The Myth of Police Oversight
Why it never really solves the problem.
Originally authored June 16th, 2016. Olympia May have made some improvements in the past few months, but I doubt it. The Worcester City Council is likely going to vote against a Civilian Review Board tonight.
Near the end of 2025 I moved to Olympia, Washington from my home town of Worcester, Massachusetts (a city, not a town really - Worcester is the 2nd largest city in New England with a population of over three hundred thousand). In recent years, my home town’s police department was the subject of an equity audit, Department of Justice Investigation, and numerous ACLU lawsuits. In addition the city was sued by the local paper (for witholding use of force records) and more recently sued for discriminating in their responses to emergency mental health situations. I watched them create propaganda campaigns and new departments with different record keeping and oversight, yet they did nothing about the problematic systems that churn out anyone good in them.
I was hoping it would be a bit better over here on the other corner of the country, but sadly I am finding a very similar song and dance in Olympia. Things are handled in house as much as possible, outsourced to nonprofits that aren’t subject to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) for the messy part, and then sent back to a panel of powerless citizens as sanitized public records. The city has zero obligation to act on anything, while the city’s public records department uses tricks to delay or deny the release of public records that could be used in pursuit of accountability.
Worcester has no oversight; the Public Safety Committee in Worcester is chaired by an employee of the sheriff’s department, whose brothers and father are also law enforcement. The Human Rights Commission isn’t allowed to publicly post attachments anymore and the city manager replaced an Attorney, Child Advocate, Nonprofit Leader with the Police Chaplain after she called for a civilian review board. There have been no repercussions for lying on a police report or in an internal affairs interview and in the past five years of investigating themselves, the Worcester Police Department’s Bureau of Professional Services have found only two instances where they determined that a policy change was required.
Conversely, Olympia has some. The mayor of Olympia certainly seems to believe so. In response to a public comment full of criticism of the Olympia police for harassing the unhoused community Mayor Payne stated, “We do have a civilian oversight board and we also have a police auditor.” He then continued “but that does not necessarily mean that certain policies and procedures won’t be enforced. For example there are rules about approaching a police officer when they are engaging in a situation. It is for the safety for an officer but it’s also for your safety, that you are not in the way. There are protocols for this sort of things, I just ask that we all get a better understanding of this, the city is here to serve you”
However, according to numerous public records requests, the “policies and procedures”, “rules about approaching a police officer” and “protocols for this sort of thing” are not written, and do not exist in the possession of any city department. While that doesn’t make his statement any less accurate, I believe our mayor was saying the quiet part out loud - that if police feel the need to take action, they will, and the administration will support them in that endeavor by generically and categorically citing the existence of policies and procedures. This society often requires systems that do not result in change, but allow for municipalities and departments that want to appear good progressive or simply not evil to point to, to claim to be doing the right thing while maintaining internal systems of oppression. When I talk of “oversight”, what I mean is watchful care, management, or responsibility for making sure a job or activity is done correctly. Not just getting a report, and then doing as few things as possible from it to avoid being sued, but reviewing the system and determining if ideologies or common practices by the force are having a harmful impact.
In Olympia, the “oversight” is not into the police department or the officers conduct, simply into the integrity of the investigation completed by the police department into it’s officers conduct. The investigation into the conduct of the police department is entirely in-house, based on strictly “templated” processes that leaves very little room to actually identify systemic issues, or identify harmful behavior. These templates are often designed to reflect on whether or not policies were followed, which has resulted in the templates themselves being criticized, and resulted in numerous recommendations about what policies should include. For example, recommendation number one is “OPD should consider ways to formally expand its force review template, in order to promote a greater range of issue-spotting and potential interventions with regard to officer performance”. In other words, Olympia should use tools that actually result in identifying and preventing issues.
Once the Olympia Police department investigates itself; that investigation is reviewed by a third party, which in this case happens to be the OIR group, based out of Southern California. The auditor within the OIR group assigned to Olympia is Stephen Connolly, who has been with the organization since 2001 was an original member of the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review. From their office in Long Beach California, thirty miles south of the Hollywood sign, Stephen and his peers at run a practice developed to cater to a country that lacks the ability to take responsibility for it’s own harm. Based on the premise that police investigating themselves for wrongdoing will often not find themselves guilty of any wrongdoing, this organization contracts with governments and municipalities to provide a third party perspective. They’re often hindered by needing to maintain a working relationship; they cannot give too harsh feedback, for risk of losing the contract. The OIR group seems to work closely with the city manager and police department, but their point of contact with the public is twice a year meetings with seven members of the public that make up the Community Policing Board, an advisory board appointed by the Olympia City Council whose responsibilities include providing input to the Civilian Police Auditor, serving as community representatives, and supporting community education and involvement in policing. This board gets to ask questions of the auditor, but serves to insulate the auditor from direct questions from the public. The auditor can’t ask the police, and the public cannot ask the auditor, so some questions are never answered.
This so-called oversight doesn’t even make recommendations on officers behavior or conduct, but rather makes recommendations about policies and what supervisors should be advised to tell the officers. They’re not saying an officer did anything wrong, they’re addressing how it should be done differently going forward, which may be responsibility, but is not accountability. There appears to be, at no point in the Olympia process, an investigation into if the actions of the police were harmful or detrimental to the public they are expected to serve, instead simply an audit of whether or not policies and procedures were followed.
