Perented Aug K 4 2016 August 16, 2016 County Grand Jury The Honorable Jeffrey B. Barton Presiding Judge, San Diego*

Published: August 16, 2016 3 pages

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⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.

⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.

Findings 2 findings

F05

Cities without a citizens' oversight board do not have public review of complaints of police behavior and risk losing the trust of their citizens. Response: Disagree in part. The City of El Cajon agrees that cities without a citizens' oversight board do not have public review of complaints of police behavior; the City disagrees, however, that the lack of such an oversight board creates a risk that the City will lose the trust of its citizens. „The State of California legislature has adopted guidelines and rules for review of citizen complaints regarding police. The City of El Cajon fully supports State law and our procedures regarding citizen complaints are fully consistent with this legislation, as well as the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights. As a result, the citizen complaint process of the El Cajon Police Department is clear, fair and impartial. The final review and approval authority of all such investigations ultimately rests with the City Manager who, in addition, has the option of requesting additional review by the City Attorney's Office and the Human Resources Department if felt warranted. The City Manager, City Attorney and Department of Human Resources are entirely independent of the Police Department.

F06

A review board shaped with citizen input will promote confidence in actions taken by the board. Response: Disagree wholly. Explanation:

Recommendations 2

16-30
Page 3

Establish independent citizen commissions for oversight of police behavior. The recommendation will not be implemented due to its being not warranted and not Response: reasonable. Explanation: There are very few formal citizens' complaints received by the City of El Cajon regarding the Police Department. In 2013, of a total of 95,000 contacts with citizens, 8 resulted in citizen complaints. In 2014, out of nearly 89,000 citizen contacts, only 2 resulted in complaints. For the entire year of 2015, only one citizen complaint was received. It is apparent given the size of the community and the large number of regular contacts with citizens, that the extremely low number of complaints filed with the City is an indication that the El Cajon Police Department has an outstanding track record of appropriate professionalism and behavior in regard to the citizens and a citizen's oversight board would have literally nothing to do the vast majority of the time and would have no apparently positive effect on either the community or the Police Department.
16-31
Page 3

Determine the specific commission model with community input to ensure acceptance, independence, and accountability. The recommendation will not be implemented due to its being not warranted and not Response: reasonable. See explanation to Recommendation 16-30 above. Explanation:

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.