Ali Winston
Fresno's police oversight model is under fire by a civil grand jury
Fresno’s two-year-old police watchdog agency was raked over the coals in a Grand Jury report released yesterday. The critique of the Office of Independent Review is the latest flap over police oversight in a city struggling to gain control over a police department roiled by allegations of high-level discrimination and excessive force.
The Office of Independent Review, headed by former Los Angeles and Santa Monica police officer Eddie Aubrey, was intended to serve as a watchdog for Fresno Police. Prior to 2009, Fresno was the largest city in California without independent police oversight.
The importance of independent police oversight in Fresno is all the more important given Fresno County District Attorney Elizabeth Egan’s decision last year to stop investigating all officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths.
However, Aubrey’s office has been dogged with problems since its inception, ranging from underfunding to lack of subpoena power to confusion among Fresnans about the agency’s capacity and powers. Modeled after San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor, the OIR’s oversight function is limited to reviewing completed police investigations for quality control purposes.
The grand jury found that OIR’s lack of subpoena power or the ability to conduct independent investigations seriously hampered the agency’s operations, and recommended defunding OIR unless sweeping changes were made (excerpt after the jump):
The Fresno Office of Indepedent Review appears to be a symbolic attempt by City leaders to demonstrate to the public that an unbiased, independent review body monitors police activities. In reality, the OIR has no authority to conduct an independent investigation; it merely reviews completed Police Department internal investigations. As a result of the decision by the DA’s office to discontinue their investigation of officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths, there is no independent oversight.
In this era of budget constraints, City leaders must evaluate whether the “symbolic” value of the OIR to the community warrants its continued funding.
The problems dogging Fresno’s OIR are relevant to potential changes to independent oversight of the Oakland Police Department. Earlier this year, Oakland Chief of Police Anthony Batts and Mayor Jean Quan announced their intention to establish an independent inspector general for OPD that would also be modeled off the San Jose Independent Police Auditor. That proposal is still in the works, and city officials have previously said that the inspector general would not supplant Oakland’s Citizen Police Review Board, which does have the ability to conduct independent investigations.
However, the problems of Fresno’s experiment in police oversight should be a warning to Oakland city leaders about the dangers of the independent auditor model.
Fresno’s independent police watchdog, the Office of Independent Review, was created two years ago
