The Community Oversight of Law Enforcement subcommittee of Olympia’s Social Justice and Equity Commission (SJEC) held its third meeting on Monday, November 20, as it prepared to present its recommendations to the commission.
The subcommittee is one of three work groups whose initial aim is to learn more about local law enforcement. It reviewed bargaining-agreement confidentiality safeguards, and officer testimonies of burnout and compassion fatigue amid increased and often conflicting public safety imperatives to the limitations of the internal investigation process to pathways for civilian oversight of policing practices. The other two work groups represent the community and the Olympia Police Department (OPD).
In the first phase of the process, now underway, each group meets independently to identify strengths and weaknesses in the current oversight model and explore best practices for building OPD’s legitimacy, accountability, transparency and responsiveness to those it serves.
In the second phase, the groups will reconvene to craft a consolidated recommendation for a community engagement and oversight model. This is expected to be posted for public review and feedback on the project’s Engage Olympia page sometime in February 2024. The final recommendation will be submitted to city council for consideration and approval in April. As of last week, anyone can register to contribute to a searchable database of user-submitted ideas for the commission to consider as it develops its recommendation to the city council.
Monday’s meeting focused on examining present channels for civilian involvement with OPD, as well as models from other cities that have effectively implemented similar accountability measures, to address the following:
Director of Strategic Planning Stacey Ray opened by welcoming guest presenter Kathryn Olson from Change Integration Consulting, which the city hired after parting ways with previous project partners SDM Consulting. Ray acknowledged that several subcommittee members had already participated in officer ride-alongs and encouraged them to “tap into those experiences so you can share with your colleagues here as we enter into the conversation, maybe some of the a-ha moments you’ve had or some of your takeaways from that.”
The group conducted a detailed review of the five branches of Olympia’s current “hybrid system” of law enforcement accountability and oversight, summarized in the graphic reproduced below:
Olson, spoke next. “I want to just start out by talking about two assumptions. The first is that there’s no perfect or best approach to oversight . . . there is no one best system or one best approach to oversight or civilian involvement. It’s really about what’s the best for the community at a particular time,” and added that “recommendations made now might not be a good fit five years from now or 10 years from now, just given the change in circumstances.”
The second assumption Olson spoke of is the role of civilian oversight.
“As important as it is, it’s just one piece. And no matter what the recommendations are that ultimately are made and adopted in Olympia, there’s still challenges,” said Olsen. “There’s still real challenges with finding qualified people to hire, there’s budget challenges… there are other kinds of challenges that oversight is not going to be able to really address, and that just helps us keep in mind what we can do and what we just don’t have control over.”
To accommodate these ambiguities, Olson recommended considering each attribute of community engagement as “being on a continuum that will change over time.” Olson warned of regarding community oversight as an “advocacy function” – “if you want a system that is going to have legitimacy with all of the different stakeholders involved, it’s really important that you have a system that is impartial; that’s able to take in information, weigh it, and make determinations based on whatever is taken in.”
SJEC commissioner Maureen Ozmun-Wells objected to the presumption of impartiality in a citizen oversight entity, saying “that’s not an automatic characteristic – in a lot of bias research, it shows that people that are hired to be impartial, including judges, aren’t, unless it’s very intentionally addressed.”
The question of impartiality is not a mere technicality.
In Portland last week, some community members who helped draft similar guidelines were dismayed by Portland City Council’s substantial revision of the advisory group’s initial recommendations, particularly its reversal of language that would preclude any current or former law enforcement employee or their immediate family from serving on the newly installed oversight board.
Olympia aims to avert such eleventh-hour tussles by addressing these issues upfront and including representatives from the law enforcement community in every step of the process. Deputy chiefs Sam Costello and Shelby Parker have alternately been on hand at every subcommittee meeting to offer relevant insight and field questions from commissioners and other city staff.
SJEC commissioner Kevin Mattison expressed what he sees as the importance of preventive versus punitive civilian engagement with law enforcement.
“I have a fear that because we’re auditing use-of-force events, we kind of miss the opportunity to audit and engage in areas that could possibly prevent it – internally in the department, and perhaps on the street,” Mattison shared.
Mattison piggybacked off an earlier comment by Commissioner Parfait Bassalé about scope, adding, “the auditing scope may need to be expanded to make sure that the liaison between the community and the community service organization – specifically the police – becomes not only more fluid, but broader and wider.”
Mattison shared an anecdote about a former neighbor who was disruptive when inebriated but multiply disabled and widely regarded as harmless.
“And when he would act up, the cops would come and say, ‘That’s Gene,’ you know?,” Mattisson said. “It wasn’t one of these things where they rack ‘em and stack ‘em just because he was erratic, because somewhere in there, the police department knew this guy was a little off. But he was a member of the community who was relatively harmless.”
Mattison stressed the value of a two-way community engagement model that empowers officers to “get a closer feel for the environment, knowing where the hotspots are, and perhaps be able to approach those hotspots with the right fire extinguisher, instead of just a deluge of force.”
Olson commented that Mattison’s example illustrates the complexity of reimagining public safety; she noted that while an oversight body might recommend exploring “nonsworn” or “alternative response models” to events for which police intervention is inappropriate, “it’s a larger city issue of looking at making those kinds of resources and options available.”
What does success look like?
When Ray prompted the subcommittee to circle back around to its discussion items, Mattison addressed the possibility of reforming an all-or-nothing disciplinary approach to accommodate honest mistakes or errors of judgment in the use of force, noting that fear of excessive reprisal might foster dishonesty on the part of the officer involved.
“You should be able to come to work and tell your supervisors, your superiors, ‘Hey, you know? I screwed up,’” Mattisson said.
Mattisson implied that one element of transparency and accountability might include clemency; if an officer owns up to using “a little too much pain compliance,” they should “be able to do that without getting burned in the public sphere and behind closed doors at the department.”
Ozmun-Wells agreed that a building block of success might include “incentivizing that accountability piece rather than punishing.” She added that she had recently attended a meeting of the Black Prisoners’ Caucus, and had been stirred by an observation from one of the speakers. “One of them said, ‘People don’t change; they heal.’ And somebody else I was with said ‘Systems don’t change; they heal.’ And so I like to think of it from that perspective.”
Bassalé asked how OPD might work to earn trust and maintain adequate communication with the public while conducting active investigations.
“We know that silence doesn’t help,” Bassalé pointed out. “And one of the things we also know about the human brain is that in the presence of silence, it fills the gap with narratives and speculation.”
The subcommittee’s next meeting is at 6 p.m., Monday, December 18 at City Hall. These public meetings are held in-person only and are open to the public. They are not recorded or available online.
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