My friend Becky always made the same New
Year’s resolution: to have a hot date on New Year’s
Eve. That way, she had 12 months to work toward her goal, and it
didn’t involve passing up beer or potato chips. I don’t recall making many resolutions
myself. Way back in the 1900s, I accepted those extra five pounds
by donating my favorite jeans to Goodwill. It’s been so long
since I had any optional vices (caffeine and sugarless gum are
necessities of life), my main resolution is just a pathetic
middle-age version of Becky’s: to stay awake enough to see
the crystal ball drop on TV. I don’t usually make it. But this year, I’m declaring an official
resolution: to stop writing news articles about this city’s
long, leisurely amble toward creating a citizen review board to
monitor our police. I’ve written stories about the proposal
being launched by a grassroots organization that used to regularly
pack an eastside church fellowship hall. The fiery meeting, where
everybody was baptized by the review board spirit, is such
ancient history that the congregation has now moved to fancy new digs
and the grassroots organization has dried up and blown away (remember
Unity for our Community?). I’ve written stories about the City
Council bringing in a panel of consultants to help draft an
ordinance, and bringing them back again for an encore performance.
And I was one of the handful of hardy souls
who attended each and every one of the public hearings hosted by a
council subcommittee seeking community input on the draft ordinance
— meetings so under-attended yet tedious that I began to
believe there was a conspiracy to kill the idea by boring all
interested parties to death. But in October, after a bit of oral surgery to
remove the bicuspids and incisors from the draft ordinance, the
council unanimously passed a compromise version. It lacked funding,
staffing and subpoena power, but Ward 2 Ald. Frank McNeil —
who has been pushing the proposal for more than 15 years, including
at that fiery Unity meeting back in aught-2 — said he just
had to get the review board established; it could be beefed up
later. “You know that old saying about the camel?” he had asked me during negotiations.
“Once the camel gets his nose into the tent, you may as well let
the whole camel in.” These days, McNeil is sounding downright
hopeful about the Police Community Review Commission. He plans to
meet later this week with the mayor’s executive assistant,
Jim Donelan, who recently attended the National Association for
Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement convention in Miami and came
back with the knowledge that review boards aren’t witch
hunters. “Oversight is a good thing and something
that’s needed,” he says. “The fact that
there’s a process for independent folks to take a look at
some complaints — it just seems to be a good
thing.”
The mayor’s office has received some 70
résumés from citizens interested in serving on the
PCRC, and Donelan says he’s helping the mayor put together a
five-member task force to sort through the applicants. This task
force — to be composed of four community leaders and one
representative from the Springfield Police Department — will
then come up with a list of 15 or 20 individuals to recommend for
appointment to the seven-member PCRC. For McNeil, arriving at this point represents the culmination of “one of the
toughest” battles of his two decades on the council.
“It’s also probably one of the largest things,” he
says. “I don’t think people understand the depth of the
impact a review board can have just to be able to review internal
affairs files and see if in fact the right questions were
asked.” He hastens to clarify: “I would be the
first to say we’ve got some very good police officers. In
fact, most of our officers are very good,” McNeil says.
“And anybody doing their job the right way, this [board]
won’t have any effect on them at all.”
I should clarify, too: my resolution
doesn’t mean I’m done writing about the PCRC. I plan to
keep covering police issues for a long time. But I hope — I
resolve! — to stop writing about tiny, halting steps, inching
lackadaisically toward the establishment of a process that has been
needed for so long. From now on, I want to write about a panel
populated with real people, with the potential to investigate real
cases involving real police officers. And while I’m at it, what the heck:
I’d like to have a hot date next New Year’s Eve too.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2006.
