Board hears detailed briefing from Columbia Police on complaint intake and internal-investigation process

The Citizens Police Review Board on April 9 heard a detailed presentation from Columbia Police Department officials about how citizen complaints are taken, routed and investigated and about the limits of the board’s access to personnel records.

The briefing, led by Board member Ed Robinson and answered by Assistant Chief Paul Dickinson of the Columbia Police Department, covered seven prepared questions the board had circulated in advance. “Complaints are... dictated by policy, it’s dictated by city ordinance, it’s dictated by state law,” Assistant Chief Dickinson said, explaining that intake follows state law, department policy and city ordinance and that oral accounts can be reduced to a written complaint and entered into the department’s case-tracking software (Blue Team).

Why it matters: the board said it wants to be able to explain the complaint process to citizens and to understand when contacts that look like complaints are not classified as such. Robinson told the meeting the board plans a closed‑session review of 2024 contacts that the department did not classify as formal complaints to…