Santa Barbara’s Community Formation Commission ‘Frustrated’ by Police Oversight Pivot
City Council Moves Forward with Proposal to Give Oversight Duties to Fire & Police Commission, City Administrator's Office
During a contentious special meeting of the Santa Barbara City Council on Monday — which reportedly ended in a confrontation involving the city’s interim police chief and the chair of the Community Formation Commission (CFC) — councilmembers moved forward with city staff’s recommendations to give greater police oversight and monitoring powers to the Fire & Police Commission and the City Administrator’s Office in lieu of creating the Civilian Oversight Board championed by the CFC. Members of the CFC — which had spent the past 13 months working toward its recommendations — spoke out at Monday’s meeting, saying they were “disappointed” and “frustrated” by the recommendations made in the final proposal presented to the City Council, which amended the proposal before moving forward with it in a 6-1 vote.
Formed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the CFC had asked for an 11-person Civilian Oversight Board, separate from an existing commission, which had its own mission statement to “ensure that SBPD is responsive to the concerns and needs of all members of the Santa Barbara community while promoting transparency and accountability, and building public trust between the community and the SBPD.” The CFC’s final draft recommendation was a detailed outline for the makeup, duties, responsibilities, and processes for a civilian oversight model, which included ideas for review, training, and community engagement that many members of the commission said were not included in the version presented to the City Council.
City staff explained that some of the CFC’s recommendations — like asking for subpoena power and the ability to hold closed sessions — were already under the Fire & Police Commission’s purview, making this implementation both quicker and more cost-efficient than CFC’s recommendations. Many of the CFC’s recommendations were, in fact, included, but members of the public said folding these into a board that already existed was not a proper response to the CFC’s final draft.
