Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin made a number of promises to the public after widespread demand for less violence and greater accountability in policing. One of the most substantial declarations that Marlin made, seemingly in an effort to quash detailed discussion of police reform at City Council meetings, was the creation of an “Advisory Committee on Public Safety and Policing”. However, this Advisory Committee has not been mentioned in over a year.
The Advisory Committee was described in detail by the Mayor on July 27th, 2020, and it was discussed again the following week.
Mayor Marlin: “We really need to have much more thorough, deeper, and much broader participation and dialogue about these issues if we’re going to re-envision public safety and policing in Urbana. I’m recommending that we put together an advisory committee to the Council and Mayor on public safety and policing, again, which seeks very broad community input in different types of venues.”
Marlin had such great conviction about the substantial involvement and burdens placed upon this committee that she wanted the community members who sit on the board to be paid:
“There needs to be a budget for this committee and our initial discussions have some compensation for the community members on it.”
The video of Mayor Marlin making these statements can be seen here:
More than one year later, it seems the Mayor’s Advisory Committee was never formed, at least not in any way that has been visible to the public.
The City of Urbana did host three “listening sessions” in November of 2020, but the sessions were very poorly attended, and were conducted entirely by City and police personnel. At the beginning of each session, Community Engagement Coordinator Lemond Peppers declared that public speech would be censored, and later followed through with that threat by muting a member of the public for mentioning Chief Seraphin by name. One of the three sessions, a session dedicated to youth input, attracted no participants.
One of the primary tasks of the Advisory Committee was supposed to be the creation of a new Use of Force Policy for the Urbana Police Department, and the Mayor emphasized the need for “very broad community input”. However, any work being done on the Use of Force policy has been largely shielded from public view. In January of 2021, the Mayor attempted to bring forth a new Use of Force Policy to the City Council, but the move quickly backfired as several Council members indicated that the new policy was far from satisfactory. The Mayor has just recently announced that a new Use of Force Policy variant will be brought to the Council tonight.
The City claims to have involved the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in their Use of Force revisions, but it is not clear what that involvement actually means for the public, since the ACLU has almost no presence in Urbana. The Champaign County ACLU operates a minimalistic website and very rarely updates members except to occasionally forward email pleas for support on various non-local political issues from the Illinois ACLU. When members of the local ACLU Steering Committee have taken action, it has sometimes been contrary to the interests of Urbana residents. Notably, some members of the Champaign County ACLU Steering Committee supported censorship and speech restrictions upon Urbana residents at public meetings (article here, here, and here). In order to strike down the illegal speech restrictions which the local ACLU representatives helped push through, Urbana residents had to rely on an Open Meetings Act lawsuit and the Illinois Attorney General.
The Urbana Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB), tasked with reviewing police complaints and TASER usages, does not appear to have been involved with the Use of Force Policy revisions in any way, and they have not discussed it at any of their meetings.
One aspect of this process which was brought up repeatedly by members of the public last year, was that the City has consistently only paid attention to a small slice of their police policies involving use of force. The document that has been under discussion is “Policy 300 – Use of Force”. However, Policy 300 (originally ~7 pages of the 574 page policy book) is essentially an introduction. The past Council discussions, as well as the new Use of Force Policy which will be presented at tonight’s City Council meeting, have not even recognized other sections of the UPD Policies:
- 301 – Use of Force Review Boards
- 302 – Handcuffing and Restraints
- 303 – Control Devices and Techniques
- 304 – TASER
- 305 – Serious Uses of Force and In-Custody Deaths
- 306 – Firearms
- 308 – Vehicle Pursuits
- 310 – Canines
- 311 – Domestic Violence
- 312 – Workplace Violence
- 313 – Search and Seizure
- 314 – Temporary Custody of Juveniles
- 1028 – Line-of-Duty Deaths or Serious Injuries
This list only names a portion of the UPD Policies that involve use of force. At a City Council discussion last year, Council Member Jared Miller said that discussing only Policy 300 and ignoring the others makes the discussion “disingenuous”. Miller also repeatedly attempted to get Chief Seraphin to release unredacted copies of the original UPD Policies. Seraphin agreed, then never followed through, and later indicated that the Council has no right or authority over police policies.
To date, no City Council member or member the public has been able to see the unredacted Urbana Police Department Policies that were originally in place in early 2020. The Mayor also declared that her Advisory Committee, in addition to community members, would be comprised of one or more members of the City Council. However, either no such appointment(s) made been made, or the public has not been made aware of those appointments.
Check CU also notes that at least two Urbana boards/commissions exist or have recently existed which would appear to have had similar goals as Marlin’s imagined “Advisory Committee on Public Safety and Policing”. The “Community Alternative Policing Advisory Committee” and the “Mayor’s Neighborhood Safety Task Force” both existed under Mayor Marlin and appear to have been dissolved or abandoned by the Mayor. The “Mayor’s Neighborhood Safety Task Force”still appears on the City chart of boards and commissions, but the Chair (Mayor Marlin) hasn’t held a meeting since August of 2018.