Tampa City Council Chairman Frank Reddick says he supports the details in Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s plan for a police civilian review board announced on Friday, but he absolutely opposes the fact Buckhorn will choose all but two members of the 11-member board, which includes two alternates.
At the next Council meeting on Thursday he plans to unveil his own proposal for an 11-member board, which would give the mayor two selections, Police Chief Eric Ward two selections, and the City Council seven picks, one for each member.
City Attorney Julia Mandell said on Friday that the city charter gives the mayor, as the city official in charge of the Police Department, the authority to control who serves on the review board. However, City Council attorney Marty Shelby has communicated to Mandell that he believes the Council has such authority.
“I’m going to be seeking outside counsel to review Miss Mandell’s (order),” Reddick says, adding that he also will have an attorney at the Council’s meeting challenging that provision of the charter. And he says he doesn’t trust Mandell’s advice. “I think she’s totally out of line and I think there’s a conflict of interest with her. I plan to challenge all that on Thursday.”
If Reddick were to get three other members of the Council to support his proposal, he would need five votes to override an expected Buckhorn veto of the measure.
Councilman Mike Suarez says he doesn’t share Reddick’s concerns about who selects the members of the civilian review board. “It doesn’t matter if it’s two people or we name every single of those folks, it is the responsibility of us on Council and the mayor as an administration to make sure that the police are doing the right thing.”
“This is not about us vs. the mayor,” Suarez adds. “It’s about doing what’s right for the city of Tampa, and creating the board is the important thing. … We will keep an eye on how they do their business and go from there.”
Suarez does say that he had hoped that Buckhorn would have reached out to the Council before he signed his executive order on Friday creating the board.
The grassroots call for a civilian review board came from members of the community in reaction to the Tampa Bay Times report back in April that showed that the Tampa Police Department had been citing blacks 79 percent of the time for bike infractions. Tampa police rejected calls from groups like the ACLU and the NAACP to stop the citations, though they did call in the U.S. Justice Department to review the TPD’s policies.
After hearing from the community, Chief Ward came before the Council on August 6 and said he had begun researching different models to fit Tampa’s needs.
Over the past few weeks, dozens of community activists have been meeting on their own, working on creating what they would like to see in such a Civilian Review Board.
Calling itself “Tampa for Justice,” the group distributed its plan to reporters who exited from the Buckhorn press conference on Friday. It calls for a 17-member board, with the mayor having three selections and the Council 14 — or two apiece. It also says that the membership shall reflect the “racial, gender, ethnic, national origin, religious, linguistic, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, homelessness and age composition of the city of Tampa population most often subjected to inquiries, stops and arrests by police officers.”
Laila Abdelaziz, a spokesperson for Tampa for Justice, said she was frustrated to see the issue become mired in a battle between the Council and the mayor’s office. “That’s not what we want to see,” she says. “We want to see the city come together and solve this problem.”
