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Police Accountability Board tells committee lack of consistent ACC data and written decisions hinders oversight
Summary
The Police Accountability Board's 2025 annual report, presented March 16, 2026, urged clearer protocols for sharing Administrative Charging Committee outcomes with the board, standardized complaint forms across agencies and at least one dedicated research/data analyst to support oversight and trend analysis.
The Police Accountability Board (PAB) presented its 2025 annual report to the Montgomery County Public Safety Committee on March 16, 2026, urging improved information flows from law-enforcement agencies and the Administrative Charging Committee (ACC) to enable the PAB to meet its statutory oversight role under the Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021.
The board said it continues to encounter gaps that limit its ability to analyze complaint pathways and outcomes. "The purpose of this 2025 report is to provide a clear accessible overview of patterns observed in board complaints," Siobhan Gorman Riley, the board's administrative director, told the committee. The PAB summarized roughly 434 adjudicated allegations in cases reviewed by the ACC; five allegation categories (policy conformity, unprofessional conduct, bias/discrimination, use of force and specific duty violations) accounted for most items.
The PAB's recommendations: the board asked for written ACC decisions and clarified transmission protocols so the PAB can reliably see how allegations were resolved (sustained, unfounded, exonerated or otherwise). Board members also urged standardized complaint forms across municipal and county agencies and recommended collecting non-identifying aggregate officer data (rank, basic demographics) to detect patterns and target coaching before patterns become systemic.
Staffing request and rationale: the PAB said the volume and complexity of complaint data has grown since the board's creation and requested dedicated research and data capacity to sustain oversight work. The annual report recommends budgeted staff for research, policy analysis and data management to enable timely, evidence-based recommendations.
ACC, trial boards and statutory limits: committee members and PAB members discussed that the Maryland Police Accountability Act and current practices limit reciprocal sharing of certain files; the PAB requested that, at a minimum, the ACC provide written dispositions and a narrative summary that would allow the PAB to contextualize aggregated trends. Montgomery County ACC and internal-affairs representatives said trial boards have been scheduled and held in recent months in county and municipal agencies, but panelists also acknowledged backlogs and varying report quality across agencies.
Next steps: the committee and the PAB agreed to continue the conversation. The PAB noted regular quarterly meetings with law-enforcement directors and said it would follow up; committee leaders suggested a focused work session in the second quarter to review progress on the PAB's recommendations and on information-sharing protocols.
Quotations in this article are drawn from the March 16, 2026 Public Safety Committee work session transcript and on-the-record remarks from PAB representatives and county officials.
