Major Questions Loom about SBPD Citizen Review Program
City Looks at Options for Establishing a Police Oversight System
(This story originally ran on Newsmakers with Jerry Roberts.)
In 2015, President Obama’s “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” released a comprehensive study that recommended a sweeping set of best practice proposals for making police departments “more just, safe, effective and constitutional.”
Obama appointed the 11-member, nonpartisan expert panel in the wake of civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of a black man named Michael Brown. The “law and order” Trump Administration predictably junked the report, but it now stands as a road map for progressive reform, amid the current wave of anti-racism protests triggered by the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.
