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Civilian review office says case closures improved but cites police records and body-cam redaction delays
Summary
The Citizen Complaint Authority said case closures within one year rose from 63% to 95% between quarters but told council that CPD records delays (median ~63 days) and lengthy body‑worn‑camera redaction are the main bottlenecks; CCA asked for improved records access to speed investigations.
The executive director of the Citizen Complaint Authority told council that performance on investigation closures has recently improved but remains constrained by access to police records and the time required to redact body‑worn camera footage.
Director Kennedy said CCA assigned complaints within two business days as an operational target and reported a material improvement in case closures: "We were only at 63% of cases closed within 1 year [in Q1]," he said, "and now 95% have been closed within 1 year." Kennedy also said CCA has made a policy choice to publish recommendations online for 2024 and 2025 and is receiving timely responses from CPD on those recommendations.
Kennedy described central operational challenges: he said roughly 96% of CCA's budget is personnel and that the office's ability to close investigations is often governed by the time it takes to receive records from the Cincinnati Police Department. He cited a median lag of roughly 63 days from records request to receipt and said redaction of body‑worn camera footage frequently adds substantial delay — describing redaction as requiring "at least twice as many minutes as a recording's length" for the redaction process.
On remedies, Kennedy said giving CCA access to the Axon system or otherwise streamlining redaction and records transfers would remove a major bottleneck; he said he has discussed the issue with CPD leadership and that a legal memo about potential staff access to Axon has been circulated for review. "That would be the quickest way to solve the issue," he said, adding that such access would eliminate the public redaction queue and let investigations move forward without waits built into the public records pathway.
Kennedy also described proposed FY27 metrics (keeping assignment timing the same, adjusting the per‑FTE closure metric to 1.5 cases per month) and said a 5.1% reduction (~$78,915) would likely hurt investigation throughput, analytic capability and outreach.
Councilors asked about expedited reviews for straightforward cases; Kennedy said that where records are delivered promptly those cases close quickly and that the records wait — not the review process itself — is the primary contributor to investigation duration.
The committee left the session with a clear operational dilemma: the office has demonstrated improved closure performance but remains dependent on timely records and redaction support to sustain those gains.
