Oak Park’s Citizen Police Oversight Committee is being studied by a consultant looking to provide the village with recommendations on how it might modernize the committee.
The staff of Pivot Consulting Group held an information session at Village Hall last Thursday evening as it looked to absorb community feedback to help shape its report on how the village’s police oversight committee can be organized to best suit Oak Park’s needs. Pivot, a Spokane, Washington-based group, is run by former high-ranking leaders at the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement and specializes in reviewing communities’ use of civilian committees for law enforcement agency oversight.
Last November, Oak Park’s village board approved $100,000 to fund the consultant group’s study. The group has already submitted a report describing best practices in the oversight field to Kira Tchang, the village staff liaison to the Citizen Police Oversight Committee.
Citizen Police Oversight Committee Chair Kevin Barnhart said he hopes the consultant’s report will yield suggestions that give the body more influence over police policy.
“Overall, we’re looking towards the step of the role of CPOC evolving in this community and standards changing so that we’re not doing something from 35 years ago,” Barnhart said. “It’s the updating of our processes and procedures so they have a little more board teeth and are a little more ingrained.”
Oak Park’s Citizen Police Oversight Committee is considerably older than most of its peer organizations around the country. While the group was founded in Oak Park in 1991, many communities have launched their civilian oversight boards in the years following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the nationwide protests that followed.
Oak Park’s committee reviews police investigations of citizen complaints, with the department’s investigations usually being led by either a commander or by the department’s internal affairs team. The committee can either vote to agree or disagree with the police investigation and action taken, but the committee’s vote is not binding. Police Chief Shatonya Johnson would have to choose to act on the ruling.
The committee is set to provide its next semi-annual report to the village board at May 20’s board meeting, according to village records.
During last week’s education session, Pivot’s Brian Corr gave a presentation on the history of civilian police oversight in the United States, and the different models of oversight work that communities rely on.
“The ultimate thing is Oak Park is looking at its civilian oversight, how it’s working, what’s been effective, what might need to change,” Corr said. “What are police officers, community members, board members, trustees, what are all these different sets of constituents looking for and ultimately how do we support making policing more effective in Oak Park and really promote community safety.”
The main models of police oversight are “the review model,” “the investigation model” and “the audit model,” Corr said.
The review model is what Oak Park currently uses, and is the most common style of oversight committee in the U.S. The investigation model requires full-time staff to conduct completely independent investigations of complaints. Committees that operate with the audit model focus more on analyzing patterns than reviewing independent complaints.
During the session, the consultants surveyed attendees on several topics including what they think Oak Park should prioritize if the village chooses to reform the oversight process.
Pivot staff expect to submit their final report reviewing the Citizen Police Oversight Committee to the village board before the end of June.