19th-quarterly-report.pdf

Nineteenth Quarterly Report of the Independent Monitor for the Oakland Police Department October 30, 2014 Page 8 Section Two Compliance Assessments Task 2: Timeliness Standards and Compliance with IAD Investigations Requirements: Fairness to complainants, members/employees and the public requires that internal investigations be completed in a timely fashion. 1. On or before December 1, 2003, OPD shall develop policies regarding timeliness standards for the completion of Internal Affairs investigations, administrative findings and recommended discipline. 2. Compliance with these timeliness standards shall be regularly monitored by IAD command and the Department’s command staff. If IAD experiences an unusual proliferation of cases and/or workload, IAD staffing shall be increased to maintain timeliness standards. (Negotiated Settlement Agreement III. B.) Discussion: OPD published Departmental General Order M-03, Complaints Against Department Personnel and Procedures, which incorporates the requirements of Task 2, on December 6, 2005. General Order M-03 was revised most recently on August 22, 2013. As the Department has trained at least 95% of relevant personnel on this policy, we find OPD in continued Phase 1 compliance with this Task. OPD has been in Phase 2 compliance with Task 2 since the thirteenth reporting period. Task 2.1 requires that internal investigations (IAD and Division Level) – including review, approval, findings, and discipline – be completed in accordance with the timeliness standards developed by OPD (compliance standard: 85%). To assess this subtask, we reviewed a list of all internal investigations resulting in formal findings (unfounded, sustained, exonerated, or not sustained) that were approved between April 1, and June 30, 2014, and calculated the number of days between the complaint date and the approval date for each case. We excluded from the dataset cases that were administratively closed, those that involved on-duty traffic accidents or service complaints, and those that did not involve Manual of Rules (MOR) violations. We segregated the remaining cases into Class I or Class II categories. If a case involved at least one alleged Class I violation, we classified it as Class I.