An annual city report designed to improve public trust in Sacramento shows an oversight agency failed to review about one-third of police misconduct complaints from 2021. Watchdogs say the Office of Public Safety Accountability report builds on longstanding transparency concerns.
Graciela Castillo-Krings, chair of the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission, said the process of how the city disciplines police is opaque. The accountability report doesn’t break down the type of discipline for each sustained misconduct allegation.
“When it's unclear what they're being charged with or what conduct is being brought to the forefront, it is really difficult to understand if the culture is really changing,” Castillo-Krings said. “If they are really being held accountable to the degree that the public would like.”
Last year, the accountability office recorded 289 police misconduct complaints, which the report breaks down into 707 allegations. People reported about 10% of the allegations to the accountability office; the rest were filed with police.
LaTesha Watson is the director of the accountability office, which is independent from the police department and reports directly to the mayor and City Council. Watson said her office needs more staff to be able to review all complaints against police and fire, whether they are filed with her office or directly with the departments. She focused on discourtesy complaints last year and is prioritizing improper search and seizure allegations in 2022.
She recommended several changes, including the creation of a dedicated position to track complaints and the city’s human resources department improving how it shares Equal Employment Opportunity cases involving police.
“We need to be notified of that so that we can make sure we are adequately answering all of the allegations of misconduct,” Watson said. “Because we are telling the public that we are the central location to know what complaints and what allegations came in for a particular time period on all public safety personnel.”
Watson said the police department’s internal affairs division cannot investigate all the complaints it receives. So, instead, supervisors within the police department also review allegations against employees who report to them.
Through the report, Watson and her office called on police supervisors to investigate complaints impartially. She also said police should send her office completed cases for review. When police tell officers the results without first sending investigations to the accountability office, Watson said her staff can’t challenge the results.
The recommendation raises red flags for Tifanei Ressl-Moyer, senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Ressl-Moyer in December filed two lawsuits against Sacramento, alleging the city withheld police public records and police violated protesters’ rights.
“The will of the public is for an independent review to be happening: something independent of the department, which is incentivized to kind of cover up wrongdoing,” Ressl-Moyer said. “The integrity of the process really relies on this openness to happen, really relies on somebody who doesn't have a stake in the end game to review what the police are doing.”
Ressl-Moyer added the report’s recommendation to increase accountability office staffing shows city leadership’s priorities. The City Council has approved record-breaking police budgets the past couple years, but Ressl-Moyer said Sacramento has not increased resources for the accountability office at the same rate.
The city created an inspector general job for the office in July 2020 to investigate police shootings and use of force incidents. But Castillo-Krings with the police review commission said the inspector general doesn’t have the authority to demand information from the police department.
Only the council has the authority under the city charter, she said. The commission recommended the council consider putting a charter amendment on the ballot a few years ago, but Castillo-Krings said officials have not acted on it.
Keyan Bliss, who serves as the vice chair of the police review commission, also raised concerns over the report’s recommendation to reduce “lengthy case backlogs.” Bliss said the longer investigations take, the more evidence degrades and witnesses forget what they saw.
About half of the completed investigations last year stemmed from complaints made in 2019 and 2020, according to the report.
Police spokesperson Zachary Eaton wrote in an email that the department can’t give details on current caseloads because they are personnel records. It also can’t say how long internal investigations take on average, he added.
The department must complete misconduct cases that may require formal discipline within a year, but Eaton said simultaneous criminal reviews can delay internal investigations.
“The Sacramento Police Department conducts thorough and comprehensive internal investigations regarding allegations of misconduct,” Eaton said in an email. “We take any and all allegations of misconduct very seriously.”
Bliss said the police department has no obligation to implement recommendations from either the accountability office or the review commission. Dozens of recommendations the commission made in the past five years haven’t even reached the council for discussion, Bliss said.
“While the police department has implemented some of our recommendations, the vast majority of them have not,” Bliss said. “The ones that they did implement came with tweaks that either water them down or make them virtually meaningless. That's just unacceptable.”
The commission typically meets monthly and reviews quarterly reports from the accountability office. However, the office presents the annual reports to the council.
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