photo by: Nick Krug

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on May 3, 2016.

A citizen review board, once mandated by the state to help curb instances of racial profiling, is hoping to expand its role as a liaison between Lawrence residents and police.

The Citizens’ Advisory Board for Fair and Impartial Policing was established in 2005 as a statewide effort to review police department policies and procedures regarding racial profiling, said Capt. Trent McKinley in an email.

“A few years later the state mandate to have such a board was removed, though the police department chose to leave the board in place to continue to monitor such complaints,” he said.

Now, among other duties, the board is responsible for examining annual police reports and investigations into racial profiling complaints, McKinley said. The board also examines use of force reports filed when officers deploy their TASERs.

Board members are appointed by the mayor.

The group meets once every other month. Representatives from the Lawrence Police Department attend each meeting, presenting the board with any incoming racial profiling complaints or TASER reports to look over.

When the board last met on June 13, only three of its seven members were present, not enough to constitute a quorum or take any action. Police officers did have a racial profiling investigation for them to review, but because less than half the group was present, Board Chair Baha Safadi said they must wait until their next meeting to see the case.

Only one member of the public attended the meeting, which was held at Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.

Safadi, who has been on the board for more than a year, said he feels the board could be doing more, but before that happens there’s some work to be done.

Very few people know about the board, Safadi said. And the precise responsibilities and scope of the group are unclear to its members, he said.

Safadi said he has reached out to city officials and asked them to give the board some guidance and perhaps some more responsibility. Preliminary conversations with the officials seem positive, he said, though he has not formally met with any of them on the matter yet.

Lawrence Police Chief Tarik Khatib said he would support the group taking a bigger role.

“When, on occasion, we’ve heard the call for the formation of a ‘police advisory board,’ or ‘citizen’s review board,’ the current board wants to remind the community that they are already here doing some of those things,” he said in an email.

“So instead of starting from scratch, it may be worth a look to see what we can add to the current board’s plate to get at some of those other things,” he added.

Aside from the addition of new responsibilities, board member Jolene Andersen said perhaps some existing duties could be examined.

In Andersen’s time on the board — just more than a year — members have reviewed roughly five police investigations into racial profiling, none of which have been substantiated, she said.

However, the procedure followed with submitted complaints may not be the most effective, Andersen said.

Once a complaint is made, it is investigated by the department’s internal Office of Professional Accountability, McKinley said. Supervisors review video and audio recordings, conduct interviews, review reports and more. The investigation’s findings are then passed on to the board for further review, he said.

“But this is another potential area we may need to consider: The police do their own review,” Andersen said. “And even though they bring it to us, it’s already complete.”

“I guess we would have the option to reopen it, but we don’t have enough information; we’re not there at the beginning,” she added.

One more viable option might be to turn any racial profiling investigations over to a “presumably more neutral agency,” Andersen said.

Currently, racial profiling complaints can be submitted to the police department at police.lawrenceks.org/content/compliments-and-complaints-lkpd or the Kansas Attorney General’s Office at ag.ks.gov/public-safety/racial-and-bias-based-policing.

But in the future, perhaps complaints could be submitted directly to the Citizens’ Advisory Board for Fair and Impartial Policing, Safadi said.

Lawrence City Manager Tom Markus said in an email he has not yet spoken with Safadi, but he thinks there could be advantages to offering a complaint submission process separate from the police department.

“Having an independent board reviewing such complaints may give confidence to the public that their concerns are being addressed independently,” he said.

Although some changes could be made to the complaint or review processes, that is not to say the department has a racial profiling problem, Andersen said. However, she does occasionally hear stories from Lawrence residents that need to be taken into account.

“I was talking to a parent the other day who said they warned their son not to drive a certain kind of car because he will be stopped,” she said. “Whether it’s real or a perception, those kinds of issues need to be addressed.”

Safadi said in the decades he’s lived in Lawrence he’s had nothing but positive and respectful encounters with the Lawrence Police Department and he wants to take an active role in ensuring every other resident has the same experience with law enforcement.

“We want to help make sure the citizens of Lawrence trust the police department,” he said. “If they don’t, we need to know why, and if we have some issue with the department, we need to get to the bottom of it and we need to get it solved.”

The board cannot take action solely on rumors of improper policing, Safadi said. It needs concrete evidence. The first step in that process is to remind Lawrence residents that the board is a resource available to them, he said.

At the board’s last meeting, Safadi introduced the topic of creating a website for the board, independent from the city or the police department’s sites. Although no action was taken, the idea was received positively by members.

With the website, “we’ll be more known to the citizens of Lawrence,” Safadi said. “We’ll have our staff, our ideas, our minutes, our agendas, location of the meetings and what we are to do in the coming future.”

The board’s current roster can be viewed at lawrenceks.org, and the group’s schedule, agendas and minutes can be found at police.lawrenceks.org.

The board will next meet at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 8 in the City Commission chambers at City Hall.

This story has been edited to correct Trent McKinley’s title. McKinley is a captain in the Lawrence Police Department.