During his January 2021 State of the City event, Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia spoke of the need for his city to “recognize the harms of systemic injustice,” partly by “reforming the Citizens Police Complaint Commission” through “major and significant changes.”
But considering that during Garcia’s first term Long Beach did not sustain even one of hundreds of excessive-force allegations made against its police department, it seems it may have taken George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing wave of nationwide protests to wash up on the steps of Long Beach City Hall for Garcia to notice.
According to the Citizens Police Complaint Commission (CPCC), an 11-member body overseen by the City Manager, for the period 2015–2018 the CPCC investigated 487 separate allegations of improper use of force stemming from citizen complaints but sustained only three, all of which were overruled by then-City Manager Pat West. In 2019, when body cameras finally began to be deployed department wide, the CPCC investigated 60 use-of-force allegations — down more than 50% from the prior year — and sustained eight, with West overruling six of them.
All told, for the second half of the decade the CPCC sustained just 2% of such complaints, with the City ultimately sustaining only 0.37%. (Officer discipline — e.g., suspension, termination — results only from sustained allegations.)
Does Garcia believe such a small percentage accurately reflects the legitimacy of such complaints? If not, how/why was it allowed to continue without redress year after year on his watch? Did it not raise a red flag for the mayor that over the course of his first term the City did not sustain a single use-of-force allegation out of 487? Was he ignorant of the situation? Is he concerned with how consistently the City Manager overrules the Commission on use-of-force issues while generally agreeing on other types of allegation?
Garcia was invited to address these questions but declined.
If he was unaware of how infrequently the CPCC was sustaining use-of-force complaints, it’s not because it was anything new. In 2011–2012, for example — while Garcia was serving as First District councilmember — the CPCC investigated 251 such allegations but sustained only two.
In 2019, Deputy City Manager Kevin Jackson told the Long Beach Post that “95 percent of the time [the City Manager and the CPCC are] in alignment.” When asked by Random Lengths News why this trend hasn’t held for use-of-force allegations — where the City Manager overrules the CPCC 82% of the time — Jackson implied (without commenting on any specific cases) that the CPCC might sustain even fewer such allegations if they had “the benefit of all of the information that the City Manager’s office has,” noting that the latter has access not only to CPCC review but also the corresponding Internal Affairs investigation for each case, as well as compelled statements from the officers involved (a tool not given to CPCC until January 2021).
“I can’t tell you why [the 95% agreement trend] doesn’t hold [for use-of-force allegations],” he said, “other than the fact that every single case is reviewed objectively based on the facts, and there’s an assessment as to whether or not policy or training has been violated. […] I think historically some of the variance between the CPCC and the final disposition [of a given allegation] has to do with additional confidential information that has been available to the City Manager […] but was not available for [CPCC] review.”
Ultimately, Jackson expresses complete confidence in the City’s evaluation of use-of-force allegations, asserting that officers guilty of violating LBPD policy are held to account.
“If there’s a violation of policy or if there’s been a violation of law, there’s going to be a sustained allegation,” he said during our interview, “and it’s as simple as that.”
Does this mean Jackson believes that everything officers did that precipitated the 545 unsustained allegations 2015–2019 must have been within policy? Random Lengths News followed up with this question via email and then again by both telephone and email, but Jackson did not reply.
Although CPCC Manager Patrick Weithers — himself an employee of the City Manager’s office — steers clear of discussing his own view of the City Manager’s overruling nearly all CPCC use-of-force findings, he acknowledges what’s already widely known: “The community and the public and the commissioners themselves definitely voiced frustration with that,” he says. “[…] There definitely is some frustration from the commissioners […], and they’ve voiced that publicly.”
The most public display of this frustration may have come from now-former commissioner Porter Gilberg, who, in a June 2020 speech at Harvey Milk Park, stated, “The Commission is a farce. […] There is no accountability for the police in Long Beach.”
More quietly, 6th District Councilmember Suely Saro, who served on the CPCC from August 2015 to February 2019 — chairing the commission for the last eight months of her tenure before resigning to run for council — has also been one of those voices. “It is widely known and often publicly shared that the [CPCC] is limited in its authority due to its charter,” she told Forthe.org last year. “I agree that it can be improved to increase our authority on the outcome of the cases and that our deliberations should have more weight on decisions made in each case.”
However, when presented with statistics from her tenure, Saro, who currently chairs the city’s Public Safety Committee, disavowed awareness of the CPCC’s overwhelming rejection rate of use-of-force allegations: “Please know I am not familiar with the use of force stats that you shared.”
Random Lengths News informed Saro that these statistics come directly from the City of Long Beach and posed direct inquiries based on these numbers — e.g., “Do you feel that only 0.6% of the use-of-force complaints that came before the Commission during your tenure involved violations of LBPD policy and/or law? How do you feel about the fact that no use-of-force allegations were sustained by the City while you served on the CPCC?” — which Saro chose not to address.
While internally Long Beach was disciplining officers for less than 0.4% of the above-referenced allegations, the City was paying out on 50% of lawsuits “alleging excessive force and/or wrongful death.” According a City document provided to Random Lengths News, for incidents occurring 2015–2019 the LBPD was sued 39 times, with the City paying out a total of $8,912,500 (plus additional expenses) across 14 separate settlements — half of these between $250,000 and $2 million — as well as an additional $4,878,743 from a court ruling in the plaintiff’s favor. (As of June 14, 2020, the remaining nine lawsuits were unresolved.)
In consideration of reform, the City has contracted Polis Solutions, which bills itself as “a training, consulting, and research firm that specializes in creating custom evidence-based programs that build public trust and safer communities,” to conduct a review of the CPCC and potentially offer recommendations for improvement. If Polis recommends substantive changes that officials wish to implement, the city council will need to place an updated CPCC Charter (as part of the Long Beach City Charter) on a ballot for voter approval.
Garcia, Jackson, Weithers, and Saro all say they welcome Polis’s review, with Garcia already (during his 2021 State of the City remarks) advocating a 2022 ballot measure.
Asked whether at present he is willing to concur with Garcia’s assertion that CPCC needs “major and significant changes,” Jackson says, “No. I’m going to go into the review with an objective, open mind and try to ascertain what the community actually desires from its oversight function and whether the current structure and operation is set up to address that. And if it’s not, I’m sure we’ll arrive at some recommendations to address those gaps.”
For her part, Saro is studiously noncommittal: “I am unable to agree or disagree with the statements you shared from the elected officials [i.e., Garcia and Jackson] or community member [i.e., Gilberg].”
From 2015 through 2019, Long Beach police officers were disciplined for fewer than one out of every 270 citizen complaints alleging improper use of force, but City officials either didn’t know or weren’t concerned enough to act. And now these same officials will decide whether police will be held more accountable for citizen complaints of excessive force in Long Beach’s future.