By JW August
A recent suggestion by a San Diego City Council Committee to rework the city’s Commission on Police Practices met with sharp resistance last week from the citizens panel.
Instead, the commission created to oversee the San Diego Police Department rejected the recommendations of the council’s Public Safety Committee to, among other things, change the role of the executive director whose allegiance would no longer be to the commission but rather to the City Council. The result would be to give the council authority over the removal of the director.
The council does have the power to pick the director, but now it was being suggested it would also have the power to fire the director. These “suggestions” came four years into the effort to create an effective commission after a great deal of policy discussions and community feedback.
Public comment at the commission’s meeting last Wednesday evening set the tone. Longtime civic activist and attorney Kate Yavenditti warned the commission, “Don’t let the City Council take your independence away. That’s exactly what this is all about.”
She noted that this sort of thing has happened before with the commission’s predecessor, the Citizens Review Board..
The pressure from the Public Safety Committee, and its chair, Councilmember Marni von Wilpert was generated by Paul Parker, the outgoing executive director of the commission who quit after a brief six-month tenure. His exit memo to the city was a series of finger-pointing complaints about what he saw as the oversight board’s problems.
Von Wilpert, in reviewing his claims, decided to postpone the search for his replacement as executive director until changes were made. She also has held off on filling the nine vacant commissioner seats. She asked the city attorney’s office to look at issues raised by Parker.
What that office found, along with the commission’s legal counsel, Bart Miesfeld, is that the employment of the executive director is governed strictly by the city charter. To change how the director is let go would require changing the city charter. They compared the process to changing the Constitution.
Other public speakers said proposed changes to the commission would intrude on its role and were not in the spirit of what the public had voted for.
Darwin Fishman of the Racial Justice Coalition recalled when he was a member of the previous board-CRB, “We had a real struggle dealing with elected officials and had problems implementing any change the board may have needed.” It was key, he felt, for the current board to “be vigilant” in order to have the community support the commission’s work.
Parker had complained that his position as executive director was an at-will position and that the board could have fired him if it wanted to. He thought it should be the council’s role to approve any firing. Miesfeld pointed out that executive directors on other city commission boards are all at-will employees.
Yusef Miller of North County Equity and Justice Coalition asked the commission to stand its ground and remain “independent from the city, the City Attorney, the City Council members.” What residents voted for as to how the commission is formed and operated “is the way it should be implemented.”
Also a concern of Parker’s was the size of the commission. He thought 25 members was “too large for effective and efficient functioning. As to this idea of reducing the size of the PSC, that was rejected by the commission, as well.
Instead, commission board member Imani Robinson’s motion received unanimous support for a message to be sent to the Public Safety Committee suggesting that the commission wanted to keep 25 as the number of members and in addition, activate a recruitment committee to fill the board vacancies immediately immediately.
Doug Case who chairs the commission, told the Times of San Diego, “While the Commission appreciates the concerns expressed at the Public Safety Committee, we do not believe any immediate changes to the San Diego Municipal Code that governs the Commission are necessary. Our hope is that the City Council will move expeditiously to fill the nine vacant seats on the Commission, to appoint an interim Executive Director, and to initiate the search process for a new Executive Director.”
