Not a Shred of Evidence to Support Urbana Mayor’s Claims on Police Review Board – Illinois

by Check CU | Mar 27, 2023 | 0 comments

Mayor Diane Marlin (right) claimed that the Urbana Police Department had made commitments to improve civilian police review, but the City can’t find any records of those commitments

At the March 13^th, 2023 Urbana City Council meeting, right before splitting a tie vote in favor of a three year Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) contract, Mayor Diane Marlin made some interesting claims about Urbana’s Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB):

“The city of Urbana has an excellent Police Department. They are committed to working with us to reform the CPRB…they have made those commitments to Council members, to me, and we will expect them to uphold that and I know they will.” (see the video of Mayor Marlin’s remarks here)

Check CU notes that the City of Urbana held multiple meetings throughout 2020 which included discussions on reforming the CPRB (UrbanaPolice.com has an excellent repository of historical news articles about the CPRB). At the time, Mayor Marlin and several City Council members made similar affirmative statements about improving the CPRB and police accountability.

However, after nearly three years, not a single word of the CPRB Ordinance has been altered. There has not been a single ordinance proposal or vote by the Council related to any contemplated improvements to the CPRB. In that same timespan, the Council passed two FOP contracts, neither of which attempted to improve the CPRB or police review in general. The FOP contract passed by the Council this month, which is now in force until 2026, puts the same debilitating limitations on civilian police review as did prior contracts.

We wondered if the Mayor’s latest claims about “commitments” had a spark of truth to them, so we sent the following Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request:

“On March 13th, 2023 at approximately 9:01pm, Mayor Diane Marlin said at a City Council meeting that the Urbana Police Department and the Fraternal Order of Police have made commitments to her and to Urbana City Council members to reform the Civilian Police Review Board (see your copy of the Council meeting video if you need further context to aid your search).

Please provide all copies of documents related to those commitments.”

The response from the City of Urbana is provided below. FOIA Officer Ross McNeil could not produce a single memorandum, email, or post-it note related to the Mayor’s claims.

The records don’t exist because the “commitments were made verbally”, says McNeil.