The chief investigator for the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners (BOPC) on Tuesday presented the latest proposal to speed up solving a backlog of more than 1,600 citizen complaint investigations against police officers and personnel. Jerome Warfield may be working around the edges in this way because he is ultimately unable to personally address the real issue: The board must hire more investigators.
Later in the week on Thursday, the city’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report on the board’s citizen complaint process before Warfield became chief investigator. The office started looking into allegations of both fraud and abuse of power in February 2023. One allegation was that hundreds of complaints were “administratively closed” by former board staff without being properly investigated. The OIG found that to be true, and though it did cite abuses of power, the office did not find fraud.
Meanwhile, Warfield has too many complaints to investigate and too few investigators.
The BOPC had 29 investigators and supervisors in 2020. It now has 18. Warfield said each investigator should be assigned no more than 15 cases. He said they currently have about 114 cases each.
There are eight positions open, and Warfield told Outlier Media that 44 applications have been received.
“Obviously, we are really interested in the board conducting the interviews for those vacancies so that we can have a full staff,” Warfield told commissioners during the Citizen Complaints Committee meeting on Tuesday.
The committee voted to draft a letter to both the BOPC chairperson and its Personnel & Training Committee urging them to take action on hiring investigators. A discussion of the applications that the board received is on the personnel committee’s March 6 meeting agenda.
Without a full staff, Warfield is hoping to resort to other tactics. He’s introduced a so-called Timeliness Initiative Project. The Citizen Complaints Committee voted Tuesday to move the project forward, but it still needs the approval of the full board.
At the centerpiece of the project’s multipronged approach is a form for staff to use in complaint investigations.
“We got together on a Saturday, and put together and developed an automated form,” Warfield told Citizen Complaints Committee members. “It allows us to put everything — just about everything — in our investigative report on this form with drop-down menus. You are eliminating hours of typing.”
Warfield said he hopes the new tool, if approved by the board, will help his staff save hours on each case without sacrificing thoroughness.
Historically, investigators close 1-1.5 cases per week on average. Warfield said with the change, “I believe that we will be able to significantly increase the number of cases that we close a week.”
Warfield’s project also includes a new triage system for citizen complaints. Cases involving more than 10 officers — such as police raids — would be assigned to the most experienced investigators who would work on them as a group. Cases are currently distributed evenly between investigators. Moving forward, Warfield would like to categorize complaints based on how involved the investigations are expected to be. Cases that include multiple officers, for example, take much longer to resolve because investigators should talk to each involved officer and look at their body camera footage.
Warfield said his office is also planning to send letters as soon as next week to residents who have initiated complaints that have not yet been resolved. He said the letter will let residents know about the backlog and assure them that their investigation is ongoing.
The reassurance is necessary after the Detroit Office of Inspector General’s report. The OIG found hundreds of investigations had not been properly investigated — but were closed anyway by former staff. The office’s findings place the bulk of the blame on former Board Secretary Melanie White. It also found Commissioners Willie Bell and Lisa Carter should be retrained on the proper role of police commissioners.
The OIG also found that Commissioners Bell and Carter both signed and approved investigation reports that White wanted to close but had not been signed by an investigator. The office also determined both commissioners knew of White’s abuse of power but failed to correct it or inform the full board. According to the OIG’s report, Bell and Carter both pushed back on the office’s findings and said a retraining is not possible as they had never been trained in the first place.
At the board meeting on Thursday, former Board Secretary Victoria Shah gave a public comment encouraging residents to read the inspector general office’s report.
The board also voted to remove Bell from his board position of vice chair.
Residents can find more details about how to file a complaint against police personnel.
Detroit Documenters Damien Benson and Pamela Taylor contributed to this story.
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