During its March meeting, members of Columbia’s Citizens Police Review Board struggled to find ways to reach the public.
In September, the Columbia City Council changed its ordinance, limiting the powers of the board to comply with a new state law. But current and former members say the City should rethink its decision, especially after new challenges have emerged in recent months.
“I guess the other thing that I want us to think about here is our invisibility," Doug Hunt, the CPRB’s chair, told his fellow members at the meeting. “We're here in the business of trying to reassure the public that the department is doing a responsible job.”
But doing so is tricky. Officially, the police review board is no longer allowed to hold special forums about policing in Columbia, nor is it allowed to make recommendations for changes to police procedure.
The board may still hold open sessions during its regular meetings, and the public is still invited to comment. But Hunt said attendance has been low.
“Some citizens who had formerly been very outspoken during the public portions of our meeting, they were quite distressed by these changes,” Hunt said. “Many of those people just stopped showing up.”
In March, no members of the public attended the board’s meeting. To get the word out about their April meeting — when it planned to review the Columbia Police Department’s appeals process — board members discussed the design of new flyers, asked a city lawyer if they would be allowed to advertise special meetings and pondered going to the press.
But despite their efforts, only two citizens showed up. Hunt said it’s a sign Columbia residents may be giving up on civilian oversight.
“As they say, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. If — and I shudder as I say it — we are on the road to becoming a less democratic society and a police state, it is the police who will be the agency for doing that,” Hunt said. “Citizens should keep their hand in and have their voices heard about how law enforcement operates.”
Navigating limited powers
Under the city council’s ordinance, the CPRB can still investigate appeals from citizens who feel their complaints about police misconduct weren’t handled properly by the police department.
“That’s what the board was set up for and they still have that power to do that,” said Assistant Police Chief of Professional Standards Paul Dickinson, who serves as the CPD’s chief liaison to the board.
Dickinson said he doesn’t believe the relationship between the board and the Columbia Police Department has changed because the board is still an independent set of eyes on cases of misconduct.
“It's a good, supportive relationship. We understand their role and we're here to support them,” Dickinson said.
Both Dickinson and Police Chief Jill Schlude — a member of the Columbia Police Officers Association when it supported the formation of the review board in 2007 — are currently receptive to his and other members’ input, Hunt said.
“(But) what troubles me is that if we lose our ability to speak publicly in open session about these matters, and if we end up with the wrong chief and the wrong city manager at some point, then everything goes dark,” Hunt said.
Internally, Hunt said the board has also been operating well — for the last few months, it has made unanimous decisions about appeals.
“If you get people who are very concerned about policing in general on the same board with former police officers and they agree a hundred percent about what the conclusion should be, you know you're in a good place,” Hunt said.
But the board can only hear appeals related to four specific kinds of policy violations: excessive use of force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, and use of offensive language, such as a racial slur.
Former CPRB chair Reece Ellis said the definitions of those violations are almost too specific for the board to function.
“If there was discriminatory conduct, but it didn't include a racial slur, because of the way the legislation is written, that wouldn't necessarily be something that we would be entitled to investigate,” Ellis explained.
Differing interpretations of state law
When Ellis was appointed in 2022, the CPRB was coming back from a mandated hiatus amid infighting and high turnover rates.
Ellis said he is proud he and other members were able to improve the CPRB’s relationship with the city, but he still opted to leave the board when his term ended in November.
“My feeling generally was that if the council was not going to, you know, protect us, it really took a lot of my morale out of wanting to participate,” Ellis said.
In September, Ellis went before the deliberating city council to argue the state law limiting police review boards shouldn’t apply to Columbia.
“What we have now is getting us a lot further away from that kind of government of the people, for the people, by the people, because the people are one step further removed,” Ellis said, adding that “there is really no other part of city government where the citizens are kind of cut off like this.”
He said the bill, which was written by a St. Louis County representative, was meant to limit the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight board which has the power to make legally binding disciplinary decisions.
Columbia’s police review board does not, and that’s why removing the CPRB’s ability to hold public forums is a poor interpretation of the law, Hunt argues.
“I understand why we wouldn't want to have those teeth and that ability to punish officers for inappropriate conduct, but you can't both have no teeth and no voice,” Hunt said. “And that's what's sort of heartbreaking about the legislation.”
Hunt and Ellis both said they hope the city council will reevaluate its decision soon, especially considering the fact that St. Louis County has yet to strip its review board of powers.
“If this entity that was much larger than us, much more powerful than us — but who still derives their abilities from the same statute — did not update anything, the City was probably overreacting to the statute by updating in the way that it did,” Ellis said.
Nancy Thompson, a lawyer for the city who advised the city council to change its ordinance, said in a written statement to KBIA that the change “was designed to preserve the rights and duties of the City's existing civilian oversight model to the greatest extent possible.”
Ellis said he’s waiting to see if St. Louis County makes a change, and if not, he will likely ask Columbia City Council to revisit the ordinance this summer — using St. Louis County as an example for why the CPRB’s powers should be returned.
The St. Louis County Council’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether it believes the board there is in compliance with state law. No members of the Columbia City Council responded to requests for comment either.
Finding new solutions
If the city council chooses not to amend its ordinances, Hunt said he hopes the CPRB’s next annual report can help make the board’s work visible to the public.
He said he is pushing for it to include short, anonymized summaries of the incidents reviewed by the CPRB, including explanations of the board’s decisions.
Formerly, the CPRB was permitted to do this, Hunt said, but recently annual reports have been “heavily lawyered” to comply with state law.
Hunt is adamant that it is imperative to commend good police conduct in order to build better relationships between citizens and police.
To highlight this, Hunt called for the CPRB’s annual report to also include examples of “shining police behavior.”
“We're trying to help the public have deserved trust in the police department,” Hunt said. “Because we are holding the department accountable both for its great behavior and its not so great behavior.”
Of the more than 100,000 interactions citizens have with Columbia police per year, Hunt said around 100 will complain — and only 15 of those complaints will rise to an appeal, subject to the CPRB’s purview.
Aside from good police behavior, some reasons for the low number could be lack of knowledge on how to complain, or fears that a limited CPRB will be unable to help, Hunt said.
“But there's no reason to think that policing in Columbia is a closed shop and the police do whatever they want,” Hunt said. “I would say, as a citizen, if you think you've witnessed police misconduct or been subject to police misconduct, you have a responsibility to complain.”
Aminah Jenkins contributed to this report.
