On Thursday, the Tampa City Council will hold a workshop to discuss the proposal floated by County Chairman Frank Reddick that would allow council to select the majority of members on the newly created police civilian review board. Specifically, Reddick’s plan gives the Council seven selections, one for each member. Mayor Bob Buckhorn could name the two remaining board members and the two alternates.
That’s not what the mayor has announced. His plan calls for him to name nine of the 11 members on the board, leading to an increasingly divisive standoff between the mayor’s office and City Council that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
Today two dozen activists who have coalesced as the group Tampa for Justice gathered in front of City Hall in Tampa to criticize Buckhorn for his refusal to back down, while some counseled Council members not to lose their nerve in the battle.
“They have the authority to act,” said the ACLU’s Mike Pheneger of the City Council. “If they don’t, it’s because they don’t have the political will to act.”
The ACLU produced a legal opinion last week that claimed that the Council does have the power to choose the members of the civilian review board. Pheneger says the city could have taken that opinion and saved the $10,000 it paid to attorney Gwynne Young, who wrote an opinion on Monday that City Attorney Julia Mandell does not have a conflict of interest and can fairly assess who has the power in city government on this issue.
Pheneger said that the city paid Gwynne to answer the wrong questions (which came exclusively from Mandel with no input from the City Council attorney). “You oughta ask the attorney, ‘do we or do we not have the power to do this?’ ‘Is the city attorney’s memo and legal opinion wrong?’ But they didn’t ask that,” he said.
The Rev. Russell Meyer, the executive director with the Florida Council of Churches, gave thanks to the assemblage of reporters covering the press conference, saying it’s the only way Tampa for Justice can communicate with the mayor, who has refused to meet with the group.
“The hope would be that the day would come with him having a conversation with us,” said Meyer. “I hope Mayor Buckhorn is listening to you, the media, because thereby he might be able to hear what we’re saying.”
And Meyer questioned the effectiveness of what Buckhorn has proposed, saying it’s an advisory board, not a review commission.
“He picks who really will be making the decisions,” he said. “He puts a police captain in charge in deciding what cases, and if somebody who has seen something on the street that is wrong and untoward comes forward, the police just have to look at them and say, ‘well, we looked into that and it’s not an issue.’ It will never get to the mayor’s advisory board.”
The City Council meeting will discuss the police civilian review board on Thursday at City Hall, beginning at 9 a.m.
