Ricardo Diaz, the most recent chair of the Civilian Police Review Board, who stepped down in May. Photo by Farrah Anderson, Invisible Institute/Illinois Public Media
This story was originally published by Invisible Institute and IPM Newsroom on July 8. A full version of this article can be found on ipmnewsroom.org and publici.ucimc.org.
Ricardo Diaz joined the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) in 2011, hoping to bring change to policing. Now, Diaz says the board’s power is sharply curtailed.
The CPRB operates on an uncommon model. Complaints about Urbana Police Department (UPD) are first investigated by UPD. Once the investigation is complete, the chief decides on next steps. If the complainant decides to appeal that decision, only then does the CPRB start a review. “That’s the step most people don’t take,” Diaz said. “They are not going to question the chief.” The overwhelming majority of people who file complaints against the police don’t appeal the decisions—severely limiting civilian oversight over the police.
At his last meeting on May 29, Diaz said Urbana residents want the CPRB to be able to do more actual oversight of police.
The CPRB was created in 2007 after years of glaring police issues in Urbana and calls for civilian oversight of the department. But during the process of formally creating the board, two major limitations were introduced. The first: the CPRB can only get involved once a complainant files an appeal. The second: of the cases that get appealed, CPRB cannot hear any that relate to pending court cases. Even when complainants appeal cases, many appeals sit uninspected for years because they related to pending litigation. Other complaints are never even accepted because the complainant was not a first-hand witness.
Research shows that the appeals-only model of oversight is “among the weakest.” Compared to most other police oversight bodies across the US, Urbana has an uncommon model, according to civilian oversight expert Cameron McEllhiney. In Urbana, only three appeals were filed between 2005 and 2019. After a spike in 2020—the result of a single person filing the vast majority of complaints—there have been no new appeals between 2021 and 2024.
Activists have pointed out flaws in the CPRB’s ordinance for years. CPRB member Peggy Patten said that she was initially surprised by the narrow scope of the board and its limited power. Some, like former chair Scott Dossett, say it’s better to have something than nothing. But others, like Danielle Chynoweth, disagree. She championed the creation of the CPRB and voted in favor of the ordinance that created the board. “It was a placeholder, so that we said we had something, which sometimes can be more dangerous than having nothing at all,” said Chynoweth.
In June, 2020, community members created a petition outlining a list of failures by the CPRB and calling for broad structural reforms. “It was in shambles,” Chynoweth said. “I was ashamed that I had ever tried to organize a civilian review board.”
Diaz, who stepped down on May 29 after 13 years, attempted to address many of these issues during his four-year tenure as chair. Now, Diaz is recommending that city officials consider suggestions made in the 2020 petition that would result in a complete overhaul of the long-troubled police oversight structure. “When I realized that getting changes through council would take years, I stepped down after doing what I could,” Diaz wrote to reporters after stepping down.
On April 10, 2020, a little over a month before George Floyd’s murder, Urbana police violently arrested Aleyah Lewis, an unarmed Black woman, in an incident caught on camera by bystanders. Over the following weeks, community members pressed city officials on what they viewed as an excessive use of force, while residents called on the CPRB to address the arrest.
But because no one had formally complained and appealed, CPRB members argued the ordinance didn’t allow them to do anything. So Jane McClintock decided she could complain about Lewis’s arrest herself. However, her complaint was rejected because the ordinance requires complaints to be submitted by someone who witnessed a “first-hand account” of the incident. McClintock had only watched the viral videos.
A memo written later that year by an attorney hired by the city to support the CPRB’s rejection of complaints about Lewis’s beating claimed that accepting such complaints would violate the Fraternal Order of Police agreement. The barrier limiting only direct eye- or earwitnesses from complaining, McClintock said, severely limits civilian oversight in Urbana. She would go on to coauthor the CPRB reform petition later that year.
In 2019 and 2020, Christopher Hansen began filing dozens of complaints and appeals about the UPD. The log of cases quickly climbed from the department’s annual average of 10 to nearly 50 submitted in one year. Hansen became involved in local policing issues in 2018 after being wrongfully investigated for theft by a Champaign officer in 2015. He also coauthored the CPRB reform petition.
The complaints ranged from failure to use personal protective equipment during an arrest in the early days of the pandemic, to repeated failures by officers to stop at a stop sign, to issues about the filing of other complaints. Some former CPRB members suspect that Hansen was trying to overload the board with work in order to highlight its limitations. “The appeals only became burdensome when a member of the public chose to challenge the way the board works with the complaints,” said former board chair Scott Dossett. “And that was their right.” Hansen did not respond to requests for comment, but wrote several online posts about participating in the appeal process.
The volume of cases impacted meeting attendance and took its toll on the CPRB’s members, Diaz said in 2023. But Hansen’s complaints “made a difference.” While the CPRB did not side with Hansen in most appeals, “the consideration of each one of them has been legit, and the amount of effort has brought out several issues that [Hansen] had pointed to changes that needed to be made,” Diaz said.
“The 2020 cases allowed us to see plenty of gaps,” he said in June. The board ended up disagreeing with the UPD chief’s finding in at least 23 of the 65 total appeals filed by Hansen. Since Hansen stopped filing appeals in 2020, the board hasn’t received a new case in over three years.
Despite repeated calls to change the model of the CPRB over many years, the board is still operating under that original model which was created in 2007. That is unlikely to change anytime soon. While some of the reforms suggested in the petition have been implemented over time since 2020, City Administrator Carol Mitten wrote in an email, any consideration of whether to change the structure of the board will come only after the city can “see if we can make the existing model work better first.”
She also wrote that the city intends to take into account the “considerations” of a consulting firm the city hired in 2023. In its first report, released in March, 2024, the consultants noted some deficiencies with the CPRB, most of which were already known. The report found, for instance, that the UPD’s policies for tracking complaints do not take the CPRB into account. However, addressing that was identified as a low-priority reform by the consultants, who did not touch on CPRB’s larger issues. Those appear to be left to whoever will step up to replace Diaz.
McEllhiney says outdated ordinances prevent meaningful change. “It’s really important for lawmakers to make sure that they thoroughly understand that a civilian oversight entity that does not have any authority is not going to be an effective agency,” she said.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Bamberg and Amelia Schafer, who worked on this story as Medill School of Journalism graduate interns with Invisible Institute.
Farrah Anderson is an investigative reporting fellow with the Invisible Institute and Illinois Public Media and a journalism student at the University of Illinois.
Sam Stecklow is a journalist, editor, and Freedom of Information Act fellow with the Invisible Institute. He works on its Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project and investigations.