For a year and a half, a small group of Baltimore residents has been reviewing and recommending charges in police misconduct cases. But over the last several months, a longstanding frustration has been getting worse.

According to two members of the five-person “administrative charging committee,” the group has been receiving documents, either new or updated, from the Baltimore Police Department just as the misconduct cases are set to expire, leaving little time for a thorough and thoughtful review. Of the roughly 1,000 cases the committee has reviewed, nearly half of them were received within 15 days of their expiration, according to city data.

The cases are often complex. One that was reviewed last week involved eight officers, two different events, a variety of allegations, and body-worn camera footage that was not yet available for viewing, civil rights attorney and committee member Jesmond Riggins said. The night before the committee was set to meet and discuss the case, Riggins said the Police Department changed the investigative report, altering a “disposition” for one of the allegations against an officer who was previously listed as exonerated. That officer was now found to have committed an improper search, Riggins said.

As the committee attempted to parse out the different officers and allegations at its weekly meeting the next day, “none of us were able to go through all of the evidence ourselves to develop a solid opinion,” Riggins said. “It was just too much at one time.”

The Police Department’s slow-moving internal misconduct investigations are a well known issue — a perennial sticking point in the agency’s quest to exit its oversight agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. But even if the untimeliness from the department is unintentional, Riggins views the lack of corrective action by the city as a major warning sign.

Years ago, Riggins worked as a city staffer supporting the now-sidelined Civilian Review Board, once the city’s flagship citizen-led police accountability body. But Riggins watched as the board was essentially taken over by the city solicitor’s office in 2018, under then-Mayor Catherine Pugh, and considerably weakened, relying on the city for access to records and testimony from officers.

“We have to think about whether there’s a strategy being deployed to make this job we’re doing unbearable,” Riggins said. “In my experience, these tactics are used to drive down the morale of the board and the staff, to increase turnover … Then what happens, the board loses legitimacy in the eyes of the community, starts to lose support, and then people will want to toss it to the side.”

To prevent that fate, Riggins and other police reform advocates have argued that the city should make good on a recommendation that dates back to the Department of Justice investigation of the Police Department and its aftermath: an Office of Police Accountability, independent from and unwavering to the mayor’s office or city attorneys.

The city’s Police Accountability Board, which houses the charging committee that reviews misconduct cases, has been publicly calling for the mayor to make that change since May, making it their first recommendation in this year’s annual report. But the path toward making it a reality has recently widened. On Election Day, Baltimore voters overwhelmingly approved Question E, giving the City Council the ability to meaningfully pass laws governing the Police Department for the first time since the Civil War.

Community organizer and West Baltimore native Ray Kelly, who served on the Civilian Oversight Task Force that first proposed the independent office and now sits on the charging committee, said that until Question E passed, there was no real need for the office. But now, he says it should be the Council’s first priority in using their newfound power.

“Right now, we are not independent. We are under the auspice of the mayor’s Office of Equity and Civil Rights,” Kelly said. “Essentially, we’re not being able to operate fully in the best interest of the people first.”

In response to criticisms from the board, the Police Department said it has made “significant improvements in its misconduct investigations and remains committed to achieving full compliance with the requirements of the federally mandated consent decree.”

“While the Department will need to conduct an analysis of the cases referred to the administrative charging committee, we recognize that more work is required due to the high volume of cases and the thoroughness needed for comprehensive investigations,” said Lindsey Eldridge, Police Department spokesperson.

Eldridge said the department is working on hiring more civilian investigators and assigning additional sworn members to its Public Integrity Bureau, which conducts the investigations.

Mayor Brandon Scott, who has long advocated for the City Council to have more legislative authority over the Police Department, declined to comment on whether his administration supports the creation of an independent Office of Police Accountability. But a spokesperson for his office said the mayor “shares a commitment to transparency, civilian oversight, and necessary accountability measures with everyone doing the hard work of police oversight in Baltimore.”

Despite the tensions between the Police Accountability Board and the mayor’s Office of Equity and Civil Rights, Riggins acknowledged some progress being made in the number of city staffers supporting the committee’s work, though he said they could still benefit from additional people.

In ushering forward true civilian oversight, city’s consent decree may have fallen short

In June 2017, as part of Baltimore’s agreement with the federal DOJ, then-mayor Pugh appointed nine community members to serve on the Civilian Oversight Task Force. The group of citizens would conduct research on various models of police oversight, develop relationships with experts, engage the public, then make a series of recommendations to the city.

When the group issued its report the following year, its second bullet point on its list of recommendations was to “institute an independent civilian office of police accountability” that would have its own staff, as well as “full investigatory and subpoena powers.”

The task force’s recommendation was never heeded, but earlier this month, more than six years after the civilian task force report was published, the monitoring team gauging the Police Department’s compliance with the federal consent decree declared the the agency was in “full and effective compliance” with the section of the agreement requiring such a task force to be assembled.

Kenneth Thompson, the lead monitor measuring the Police Department’s compliance, told The Baltimore Banner that his team’s role is “limited to providing technical assistance and assessing whether the city and BPD have complied with the specific requirements of the consent decree.”

For the task force, Thompson said, that meant assessing whether the task force was created with qualified members and whether it analyzed the city’s civilian oversight structure, then made recommendations to improve it.

“We were not charged with assessing the response to those recommendations by the City or BPD,” Thompson said.

Heather Warnken, executive director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said she agrees with advocates who stress the need for a truly independent police oversight office.

“Independence,” she said, “is foundational to the restoration of trust.”

That restoration of trust between Baltimore’s historically over-policed communities and its Police Department is one of the primary aims of the consent decree, and perhaps its most obvious failure. Residents continue to take a negative view of the police, and the cozy relationships in courtroom hearings undercut any notion of real community engagement.

As for the monitoring team’s report on the civilian oversight task force, Warnken said: “Assessing compliance with what is on the paper of the consent decree versus measuring change are two very different things.”