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OCC report: complaints down 25% year over year; sustained rate about 4% in Q1
Summary
At the April 10 Police Commission meeting the Office of Citizen Complaints reported 151 complaints opened Jan'Mar 2013 (25% fewer than 2012), 174 cases closed, about 291 pending, and seven sustained findings year-to-date; staff flagged a narrow gap in the Stop Data Collection policy that did not explicitly cover bicycles.
The Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC) told the Police Commission on April 10 that it opened 151 cases between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2013, a 25% decline from the same period in 2012 when 201 cases were opened. The OCC reported it closed 174 cases in the period and had 291 pending as of the date of the meeting.
Director Hicks presented the quarterly numbers and said OCC investigators closed 23 more cases than were opened in the quarter. He told the commission that the OCC sustained allegations in two cases in March, bringing the total of sustained cases for January through March to seven and yielding a sustained rate of approximately 4 percent of cases closed in the quarter. The OCC also reported two mediations in March and a year-to-date officer mediation acceptance rate of 84 percent.
Director Hicks described three adjudicated matters in greater detail. In one notable example, the OCC found neglect of duty where an officer conducted a traffic stop of a bicyclist who ran a red light but did not collect stop-data; the chief later treated that as a policy failure because the department's Stop Data Collection policy explicitly referenced vehicles and not bicycles. The department has issued a bulletin to address that narrow policy gap going forward.
Commissioners asked about whether use-of-force and other station-level statistics are centralized for commission reporting; the chief and OCC director said relevant logs are compiled and sent to OCC on a monthly basis and that the department and OCC would work on the presentation to the commission.
Director Hicks also noted differences between calendar-year and fiscal-year reporting in the OCC database and recommended maintaining the calendar-year reporting practice to avoid burdensome conversions. The commission asked staff to continue refining the schedule and reporting formats included in a broader scheduling resolution under discussion.
