2006-2007 Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury Report Police Misconduct May Be Underreported

Conclusions 1

• CL1 Page 8
  At recent community-police forums, concerns were raised as to the ability of the SJPD to appropriately oversee itself through the response of the Internal Affairs Unit to citizen complaints and a monitoring of their investigations. The IPA, which reports on the actions of the IA through auditing of complaint investigations and monitoring of IA statistics, questioned the accuracy of the current complaint classification process in the 2005 and 2006 IPA Year End Reports. A special analysis of 92 percent of those years’ Inquiry-type complaints showed that the IPA disagreed with the IA’s Inquiry classification at least 50 percent of the time. Although citizen complaints may be received by both the IPA and the IA, only the IA is authorized to investigate the complaint, and give a final classification. The IPA comments when there is a perceived discrepancy within a category or between categories. As an example, since 2003 the Command Review category went from 13 percent down to 0.2 percent; that is, a single Command Review complaint for all of 2006. Correspondingly, since 2003 the percentage of Inquiry and Procedural-type complaints taken together has gone up from 47 percent to 70 percent of all complaints. These two categories of complaints in comparison to Formal complaints carry little subject officer accountability, investigation, or discipline. A new EWS manual off-line log, that captures and manages information from Inquiry-type complaints, was initiated in April 2007. If this procedure is formally incorporated into the IAPro database, it will increase officer accountability. The number of citizen complaints is quite low, about 450 for 2006. Put into perspective, there were just over 400,000 citizen-police contacts in 2006, and there are 1346 police officers in San Jose. The ratio of complaints to all citizen-police contacts is 0.1 percent. However, it is a concern of the Grand Jury that, given the current complaint classification and resolution procedures, a number of citizens do not have the confidence to report perceived officer misconduct. In order to promote public confidence that police oversight is objective and effective, the Grand Jury recommends that more joint responsibility be given to the IPA as the principal intake location and that the IPA be authorized to classify all citizen- generated complaints. As a critical first step, the IPA and IA should jointly develop category-specific criteria for complaint classification purposes, and a category hierarchy that goes from the incidental Citizen Contact to the most serious Formal complaint. An improved, single complaint form used by both the IA and IPA would standardize the complaint filing process. In addition, the IPA should be granted co-investigation authority for those cases the IA does not investigate, or cases questioned by the IPA. This especially includes the most serious Formal complaints – use of force, and officer- involved shootings. Finally, both the IPA and the Internal Affairs Unit of the SJPD should be subjected to a performance audit that should be ordered by the City Council. By following these recommendations better police-community relations will be achieved. 8

No Responses Found 1

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