fourteenth-report.pdf

Independent Monitoring Team Fourteenth Status Report of the Independent Monitor Delphine Allen, et al., v. City of Oakland, et al. July 31, 2009 to January 13, 2010 Page 101 During the seventh reporting period, the IMT interviewed officers on all three patrol shifts regarding their understanding of Task 47’s requirements. Based on our interviews, OPD officers appeared to have a solid grasp of the most important elements of this task. As a result, the IMT changed its conditional training compliance determination for this task to an unconditional in-compliance finding. During the seventh reporting period, the IMT audited OPD’s compliance in actual practice with Task 47 and found that OPD had made impressive progress on this task with respect to its attendance at community meetings. The IMT’s audit found OPD in compliance with this element of Task 47, but not with many other requirements. A fuller discussion of our audit is included in our seventh status report. During the ninth reporting period, OIG audited Task 47. According to OIG, OPD had fallen out of compliance with the community meeting requirement and is not yet in compliance with other requirements of this task. During the tenth reporting period, OPD pledged to identify its community policing and problem-solving methods and the mechanisms it uses for measuring them as required by the NSA. During the eleventh review period, this information was provided to the IMT. The IMT reviewed the information and provided comments to OPD. During the tenth reporting period, all but one of the compliance standards for this task was lowered from 95% to 85% or modified to include a more subjective pass/fail assessment. During the twelfth reporting period, OPD revised Training Bulletin III-A.5 to incorporate direction regarding its methods and mechanisms for measuring community policing and problem-solving. We conducted a compliance assessment of Task 47 during the twelfth reporting period. Our assessment of Task 47 found that OPD was in compliance with each of the provisions reviewed. Accordingly, we found OPD in conditional compliance with Task 47. This compliance finding was conditional because we did not review the Task 47.3 requirement that OPD implement mechanisms to measure its community policing and problem-solving activities. OPD had not yet had sufficient time to implement this requirement. During this reporting period we conducted an assessment of OPD’s compliance with the requirement that OPD measure community policing efforts. We found that OPD has implemented some mechanisms to measure its community policing efforts, including requiring officers to document their completed problem-solving projects on beat project forms; tracking the projects completed by its dedicated problem-solving officers; tracking the number of commanders who participate in community internet groups; and tracking the number of officers who attend community meetings each quarter. In addition, OPD began to include in the performance appraisals of its patrol officers an assessment of whether officers complied with the new requirement to complete a minimum number of problem-solving projects each year. While these measures are sufficient to comply with Task 47, there is significant room for OPD to make its measurement efforts more useful to the Department and the communities it serves. For example, while OPD officers complete beat project forms for each individual project, we found a wide variance in the quality of information captured on each form. Additionally, we found that