Police Reform Can’t Happen Behind Closed Doors

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Here’s what we know:

Sometime today, members of the Police Community Oversight Board — the 24-member panel appointed by Mayor Nutter to oversee police reform efforts over the next two years — will gather via conference call.

We don’t know when the call will be. We don’t know how to join the call to listen in, if we want. We don’t know precisely what members will be talking about. If there’s someplace that this information has been publicized, I’m not aware of it. In fact, it’s a bit of luck that we even know the call is happening at all.

Which means the “public oversight” part of police reform, it seems, is getting off to a slow and opaque start. And that seems like a bad omen for a process that is supposed to result, at least in part, in a much more transparent police department.

Kelvyn Anderson, director of the Police Advisory Commission and a member of the separate oversight board, promised me that the process will improve and become open to the public. “There definitely will be public meetings,” he told me.

And that’s good. But it already feels like the process is starting to slip a bit.

Here, for example, is how I found out about today’s conference call: This week, I called the office of Temple Law School Dean JoAnne Epps — who, in fairness, I’ve found accommodating in the past — to see if I could find out when the committee would be meeting. It had been, after all, more than two months since Nutter ordered the committee to work. Neither she nor her assistant were available, I was told.

So I contacted the mayor’s office. The mayor’s office directed me to a police spokesman. And the spokesman… directed me to Dean Epps. Whom I then emailed on Wednesday morning. As of this morning: Nothing.

Which left me in the dark. Was the committee meeting? Doing its work? And if so, how would I know?

In fact, we had evidence that the work had begun: The Police Advisory Commission — again, a separate body from the Police Community Oversight Board — posted a link to the police department’s “reform matrix,” a list of the federal recommendations and a target date for meeting each. (The hard-working folks at The Declaration have an apparently updated version of the matrix, incidentally, that shows how cooperation from the Fraternal Order of Police will be necessary to implement the reforms.)

So I checked in with reporters at other publications in Philadelphia, just to make sure I hadn’t missed something. It didn’t seem like I had. One suggested I call Anderson.

Anderson let me know about today’s conference call. And he said the board  is interested in being open and transparent to the public — which he agreed means letting the public know when it meets and what it’s meeting about. “We’ll put up a website soon with that kind of information,” he said.

Again: Good. But it’s still frustrating. An entire chapter of the federal report listing needed reforms in the Philadelphia Police Department was devoted to the department’s shortcomings in transparency. Open oversight is a necessary part of that process, and — as Philly’s history shows — it’s damned tough to graft on after the process gets rolling. No more baby steps. The time to get it right is now.

Real police reform simply can’t happen behind closed doors.

Follow @JoelMMathis on Twitter.