The OIR group receives and reviews evidence that was gathered and utilized by OPD, which is to say that is the extent of their investigation - reviewing material provided to them by OPD. They are not able to accept evidence or testimony from impacted parties, consider other public records, and of course do not have subpoena power to interview members of OPD themselves. They do not evaluate the investigation results, so much as the investigation process, which is heavily templated to ensure there is little room for an actual open ended investigation such as how OPD would investigate a member of the public.
The police department knows when they need to preemptively cover themselves, and compensates with additional data in situations where there will be more scrutiny. This is evidenced in the mid-2022 report which states, “The records involving marginalized persons were generally more detailed and more thorough than reports regarding white, cisgendered people. Those records also provided detailed descriptions of de-escalation efforts and often involved other law enforcement agencies and CRU personnel.” That was only the third audit, and now officers have had four more years to continue structuring how they report these incidents. It also seems the entire process has become more structured into a template. This template functionally ensures that the investigation is done the same way every time, which would be great if consistency was the ultimate goal, but not great for rooting out injustice, increasing equity, or preventing tools of oppression from functioning as such.
Another large issue with this system is that it generally requires the public to file complaints. Back in Worcester, this is discouraged with a practice of running background checks on civilians who file complaints, and both here and there people have been let down consistently by not seeing any result when they file complaints, so they don’t bother; then the auditor doesn’t have data to audit, beyond use of force reports.
Nonetheless, the most recent audit based on the fifty use-of-force incidents logged in 2025 discovered many issues such as them marking latino people as white, use of force interviews being conducted by the person who used force, or interviewing subjects who were under the influence for their report, and being disrespectful to people they were detaining, to the level that necessitated recommendation sixteen: OPD’S policy prohibiting profanity should be modified to recognize that profanity is not an accepted de-escalation tool.
It does address the process noting that the OIR group “offers suggestions for slightly adjusting this approach”, citing a sense that “the focus as constituted is more narrow than it might be, and that a broader look at performance issues (beyond the “bottom line” question of use of force policy compliance) could be productive”. They actually use the word sense, because in the newspeak era of addressing police accountability, maintaining a relationship with the municipality is this firms top priority, and they cannot be too direct if they want to stay on good terms. This results in essential changes being softballed as suggestions, instead of recommendations, and phrases within recommendations that OPD should “consider” or “Advise it’s supervisors” endless words with zero power like “instruct”, “encourage”, “clarify” because at the end of the day, every single thing the consultant says is optional; morality and ethics aside, the municipality has zero obligation to do anything in this report. It could simply talk about the existence of the report instead, and as long as the public doesn’t look too closely into anything, that plan works for some cities. I’m interested to see what it looks like if Olympia implements any of the twenty two recommendations they received in the first report from their new auditor, particularly recommendation 20 which OPD should review the “filing rate” of obstruction charges by the County Prosecutor to ascertain whether the charge is too routinely included by arresting officers, which directly ties into the mayor’s remarks about “approaching a police officer when they are engaging in a situation”. Feedback on their oversight process is limited to seven paragraphs of the report, but there is no discussion of the ongoing harm of having a police department consisting of people who needed to be told that swearing at people isn’t descalatory.
In Olympia, the public faces preventing police accountability are City Manager Burney, Police Chief Parker, and Public Records Access Officer Amy Iverson. They’re individual cogs, in a much larger machine, and this machine operates very similarly in many other cities. City employees can be confident that by the time a lawsuit is issued they will be in a different position, probably in a different city. They know that even if, (and that is of course a big if) their employer is ever held accountable, they won’t be. So there is no incentive to act in the interest of the constituents they were hired to serve, and instead they uphold problematic practices that protect police from accountability.
At some level, this makes sense. They do have a fiscal responsibility to the public, and the size and cost of lawsuits they would be subject to from handing out police bodyworn camera records would drastically exceed the cost of unlawfully hiding public records. It’s a simple cost analysis, accountability is expensive, so is change, and they aren’t ready or interested in making the level of changes that would be required to address the problems they’re covering up. Additionally, noone is asking them to - the city councilors generally prioritizes the wishes of the Chamber of Commerce, commercial developers, and wealthy (white) homeowners - the people whom the people serve. As long as police are seen as necessary to deal with petty crime, homelessness, and drug use, noone is telling the city manager, chief of police, or public records access officer to do their job differently, because the police are currently doing their function and what is concerning to many people is that they might be stopped. So, politicians side with police over people, and oversight remains forever nonexistent, while remaining a buzzword that can be thrown around by mayors that need to maintain the illusion of it to pretend to be on the right side of history.
The myth is that the existence of police oversight results in systemic change. The city is not prepared or equipped to make the changes necessary, nor are they going to. The city makes as few changes as possible because it’s police are prioritized as a public image first and foremost and if they make their police officers uncomfortable with lots of large changes, they will leave for other departments that aren’t demanding they behave better. Plus, the union gets in the way, nitpicking and negotiating for the maximum benefit and lowest change for their members and a local union has WAY more power than a Hollywood consultant ever will.