Complaints against Evanston’s police officers have been reviewed by the Evanston Citizen Police Advisory committee for almost a year now, drawing mixed responses from residents.
The committee is comprised of residents from each ward in the city and meets once a month. Members go through every complaint filed against police officers by residents with Chief Richard Eddington and other police representatives. They evaluate the manner in which the complaints are investigated and dealt with.
“In the history of the city of Evanston, there has always been desire to maintain the highest standard for professional police conduct,” Eddington said. “What this group has done has added another layer of review in critiquing the disciplinary decisions of the chief of police.”
Critics of the committee say an independent body, without police involvement, would allow for more transparency.
“You still have the police reviewing policemen,” said Betty Ester, a proponent of an independent advisory board. “(The committee members) get a summary of what the complaint was, so they don’t have a full fledged complaint with all of the information.”
Ester, a Fifth Ward resident, said members of the community take issue with the way police officers speak to them.
She said many of her neighbors feel they are the subjects of unnecessary scrutiny, since several of them have been stopped and questioned by officers with little explanation.
“They want to know why are the police stopping so many people in the community,” Ester said Wednesday night. “They say that they are searching for something but they’re never telling the community or trying to elicit the aid of the community.”
Eddington said the complaints the committee receives vary, but that each one receives very thorough scrutiny.
He also said the committee was formed as a compromise and an independent board would have been too expensive and inefficient to maintain.
“They felt that the issues would be more equitably investigated by investigators that do not work for the police department,” Eddington said. “That is in interesting and explorable concept, but there has not been the level of misconduct or scandal that would propel the city government in difficult economic times to invest in that duplication of services.”
Before beginning to hear cases, committee members completed a training process, said Harriet Sallach, a member.
“It was critical that we had enough training,” she said. “We learned the organization system of the police department and how they processed complaints and everything, what the options were.”
Sallach said she serves on the committee in order to fulfill her responsibility to the city.
“I do a lot of community service and when I heard about the committee, I sent in my name to be considered,” Sallach said. “It’s a resident’s responsibility to take part in government in whatever extent we can as part of a democracy.”
The committee reports back to the Human Services Committee, on which all of the city’s aldermen sit.
Ald. Delores Holmes (5th) said her constituents had raised concerns about unfair treatment by the police.
“We thought that to have input from citizens about complaints would not be a bad thing to have,” Holmes said.
The biggest change she said she has noticed since the committee’s formation is that all complaints – whether deemed founded or unfounded – now come before the Human Services Committee, allowing the aldermen to see the volume of complaints the police department has to deal with.
Eddington said it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of the committee, especially after a relatively short amount of time, but the committee’s goal is to establish comfort in the community.
“It’s very important that the public have confidence in their police department and this is part of establishing confidence that there’s accountability,” he said.
