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 40 compliance review with this task to provide OPD the opportunity to ensure all Task 16 cases are identified. In the interim, the IMT met with IAD to discuss the Task 16 cases we did review to ensure that IAD and the IMT have a common understanding regarding how these cases will be assessed and to allow OPD to address any problems prior to the IMT’s formal compliance assessment of this task. The IMT also worked with OIG and IAD to develop monitoring criteria that would minimize the problems identifying cases responsive to this task. During the tenth reporting period, both of the compliance standards for this task were lowered from 95% to 90%. During the thirteenth reporting period, we completed our actual practice compliance assessment of Task 16. Task 16.1 requires that OPD hold supervisors, commanders, and other OPD managers accountable for “supporting the IAD process.” A variety of NSA tasks, including Task 16.2, specifically address ways in which OPD leadership must support the IAD process. Such support requires, for example, responding to the field to take misconduct complaints (Tasks 5 and 6); forwarding complaint information to IAD so that it can be tracked and resolved (Tasks 4 and 5); reporting misconduct that they observe or learn of, including retaliation (Tasks 33 and 37); complying with OPD timelines when they are assigned to investigate allegations of misconduct (Task 2); and, perhaps most directly, supervising – and intervening when necessary – to prevent, detect, and effectively respond to misconduct by officers under their command (Task 16). In conjunction with the IMT’s ongoing monitoring, including the review of the above- listed tasks, the IMT noted and reviewed instances where supervisors, commanders, and other managers did not support the IAD process, as described above, and assessed whether OPD held leadership accountable for any failures to support the IAD process. Our reviews have shown that OPD is doing a better job of holding leadership accountable for supporting the IAD process, but is not yet where it needs to be. We found many exemplary instances of OPD holding supervisors and managers accountable. In addition to specific exemplary cases discussed in our Task 16 audit report, IAD command staff now issue negative case evaluation reports for unacceptable internal investigations and for missing internal IAD deadlines. It is likely because of these and similar measures that the quality and timeliness of IAD investigations has improved. In other instances, OPD did not hold supervisors and managers accountable, and these cases indicated that, despite significant advances in this area, entrenched obstacles to supervisory accountability remain. One of the most direct ways in which OPD supervisors and commanders can support the “IAD process” is by properly supervising, reviewing, and intervening in the actions of their subordinates to ensure those actions are appropriate. Task 16.2 requires that where OPD finds that an OPD member or employee committed Class I misconduct, OPD must determine whether a supervisor or manager should have reasonably determined that the subordinate committed misconduct and hold the supervisor or manager accountable as appropriate. We found that OPD is not yet in compliance with this requirement because we identified cases in which OPD did not properly identify and investigate supervisory failures such as commanders failing to report misconduct.