Posted
by Brad Johnson
on Tue Jul 20, 2010
Last updated
Jul 20, 2010
Councilman Gary Kespohl introduced a new amendment at the council meeting on Monday. It stems from issues with the first complaint to the review board, where a resident from the state of California complained about a February swat raid.
The council's proposed changes would only allow someone to file a complaint if he or she is a Columbia citizen, or if they were directly involved in the incident, or if you are related to someone involved.
Councilmember Kespohl tells ABC 17 News the review board is spending way too much time on questions about the ordinance rather than the complaint itself. He says the change in requirements needs to be made now so that doesn't keep happening, so we asked the review board chairwoman why they didn't think of this problem earlier.
It took more than two years to put together the board, and now it's being bogged down on its first case.
"When the oversight committee and then the task force worked on it we wanted to be broad enough to include any possible options that could happen, I don't think we considered at all it would be this broad," Citizens Police Review Board chairwoman Ellen LoCurto-Martinez tells us.
LoCurto-Martinez tells us the reason they aren't able to move forward on the case is because they aren't sure how to handle an out-of-state complaint. In fact, she says they didn't think they would ever have to deal with one, and now it's overwhelming. She thought they would eventually get a high profile case but didn't expect it to be their first one, making it that much harder to deal with.
Councilman Kespohl says they can't afford to be wasting time and money.
"We can't burden that commission down with a lot of complaints, it ties up police officers time and it ties up citizens' time," Kespohl explains.
The chairwoman believes Kespohl's changes would be good to implement.
"I think we personally left the ordinance open enough so that we could work through some of the details and then the new board one they were selected could actually fine tune it and sit down some parameters we felt were important," LoCurto-Martinez says.
The council's amendment is now in the city attorney's hands. He's hoping to formally write the proposal and get it back to Kespohl in about a week. He says he wants the review board to go over the formal document at its meeting on august 11th. The council would then vote on it the following week.
