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Independent police auditor presents 2025 report, flags complaint spike and body-camera gaps
Summary
Stephen Connelly of OIR Group presented the independent police auditor's report for Modesto covering 2025, noting a rise in complaints (28 to 48), recurring complaint themes (custody exchanges and resident searches), strong force-review processes, and persistent body-worn-camera activation issues; he urged using complaint reviews as training opportunities.
Stephen Connelly, the city's independent police auditor (OIR Group), presented his office's 2025 annual report to the Modesto Community Police Review Board on May 20, summarizing methods, findings and recommendations.
Connelly described the office's selection process: investigators review all complaints alleging bias, all cases naming a supervisor and a random sample of other cases. "My name is Stephen Connelly," he told the board, and he said the report focuses on completed cases from 2025.
The report found an increase in the total number of complaint cases in 2025 and linked part of that rise to a newly enhanced online complaint portal that made filing easier. Connelly said recurring complaint themes included custody-exchange disputes and resident searches: "a lot of the complaints this year related to people who were unhappy about the police response to custody exchanges," and many resident-search complaints involved family members disturbed by disruptive searches.
Connelly praised the Modesto Police Department's force-review structure and described the agency's use-of-force review as "well constructed," but he flagged ongoing problems with body-worn cameras (late activation and post-incident muting) and urged more consistent documentation of de-escalation efforts. He recommended using complaint and force-review files as training tools even when no policy violation was formally sustained.
On two officer-involved critical incidents and a cluster of complaints arising from protests on June 14, Connelly said his office reviewed the investigative files and body-camera footage available to it and concurred with the department's finding that the specific arrests investigated were justified and consistent with policy. He recommended the department continue after-action reviews to learn from large-scale events and to document operational adjustments.
Board members pressed Connelly about timeliness (he said yearlong reviews for major critical incidents are common), whether his office could conduct broad statistical disparity studies (he said that large-scale statistical analysis is outside OIR Group's scope), and whether more accountability for body-worn-camera lapses could change behaviors (he said it likely could). A member noted a jump from 28 to 48 complaints; Connelly said part of the increase was from the online portal and that the office uses department-provided statistics when reporting totals.
Public commenter Tom Helm thanked the auditor for transparency and asked the board to schedule additional time for public comment after he reads the full report. Connelly encouraged members of the public who believe they witnessed misconduct to use the complaint intake process.
The board did not take formal action on the auditor report at this meeting but engaged in detailed questioning; Connelly identified multiple recommendations for the department to consider.
