Scrap Police Board

The city of Madison is facing a budget crisis. I’ve got an idea to save an easy half million dollars.

The Civilian Police Oversight Board was created in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It never made any sense because the Madison Police Department has long been among the most progressive anywhere and because there’s always been plenty of civilian oversight over it. There’s the Police and Fire Commission, the Public Safety Review Board, the Mayor and the City Council. When there’s a police shooting we have the District Attorney and the State Department of Justice to investigate it. And, of course, victims always have a recourse in the courts to file civil suits. Advocates of the new commission could never articulate what value it would add to what was already there.

All that was bad enough, but then when the board was actually created things got much worse. A last minute amendment on the council floor required that at least half the board be made up of Black members, a clear violation of law, which was demonstrated when the city was promptly sued and lost. And then things went downhill from there.

The latest revelation is that after three years the commission hasn’t even so much as come up with a complaint form and process to be used by citizens who feel aggrieved by the cops. And, by the way, nobody has asked for one. There have been no complaints to follow up on. So how does the Police Monitor spend his days? Well, I guess working on that form. Apparently, it takes a lot of community meetings to produce a form like that.

And this is only the latest chapter in a story that might be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and costly. The board took months just to get itself organized. When they finally were ready to start the hiring process for a police monitor they couldn’t get a single executive search firm to help them, a bad sign when you consider that these firms should want the business. So, they took the process in-house but dragged their feet and were less than transparent while board members took to social media to air their biases about the candidates, resulting in a discrimination lawsuit. When they finally did hire a monitor it came to light that, at a previous job, Byron Bishop had discriminated against an employee who he had had an affair with and he had owned a private security firm that had dropped the ball in supplying security personnel for the city’s first Freak Fest (something I recall all too clearly). One might stop here and wonder how well the board was vetting its candidates even as it took an inordinate amount of time in the hiring process. In any event, after Bishop withdrew they picked another candidate who thought better of it (how can you blame him?) and he also withdrew. They finally got down to second runner-up Robert Copley who now struggles so mightily with forms and processes.

Copley was hired more than two years after the board was established during a period when simply making that hire was the only substantive thing on its agenda. And in the 14 months or so he’s been on the job he hasn’t even produced a complaint process.

And to reward themselves for all of that stellar work the board voted to recommend that they should be paid thousands of dollars in “honorariums”, a concept that has no place in municipal government even for competent people.

This whole thing is just a train wreck. And the budget for the commission is an astounding $509,000 this year. It would be a waste under any circumstances, but a city facing a $27 million deficit simply can’t afford to incinerate tax dollars like this.

If we lived in a sane world the board and the monitor would be gone tomorrow. Note: we do not live in a sane world.