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A contract signed “in blood” was supposed to keep Wendell M. France in Cincinnati as executive director of the Citizen Complaint Authority (CCA) for two years. It didn’t work.
In March 2004 then-City Manager Valerie Lemmie joked about the signature as a way to underscore her desire to keep someone in the position, a key component in the city’s compliance with the collaborative agreement on police reform. Nathaniel Ford, the first director of the CCA, quit after just four months.
France left late last year after 20 months on the job, but no one at City Hall knows why.
“No one, and I mean no one, has been interested in why I left,” he says. “I submitted my resignation around Nov. 1. I don’t think it was even announced until a month later that I was leaving, and by then I was gone. That just spoke volumes to me about where we were as a city.”
‘Adverse interactions’
Lemmie’s resignation last fall triggered his own decision to quit and return to Baltimore, France says.
Lemmie was the only real supporter of the CCA, he says. He wonders aloud about the city’s commitment to civilian oversight of the police.
“In Valerie Lemmie, we had an excellent advocate but we did not have an advocate on city council or in city government,” France says. “The police department had several advocates, and so we were often in the position where we were beating back issues that were generated because maybe the FOP didn’t like the issue. They could mobilize around issues that affected us far better than we could. We were not attractive to the elected official.”
Members of city council virtually ignored the CCA, according to France.
“If there’s anything that disturbed me during my tenure there was that most of the city council people I never met with, never interacted with,” he says. “Most of them would not entertain a meeting. I was there for two years. I never met with the former vice mayor (Alicia Reece).”
Christopher Smitherman, who lost his seat on council last year, was an exception, France says. Former Councilman David Pepper met with France while running for mayor.
“The question I raised is, ‘How are you representing the community, how are you addressing these issues that ended up being a court order and you’re not even talking to the agency that manages the process?’ ” France says.
A 27-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department, France was well versed in the kind of citizen/police oversight required by the collaborative agreement. When he came to Cincinnati, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed his hiring.
But it took time to develop a working relationship with the police department’s command officers, France says.
“I was a cop, so I understood some of what they think I didn’t understand,” he says. “I understood all of the demands being placed on this agency by all these external forces. I understood trying to juggle all those different balls. I tried to be more of a resource than an adversary.”
Five investigators, two administrative personnel and the executive director make up the CCA staff. They investigate complaints about police and prepare reports for the seven-person CCA board, the court monitor supervising the collaborative agreement and the police department. The CCA — and the public — have a bigger role to play than many seem to understand, according to France.
“People view citizen oversight in Cincinnati just from the four corners of the collaborative,” he says. “But citizen oversight is far, far more participatory than the collaborative. We just shouldn’t be dealing with complaints and misconduct. We should be, as the collaborative says, looking for opportunities to reduce adverse police/citizen interactions.
“When you share that, it’s kind of difficult to get people to appreciate that you’re not trying to run the police department. You’re trying to make sure that, if there’s a procedure, a policy, a practice in place that creates a disproportionate number of citizen complaints, then we ought to be talking about that procedure, that practice or that policy — not necessarily about the complaint.”
‘A different environment’
France points to San Francisco as an ideal model for citizen oversight of police. Citizen advocates there “give the citizen a much better understanding of what that process is all about,” he says. Lacking this, the public is ill informed, according to France.
Another essential is leadership from City Hall, he says.
“I would suggest that they have to actually make it appear that the city is serious about citizen oversight of law enforcement,” France says. “Talk about how that oversight breeds accountability. Actually look at what lack of accountability creates.”
France says his observations are based on more than his experiences as a city employee. Living in Cincinnati was revealing, he says.
“It was really like going back to a time I already lived where there was social unrest, racial divisions and a lot of hostility around race and class issues,” he says. “While that still goes on all over the country, most people in most cities have found ways to move into constructive interaction so that decisions and relationships are based on having an appreciation for who that person is, not necessarily what race they were.
“And I don’t mean to infer that I didn’t interact with nice people. I met a ton of nice people. But sometimes you get to a point where you recognize that maybe sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know.”
France believes the success or failure of police/citizen relations depends on community-wide involvement.
“I just didn’t see enough people, white folk, involved in this interaction,” he says. “I saw the lawyers, the people on the monitoring team, the vendors, who all were being compensated for managing this process. I didn’t see enough of the average citizens involved, because the average citizens have this notion that everything is OK.”
France marvels at the silence that greeted his departure. He was surprised that Mark Mallory, who was elected mayor a week after France resigned, hasn’t called. To date, no one in city government has asked him to share his experience, France says.
“I’m from a different environment,” he says. “Most mayors I know would have talked to me long before now. They would have talked to me before I left.”
Mallory says he’s been meeting with department heads and working to fill 39 openings on boards and commissions. He’s considering a number of candidates for vacancies on the CCA.
“I’ve had several names recommended to me and I’m looking at those and several more,” he says. “I am fully committed to the concept of citizen oversight. One of the most important things we can do is improve the relationship between the police department and the community, and I see the CCA as one of the tools to use to do that.”
After CityBeat called Mallory’s office for comment, City Manager David Rager phoned France and told him the paper was preparing a “negative, attack-type piece.”
Rager hasn’t spoken to CityBeat about CCA or this article. ©
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2006.
