The City of Springfield may have gotten a bit more than it bargained for last week when three experts came to town to advise officials on the formation of a citizen police review board.
In brief welcoming remarks, Mayor Karen Hasara set the agenda, saying that “there’s no question that we will have a review board” and that the business at hand this night was to “make sure we do it right.” Lawrence Johnson, chair of the mayor’s Race Relations Task Force, which hosted the event, then recited each expert’s impressive resumé.
But as soon as the experts introduced themselves, it became obvious that one panelist was taking a holistic approach by examining not only what type of review board Springfield might need but also the policies and practices that got the city to this point.
Right upfront, in his opening speech, Mark Gissiner–senior human resources analyst for the City of Cincinnati and past president of the International Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement–questioned not only Springfield Police Department’s practices but also the city’s policies on public records and its handling of employment discrimination complaints. Later he elaborated on some of his concerns.
When he was introduced at the forum, Gissiner took aim at SPD’s top brass. “It’s clear to me that there were some incidents that occurred particularly at the top level of senior management that dealt a fatal blow to the status quo,” he said, apologizing for inadvertently making a rhyme.
He later confirmed that the incident he was referring to was the decision made by SPD’s management to let stand scores of erroneous media reports that then-officer Renatta Frazier failed to prevent the rape of another officer’s daughter. “That one kind of surprised me,” Gissiner said later. “I thought that really hurt the confidence of the citizens. Someone should be held accountable for that.”
But while Gissiner recognized that it was this incident that reignited a decade-old call for a citizen review board, he made it clear at the forum that even if Springfield already had such a board in place, it probably wouldn’t have had jurisdiction over a specific employment matter like the Frazier case.
Instead, he said, the city’s Department of Community Relations should have had jurisdiction to investigate Frazier’s case as a discrimination complaint. “I spoke with Sandy Robinson,” Gissiner said at the forum, referring to the director of that department, “and I don’t understanad why his office doesn’t investigate EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaints.”
Robinson later confirmed that–while one of the primary functions of his office is to investigate EEO complaints against private employers in Springfield–he cannot investigate EEO complaints from employees of the City of Springfield. It is, Robinson said, a matter of unwritten policy from the mayor. “If there is a situation that involves a city employee, since I have the same boss, ultimately, there might be questions of conflict of interest,” Robinson said.
He said he could see why Gissiner would expect Frazier’s case to be investigated by his office, because “in other cities that probably would’ve been the case.”
In fact, it was the case here in Springfield until Hasara became mayor. Under the previous mayor, Ozzie Langfelder, the department Robinson heads (then called the Department of Human Relations) routinely investigated city employee’s EEO complaints. Carolyn Toney, who headed that office from 1991 to 1995, said the city even had a “workshare” agreement with the state under which the state agency routinely referred City of Springfield employees back to Toney’s office if they had a discrimination complaint. “They would send us charges in our jurisdiction, which meant the city limits of Springfield,” Toney said.
The fact that the mayor ultimately supervised both Toney and the complaining employee never created conflict: “Mayor Langfelder never intervened in our department when we had a charge of discrimination filed,” she said.
Toney now works for the parallel state agency, the Illinois Department of Human Rights, and says the state’s policy allows IDHR to investigate state employee complaints. “Why couldn’t the city do the same thing?” she asked.
Toney was one of the first and highest-ranking employees Hasara removed. “She told me that she would rather have her own person,” Toney recalled. “I told her I was a loyal person, loyal to whoever was the mayor. But she said she wanted someone she could trust.” Toney was, at that time, secretary of the Sangamon County Democratic Party. Hasara is a Republican.
Another city policy Gissiner questioned concerned withholding of SPD internal affairs investigations. “Why isn’t an internal affairs investigation available to the public?” he asked at the forum, saying that these investigations are public record in Cincinnati. “One of the key issues missing here in Springfield is the lack of transparency.”
Gissiner–who managed Cincinnati’s Office of Municipal Investigations for several years–compared Illinois law to Ohio law and concluded that the two states are substantially the same. “The way I read that is that, you know, anybody would have access to any administrative investigation involving a city employee, including police,” Gissiner said. “In Ohio, basically what our Supreme Court has said is that once the information is in the hands of an administrative agency, then it’s a public record. And internal affairs is an administrative agency as defined by the Ohio Supreme Court.”
Springfield’s policy of not releasing records allowed police administrators to ignore the erroneous reports about Frazier. Even after the reports were revealed to be wrong, Chief John Harris and department counsel William Workman continued to point to these policies as justification for the department’s silence.
Gissiner also zeroed in on the mysteriously low number of “excessive force” complaints against SPD officers. Citing the department’s 2001 annual report, he said the data indicated only 12 such complaints. “I worry about that,” Gissiner said. “That makes my senses tingle.” He went on to suggest that such a low number might be due to a “lack of confidence in the internal affairs process.”
Ward 2 Alderman Frank McNeil, author of the proposed ordinance creating a police review board, later confirmed that Gissiner is on target. “The number made my senses tingle as well, because I know why it’s so low,” McNeil said.
“This is not a new discovery. I’ve known this for the last four or five years, because people call me and complain, and I say you’ve got to file a complaint with internal affairs, and they say, ‘Why? So they can tell me there’s nothing wrong? “
McNeil said that’s why Carl Madison, the former president of the local NAACP, always referred people to the FBI–“because of lack of trust in the internal affairs department of the SPD.”
As previously reported in Illinois Times, McNeil and another alderman, Frank Kunz, had to help Eastside nightclub owner Bruce Clark file a complaint after he was arrested at his own club in August. Clark, who had called police to quell a disturbance, was maced, arrested, and jailed. But the first few times he went to SPD’s internal affairs department to complain that the responding officers had battered him, he was told his version of events was not needed since other witnesses had come forward. Only after McNeil and Kunz met with Chief Harris, Assistant Chief William Pittman, and an internal affairs officer did Clark get to lodge his complaint against the arresting officer.
McNeil said Clark’s case is not unique. “That has happened before,” McNeil said. “But I should not have to call internal affairs or anyone else to make sure that these people will address a complaint. It should be routine police business. Aldermen should not have to make these phone calls to make sure police do the routine things they should be doing.”
For now, all of Gissiner’s creative suggestions for Springfield are either stagnating or fermenting in the same barrel with many other policy proposals, waiting for the new mayor and new council members after the April 1 elections. McNeil has chosen to keep his proposed ordinance in committee until the new officials are in place.
This article appears in May 1-7, 2003.
