Cincinnati Police Ignores Citizen Complaint Board

Cincinnati's police watchdog agency released a list in November of 23 police officers with the most citizen complaints against them as part of stepped-up effort to help identify possible problem officers. But two months later, authorities still aren't quite sure what to do with the report. Because many of the complaints made to the Citizen Complaint Authority could not be substantiated, police say the list could be counterproductive - and could discourage officers from aggressively pursuing drug dealers and violent criminals. The report identified officers with complaints from 10 or more people. The list includes complaints dating back, in some cases, to January 2000. The report also lists 32 people who filed at least three complaints against officers between 2000 and September 2004. The purpose of the report was to help officials identify possible problems in the Police Department and right them before they compounded, resulting in strained police-community relations or lawsuits. The report is the first released under a 2002 settlement on racial profiling that required the complaint authority to identify patterns of complaints against officers. "The idea was, if you're going to have police accountability measures taken seriously, you ought not assume that each complaint is isolated," said attorney Alphonse Gerhardstein, who represented plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit that resulted in the settlement. "The fact that an officer has a lot of complaints, it suggests that there's a whole lot of people who don't see his conduct as fair." [more]