinance she sponsored to strengthen
police oversight was on the brink of passing the full Council, Councilwoman
Wanda Halbert trashed more than a year of painstaking progress and started back
at zero, bringing together polar opposites to agree on a new ordinance.
Mayor
and Administration
Not to be outdone, the city administration rewound
history to mid-2013, before Mayor A.C. Wharton pushed for a policy about
citizens filming police and before Wharton said the police oversight board
needed to have more clout. Chief
Administrative Officer Jack Sammons of Wharton’s administration sent his
administrative assistant to say, “Never mind,” about all that talk we have been
doing for more than a year about supporting an upgrade to a citizen police
oversight committee.
Police
Rounding out the absurd, Police
Director Toney Armstrong, who is sworn to uphold the law, apparently has not
cooperated with the existing Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board
ordinance by failing to refer Internal Affairs appeals to the citizen board.
Straight-faced and pushing the “reset” button on his four-year tenure as chief,
Armstrong said now he is ready to go to work with the ordinance as it has
existed since 1994. In an April 21 City Council committee hearing,
Armstrong acknowledged that his department has not sent a single case to CLERB,
thus being a key roadblock to the board not working.
While the existing ordinance allows
for the CLERB to independently investigate complaints, in practice, the
board in the past operated as an appellate body, receiving complaints
from aggrieved citizens who were not satisfied with Internal Affairs'
findings. At some point CLERB’s subcontractor investigator was terminated
by the city, and the board thus became dependent on receiving cases from
MPD. This system apparently functioned
for a while, although not during Armstrong’s or Wharton’s tenures.
MPD likes it
that way. In fact, MPD and the police union state they do not want CLERB
to independently investigate complaints, but merely act as an appeals body
after IA has finished its report. This forces citizens to complain to the
ones who abused them in the first place and thus discourages people from coming
forward.
Political Calculations
Per the city’s new position, the impotent ordinance
would remain as is, but the CLERB would have a website and a $200,000 annual
budget, which Halbert got Council to approve June 16, for staff positions including
an investigator.
Armstrong and Memphis Police Association executive
director Mike Williams have a biting disdain for the people’s coalition Memphis
United, and Armstrong said he wanted to hear no more from them – he wanted to
hear from a sitting member of the Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board. Note to Armstrong: Be careful what you wish for; you just might
get it. Armstrong got an earful from
CLERB Chairman Rev. Ralph White, who squarely blamed the police department for sabotaging
the civilian board by not forwarding citizen complaints to it.
“There’s
a lot of underhanded things that have gone on,” White said. “Citizens ask, ‘Who’s hiding something?’”
TRAVEL BACK TO AN ACTUAL EARLIER TIME
Since we have some grasp of history – and Internet
access that often works -- in May 2014, Halbert and others on City Council’s
public safety committee passed a resolution asking Memphis United to study the
problem of police oversight, to have town hall meetings in the seven council
districts and to come back to City Council with a report. Memphis United did so, at no charge to the
city, and the result was proposed changes to an existing police oversight
ordinance which would give the citizen board subpoena power and would allow
aggrieved citizens to complain directly to their peers rather than only to
police internal affairs officers.
This happened on April 7. As Casey Stengel said, “You can look it up.” On April 16, Armstrong and police union representatives;
city attorneys; CLERB representatives including Rev. White, and Memphis United
representatives met for an unofficial hash-it-out – you know, the same meeting
they held yesterday but which police and Halbert act as if it never
happened. Memphis United had alerted the
media of the meeting; however, when reporters and camera crews showed up, the
city and police refused to let them in the room.
On April 21, council committees approved the proposed
ordinance and sent it to the full Council.
Halbert
was one of those who voted on April 21 to move the ordinance along as it
stood.
Continuing through the gauntlet of how an ordinance
becomes law, the proposal was read out at three City Council meetings and came
time for a vote on July 7. However,
Halbert voted to not vote that day. And
as sponsor of the ordinance, she got the vote put off again on July 21.
Never mind that City Council had more than enough votes
to pass the ordinance on July 7 and July 21, and since this ordinance was
Halbert’s baby, she would be pushing to get it passed and declare victory –
right?
Instead,
Halbert retreated to the starting line yesterday as if none of this had ever
happened -- must have been a dream or something.
The time for a let’s-hash-it-out meeting that includes
representatives of Memphis United, the CLERB board, the police and police union
would have been after May 2014’s resolution and before the ordinance passed out
of Halbert’s public safety committee on April 21 – and such a meeting happened,
the aforementioned, closed-door meeting on April 16.
Needless to say, no good came out of Monday’s meeting. Halbert said, Let’s meet again Wednesday, and
we will come up with an ordinance “that we all agree on,” and I will carry that
back to City Council.
The
idea of getting this group to hold hands around the campfire and agree on a
15-page document when the parties are at opposite poles is even more
far-fetched than, say, a time machine in City Hall.
According to Brad Watkins, executive director of the
Mid-South Peace and Justice Center and an advocate for the upgraded police
oversight policy, Mayor Wharton as recently as Thursday told Watkins that he
would continue to support the revamped ordinance.
Wharton has publicly said the citizen review board
needed more clout, including the authority to issue subpoenas. Link
to video of Wharton’s remarks Jan. 28, 2014, at Rhodes College: https://youtu.be/Y6tPZP_5eRU
City Council had the votes to pass the ordinance –
which includes recent concessions in favor of the police union’s position that
the board would not have subpoena power and that the citizen board cannot see
any information from Internal Affairs before it completes a complaint report –
on July 7. That version of the ordinance
is what they should pass when they next meet on Aug. 4. Then, the time warp can be closed.
Instead, Halbert plans to reconvene the same group at 2
p.m. Wednesday to do the same thing all over again. Anybody got the lyrics to “Kumbaya?”
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