Sacramento leaders promised to listen to the police commission. Then they ignored it again

In 2015 — in the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — the Sacramento City Council established the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission.

The idea: To demonstrate commitment to transparency, accountability and citizen engagement when it comes to how police interact with the public. The new panel replaced a previous commission, the Community Racial Profiling Commission, which was widely seen as toothless and insignificant.

After the City Council voted to create the new commission, then-Mayor Kevin Johnson declared that it “has real teeth in it.”

“This commission, made up of the community, gives us a chance to have real accountability, real community input and it gives you (the community) the chance to have real oversight,” Johnson told the audience in the City Council chambers, according to a story by The Sacramento Bee’s Ryan Lillis.

The commission flopped soon afterward, with critics saying it did not have enough oversight power.

“I felt the commission lacked relevance in critical moments,” said Pastor Les Simmons, who resigned from the panel three months after Sacramento Police officers shot Joseph Mann to death in Del Paso Heights in 2016. “At one point I said, ‘What is my role here?’”

In 2017, the City Council reconstituted a new version of the commission to address those concerns.

“The issues that this commission will deal with are going to be high profile and it’s important that there is a group of community leaders that provide guidance and a voice for these crucial issues,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg said.

In 2021, it appears the City Council has once again failed to live up to the promise. Current members of the commission say the City Council has basically ignored its work for the past three years, calling into question the reason for its very existence. If Sacramento’s leaders think the city needs a community-based commission to review the police, why do they seem so intent on repeatedly ignoring its work?

Tensions over the commission’s role spilled into public view this week as the commission’s chair, Mario Guerrero, presented the City Council with key recommendations from the panel. The recommendations include proposals to raise the police department’s standard for when officers can use force, to require drug tests for officers after use-of-force incidents and giving the commission a budget to conduct its work.

“We have talked about them to death,” Guerrero said of the ideas, pushing the City Council to finally weigh in on the commission’s ideas.

Mayor Steinberg and most members of the City Council readily acknowledged the city’s failure to respect or heed the work of the commission. After urging from District 4 Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, the council agreed to revisit the commission ideas in a few weeks and finally give an indication of whether it will support the recommendations.

While the commission’s recommendations to the council are not binding, the City Council owes the 11-member commission a response to the 55 pages of recommendations and observations it has compiled. If some of the ideas won’t work, the City Council should debate them in a public forum and issue an official decision of some kind.

Otherwise, what is the point of the Community Police Review Commission? To serve as a public relations mechanism whenever city leaders need to prove they’re progressives who value community input on life-or-death matters like policing? Sacramento needs action, not lip service.

It’s shameful that it’s taken so long for city leaders to take the commission’s work seriously. Better late than never, however. As the nation reels from the police killing of Daunte Wright in Minnesota and the brutal arrest of Army Lt. Caron Nazario in Virginia, it’s clear this issue isn’t going away.

Under Steinberg’s leadership, the city has made important progress on police reform. It has created an inspector general position and taken steps to shift police away from calls that would better be dealt with by mental health specialists. Now, the city must finally do right by the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission.

The City Council must provide clear responses to the commission’s recommendations on an annual basis. It should also push City Manager Howard Chan to ensure that Sacramento police fully participate in the commission’s work. Guerrero said the police department’s participation has been spotty.

That’s probably because police view the panel as toothless. It’s long past time for the City Council to keep its promises and change this perception.