photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Jan. 31, 2023.

City leaders will soon consider whether to reverse course on a plan to include previously developed draft changes regarding how complaints against police are handled by the city as part of a new effort to improve the complaint process.

As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission will consider adopting a resolution that removes the previously agreed-upon direction for the Community-Police Oversight Work Group to review a draft ordinance regarding police complaints that the Community Police Review Board developed.

Following a request from the commission in the summer of 2020, the review board took approximately a year to develop a draft ordinance to strengthen its oversight over police complaints. However, following the commission’s charge to the board, the commission also hired an outside consultant to conduct a comprehensive review of the Lawrence Police Department, which resulted in a recommendation in the summer of 2021 to convene a more collaborative work group that also included police representatives to consider the city’s police complaint process and the role of community oversight.

Members of the review board advocated that their draft changes, the development of which included a community survey and consultation with city legal staff, be reviewed as part of the new process rather than discarded. The board’s draft ordinance called for the board to review all complaints filed by residents against police and the police department’s investigation, among other changes.

However, the work group, which was supposed to convene for its first meeting by the beginning of September of last year, has yet to meet. That’s in part due to a series of resignations from the police review board, which has lost several members since February of 2022. That in turn affects the work group, which has three representatives from the board.

The first resignation was Jane Gibson, who in February of 2022 wrote a letter to the commission and her fellow board members expressing concern about the lack of transparency regarding complaints against police and a lack of support to improve oversight from city leaders, including the police chief, as the Journal-World reported. Police Chief Rich Lockhart disputed that claim and said he was completely committed to transparency. Since then, six additional board members have stepped down for various reasons. Two of the board members who have resigned were also part of the work group, according to information from the city.

A memo to the commission states that in an effort to encourage the work group’s progress, staff recommends the direction that the work group review the board’s draft ordinance as part of the process be removed from the group’s charge, and instead, allow the work group to determine its own suggestions for ordinance changes to improve the complaint process and enhance citizen oversight.

“A thorough review and examination of the existing complaint process remains within the Work Group’s purview,” Assistant City Manager Casey Toomay states in the memo. “It is hoped that adoption of Resolution No. 7474 will energize the Work Group so it can commence the very important work of building trust between the Lawrence Police Department and our community.”

The Journal-World asked Toomay for further explanation regarding why staff feels asking the work group to start anew on the ordinance changes would help address the challenges with appointments to the work group and improve the process. Toomay said the hope was to expand the work group’s discussion.

“Our hope is to broaden the possibilities for the Community-Police Oversight Work Group and not limit their discussion,” Toomay said in an email. “We hope by removing this requirement, it will expand discussion about the complaint process and allow members to consider a range of ideas and solutions for our community.”

In addition to the two board members, two other work group members have resigned after being appointed, according to Toomay. She said that includes one of the community members appointed to the group and one of the police representatives, the latter due to a change in leadership of the police union.

Accountability concerns regarding the city’s process for reviewing complaints against police date back several years. At the urging of the Lawrence branch of the NAACP, the commission created the Community Police Review Board in 2018 following a long debate that included pushback from the local police union. The governing ordinance that was ultimately approved gave the board a limited scope of review. City leaders called for a review of the ordinance in June 2020 amid nationwide protests against police killings of Black people and other people of color and reports that the board had yet to review any complaints in its first two years of existence due to the way it was set up. Though there have been dozens of complaints made against police since the creation of the board in 2018, it has reviewed only one complaint because of its limited review powers.

Under the 2018 ordinance, which continues to be in place, complaints against police filed both internally and by members of the public are investigated by the employee’s direct supervisor or by a division of the police department. The board only reviews complaints dealing with racial and other bias and only if the person involved appeals the department’s decision in writing within 14 days. The board’s members have called for stronger oversight for the past few years, referring to the board in its current form as a “rubber stamp” and “window dressing” for the department.

The Lawrence City Commission will convene at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.