POST reports 33,000 complaints, board presses for clearer public dashboard

At the Peace Officers Standing Accountability Advisory Board hearing on Jan. 16, POST staff presented a quarterly statistical briefing showing roughly 33,000 complaints, charges and allegations in its records and urged the board to request clearer, more digestible public reporting.

"Our top 3 areas of serious misconduct allegations remain, physical abuse, excessive use of force, demonstrating bias and abuse of power," Bureau Chief Christine Ford told the board. She said POST has received more than 31,000 agency misconduct reports affecting over 18,000 officers and that about 53% of those are "retro or look back cases." Ford said 22,000 of the 31,000 reports had been assigned to personnel and about 12,000 were open investigations while roughly 9,000 were closed.

Assistant Executive Director Anne Marie Del Munoz described the briefing as part of repeated efforts to refine how POST portrays intake and case progress to the public and the Legislature. "We do a report to the legislature every year that is supposed to do just that," Del Munoz said, adding staff will return with alternate visuals and breakdowns.

Board members pressed staff on specific counts and public-facing detail. Board member Dr. Glaser urged staff to provide a page or graphic that breaks the 33,000 figure into categories the public will understand at a glance — for example, how many reports are simply allegations, how many are non‑serious, how many advance to investigation, and how many lead to letters of intent to revoke. "It's alarming because it's a quick look and you don't look like we're seeing any movement," Glaser said, calling for a one-page summary or checklist that would make the data more digestible.

Staff said the increase in public complaints (POST staff reported a 47% year-over-year rise in public complaints handled by the intake bureau) is in part awareness and outreach; Sarah Wallace, bureau chief for intake and disposition, said when duplicates appear — that is, when a member of the public files a complaint and the agency has already submitted an agency misconduct report — the bureau links the records so they are reviewed together and do not artificially inflate counts.

Board members also questioned a large count of so-called "issue in error" closures (224 in the slides reviewed by the board). Ford and Del Munoz said those often reflect duplicate submissions, typographical errors in officer ID numbers, or double entries in the agency feeds and that training and outreach (including monthly Mark43 trainings) have been increased to reduce the error rate.

The briefing also covered disposition categories. Ford explained that among closed cases, about 49% were found not to meet the statutory definition of serious misconduct, 34% were closed because staff could not reach the "clear and convincing" evidence threshold, and the remainder were not actionable because they were beyond POST's statutory time limits.

Why it matters: board members said the raw total number will alarm the public unless accompanied by context about what portion of those reports represent serious-misconduct allegations and what portion are administrative, duplicated, or outside POST’s jurisdiction. The board asked staff to return with sample one‑page graphics and an expanded breakdown showing public-complaint dispositions, duplicates, and the counts that actually reach the evidentiary threshold for letters of intent to revoke.

What’s next: POST staff agreed to return with updated visuals and a proposed public-facing checklist that would be published monthly or quarterly to explain the categories. The board did not take formal action other than requesting the refined materials.