A Clear Message from Boise
Published on May 15, 2008
Pierce Murphy, the Boise police ombudsman with long ties to Spokane, delivered a clear message to the Spokane City Council this afternoon about how important his arms length relationship with the Boise Police Department has been to the success of his office in Idaho’s capital city.
In a council briefing room packed with police officers, city officials and interested citizens activists, Murphy sat comfortably at a table with five council members and answered questions for most of an hour. He purposely stayed away from the specifics
of the recently presented “tentative agreement” the city has negotiated with the police guild. But by the end of the hour, Murphy had gently but clearly registered strong doubts about whether Spokane is headed in the right direction with a proposal that so clearly lacks the central feature that Murphy says is key to his credibility in Boise–independence.
“One message I’d like to leave you with,” Murphy said early in his presentation, “is that it’s very important that the city hire a director or an ombudsman for this office who has the personal character and intellectual capability and skills to be able to put that structure into action. Good structure, wrong person, I think is failure. Good person, wrong structure, is equally fraught with failure. So you really need them both.”
At least at first, it didn’t seem as though any of his questioners (Council President Joe Shogan, and council members Nancy Mclaughlin, Bob Apple, Richard Rush, and Steve Corker) were eager to touch on the key controversy surrounding the new proposal. The first half of the meeting was largely a quiz about Murphy’s qualifications for the Boise position. So he walked them through a life story that included early years as a police reservist in California and his studying philosophy with Jesuits at Spokane’s Gonzaga University. Murphy met his wife at Gonzaga, got married at St. Aloysius, and even adopted a child from Spokane. He was an executive with Boise Cascade when he applied to be the Community Ombudsman in Boise following a period in 1996 and 1997 that, he said, left the community “reeling” with doubts about its police department after seven shootings in less than two years.
But Murphy, at several turns, made his point about how his autonomy from the Boise police department, his power to conduct his own investigations into citizen complaints, was key to not only winning credibility for his office, but closing the “breach of trust” that existed a decade ago between the Boise community and the police. One positive example he cited was his annual and thorough audits of how the Boise Police Department conducts internal investigations into citizen complaints.
“I have the authority and really the obligation to audit all the internal investigations that the police department conducts,” he told the Spokane council. “I can tell you that in the nine years, from the first year of the audits that we did, until now, I have seen an incredible improvement in the quality of those internal investigations. I have to give the current chief and his predecessor credit for what they’ve done to make that happen. But I like to think that having an outside entity audit that and report to the public has (had) a positive influence on those internal investigations.”
The existing “tentative agreement” for a Spokane ombudsman does not allow for independent investigations by the office. The ombudsman could only sit in on police internal investigations and implore the department and, if necessary, the police chief, and then the mayor, to conduct a more thorough and fair investigation. That’s not the case in Boise, where Murphy’s office is free to independently investigate any citizen complaint that is registered with the office.
“Given the situation that Boise faced at the time, it would have been very difficult for me to gain that credibility without having the authority to separately investigate.” Boise Community Ombudsman, Pierce Murphy
As for the audit function Murphy described, and whether the Spokane office could replicate the process that Murphy says has been so useful in Boise, that’s still murky at best for Spokane. Although the agreement would give an ombudsman “access to all complaint and [police] investigative files for auditing and reporting purposes” it only says that the ombudsman “may make statistical observations regarding the disciplinary results of sustained internal investigations, but shall not take issue with discipline imposed by the Chief of Police in specific cases.”
That’s a much more limited role than the one Murphy described Thursday. In Boise, Murphy says he is allowed to focus and does focus on evidence of policy or legal violations by officers that have not been properly investigated. And all of his work, he said, is made public.
It was near the end of the meeting, though, that the independence issue arose most clearly.
Murphy, the immediate past president of the National Association for the Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, was asked about trends in police oversight. In completing his answer, he casually noted that some cities have ombudsmen or auditors that have independent investigative authority and some don’t.
“So,” council member Nancy McLaughlin asked, “if you don’t have investigative authority do you still believe the oversight is valuable?”
“Well,” Murphy replied, “certainly I think it’s better than no oversight. I think it would have been difficult for me to gain the public credibility that I have. Given the situation that Boise faced at the time, it would have been very difficult for me to gain that credibility without having the authority to separately investigate. If I had been completely limited to whatever investigation [police] internal affairs did, even if
I could make recommendations to them, I think that would have been difficult.”
Of course the “make recommendations” back to the police is the limiting feature of Spokane’s proposed agreement.
Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick attended the session, as did Mayor Mary Verner, but neither spoke. The mayor’s top administrative assistant, Ted Danek, spoke before Murphy and freely conceded that many of the substantive questions about how a Spokane ombudsman would operate remain unanswered. But he did enumerate a scope to duties that, if anything, only re-emphasized how devoid the office would be of independent investigative powers. His list:
*To receive complaint complaints and participate in [police] administrative interviews.
*Recommend policies to the chief, the mayor and council.
*Develop and recommend strategies to improve complaint gathering and resolution.
*Maintain contact with community resources as identified and necessary to recommend services.
But it was Council President Shogan who offered the most straightforward and surreal explanation of where the council finds itself on this issue. This, verbatim, are his welcoming remarks to start the session:
“We’re under quite a bit of a constraint right now. There’s been a tentative agreement we reached with the police guild for an Office of Ombudsman. It’s taken maybe a year and a half to negotiate. That has yet to be voted on by the guild. Because of that we are not allowed as a council, as a legislative body, to discuss that tentative agreement at all until it’s been voted on by the guild. If we do that, it’s already been characterized as an unfair labor practice. The guild’s attorney has told us we will be sued, and we’ll be subject to attorney fees. Now, that doesn’t mean that individual council people cannot discuss this on their own. Although I’ve cautioned them to really be careful about anything that will jeopardize the vote on this agreement, which I’m told will be next month. Having said that I welcome all of you to be here.”
Posted May 15th