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Audit adds category 3 complaints to reviews; OIR urges better location and demographic reporting
Summary
OIR expanded its review this cycle to include category 3 complaints—lower-merit external complaints—finding most were customer-service or perception issues; the auditors said they can try to provide more granular location and demographic breakdowns but cautioned about small sample sizes.
OIR presenters said the city's contract change allowed the auditors to receive category 3 external complaints that previously were not part of their scope. Steve Connolly described category 3 complaints as matters that, on their face, would not constitute policy violations or were triaged out after initial evidence review (often by body-worn camera footage).
Teresa Magula said externals were mostly customer-service concerns and that the expanded scope gave auditors a broader lens into community issues. "The majority of these are related to customer service and reporting issues," she said. OIR reported two sustained external allegations in this review period; the remainder were not sustained.
Council members requested clearer geography (beyond zip codes) for incidents. OIR said zip codes are a limited proxy and agreed to try to provide more nuanced location breakdowns (for example, by census tract or non-identifying neighborhood metrics) while protecting privacy. On demographics, OIR said it has coded about 73 complainants for race/ethnicity and did not see evidence of disproportionate outcomes in this small sample, but warned against overinterpreting limited data.
