CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Charlottesville City Council will consider changes to the ordinance that created the Police Civilian Oversight Board at its Monday meeting.
The board was established by the Council in December 2021, but has not been able to gain any traction to do the work it is designed to do.
This year, the oversight board has lost four of its eight members and cannot form a voting quorum. The board right now is functioning with an acting Executive Director James Walker after Inez Gonzalez left in August for another job.
When Gonzalez left, she urged the Council to continue the board but overhaul its design. She noted her suggestion was not a criticism of those who drew up the founding documents.
“Again, without those documents, we would have had nothing, and so we needed them,” she said at the time. “And so, I’m grateful to everyone that was involved in that for having put that together for me to have something because I would not have had a job here had it not been for that, so how about that, selfishly speaking.”
City Manager Sam Sanders said in a September joint meeting between City Council and the PCOB that a draft presented then was the fifth or sixth they had been working on “a long time”, and now City Council Monday night considers a finished product.
A number of technical changes are made to comply with the changing nature of the board, which started in 2019 as a “review” board, and was made in 2021 an “oversight” board after the General Assembly granted broader powers for such local panels.
The biggest changes remove the “executive” from the title “executive director” to comply with leadership positions in the rest of the city.
“The single executive director within the entire city of Charlottesville has never made sense, so being able to just clean that up and make it parallel to others, we did a whole job description project and had to keep that position separate because the ordinance states it that way,” Sanders said.
A whole section is added to the ordinance creating a city Office of Police Civilian Oversight.
Acting Executive Director Walker, along with Deputy City Manager for Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Ashley Marshall, outlined in September the model is the Office of Human Rights, which supports the Human Rights Commission.
Marshall said this structure allows more PCOB support and also allows the Office of Police Civilian Oversight to have access each other to work together on a case that might come of the Office of Human Rights.
She said the current structure does not allow the PCOB to address an issue unless there’s a complaint generating a case.
Walker also suggests turning over the 80-page operating procedures over to the City Manager for city staff to maintain.
“There are sections in those operating procedures that don’t even have complete sentences, it’s like the sentence stopped in the middle of the sentence,” Walker said.
“There are many other conflicts that exist internally within that document, as well as many other documents.”
Acting PCOB Chair James Fracher noted, along with Gonzalez back in August, there have been difficulties in keeping up with changing state laws regarding such police civilian boards, and the PCOB has just not been able to keep up.
