A consulting firm hired by Oak Park’s village government to assess the role of citizen oversight of the police department has made 11 recommendations and this observation:
“The message was clear to us, people value accountability in Oak Park, they want transparency but they believe that oversight should build trust and not divide,” said Bart Logue, the group’s CEO.
A key recommendation is that the village hire a full-time staff member to work with the Citizens Police Oversight Committee to allow them to expand their capacity to review citizen complaints about policing and to take on a broader role in assessing policing efforts locally.
Oak Park’s board of trustees heard the set of recommendations on how it could reconfigure the committee following the consultant’s yearlong study.
Pivot Consulting Group is a small agency focused on the field of citizen law enforcement oversight. It provided its recommendations to the board based on a study of oversight bodies across the country and engagement with CPOC members, Oak Park police and village residents.
Sept. 9’s discussion served as a study session on the issue, with more board action expected to follow in coming months.
Oak Park’s police oversight committee is significantly older than most of its peers in other cities. Created in 1991, the body didn’t change much, even as governments around the country created new police oversight methods and strategies in the wake of high-profile officer-involved incidents — like the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
The previous village board hired Pivot after making modernizing CPOC a goal, Assistant Village Manager Kira Tchang said.
“In the 34 years since CPOC’s creation a lot has changed including policing standards, both national and local conversations about public safety and important conversations about transparency, equity and professional responsibility,” Tchang said.
Pivot made 11 recommendations to “increase CPOC’s capacity.” Among the group’s recommendations for the village was advising the board to create a full-time staff position that would support the committee’s work, using the structure of Cambridge, MA’s police oversight board as a model.
Like Oak Park, Cambridge’s police oversight committee reviews the results of completed police internal investigations, but has full-time staff support and more access to police data, Pivot said.
“The Cambridge review model stood out as what we thought would be the best fit for Oak Park,” said Logue. “It respects the long-lasting impact of the CPOC, but it builds on that institutional legacy rather than replacing it outright. At the same time, it strengthens their capacity by ensuring that a full-time professional staff member will help them carry out day-to-day duties at the direction of the oversight body. We really valued Cambridge’s collaborative approach with police leadership.”
Such a new full-time employee would likely report to the village’s director of diversity equity and inclusion, but no current staff member has the capacity to take on additional CPOC responsibilities, Oak Park Village Manager Kevin Jackson said.
“It speaks to a pretty significant demand in terms of workload,” Jackson said. “We don’t have the capacity to take those on right now, and I think that’s what’s being acknowledged in the assessment.”
A member of Pivot’s team — Brian Corr — served as executive director of Cambridge’s Police Review & Advisory Board from 2010 to 2024.
Other recommendations included providing the committee with more data and standardizing the role CPOC has when the police department looks to adopt a new surveillance technology.
The set of recommendations comes after the village board voted to cancel the department’s contract with Flock Safety — turning off the eight license plate reading cameras the company operated in town citing concerns that the cameras helped aid federal immigration enforcement. That vote came months after CPOC members submitted a document to the village board in March asking for more access to Flock camera data.
“Access to investigative search outcomes is critical for CPOC to fulfill its oversight duties,” they wrote in the document. “Evaluating search justifications, false positives, and case outcomes enables CPOC to determine whether ALPR searches lead to lawful, unbiased, and effective enforcement actions — or whether their use meaningfully contributes to public safety in Oak Park. Without this information, CPOC cannot accurately assess whether ALPR searches are achieving their intended purpose or being misused.”
One CPOC member — Jack Powers — spoke out at two village board meetings in favor of the village keeping its contract with Flock Safety.
Board members received the consultants’ recommendations positively but spoke to the necessity for highly specific guidelines based on the recommendations to shape the commission’s future. The board will address the issue again when specific ordinance changes are drafted by village staff for a final vote.
“If we had this a couple of years ago, I think we might’ve navigated some conversations a little better,” said Village President Vicki Scaman. “With a staff person for CPOC, or whatever it’s going to be called in the future, we can address a lot. Including some of the questions raised tonight around technology. I think we need to flesh out what that job description would look like so it’s best suited for our village.”