Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin made a number of promises to the public in 2020 after widespread demand for police reform. One of the most substantial declarations by Marlin, seemingly in an effort to steer discussion of police reform away from City Council meetings, was the creation of an “Advisory Committee on Public Safety and Policing”. However, it has been nearly nineteen months and Marlin’s Advisory Committee appears to have been completely abandoned.
The phantom Advisory Committee hasn’t even been mentioned in six months – not since Check CU published an article on the issue on August 23rd, 2021. The article prompted questions from Urbana City Council members at a Council meeting that same night.
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:
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, the Policy has already gone through multiple revisions over the past nineteen months, and any work being done on the Use of Force Policy has been almost entirely 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.
Chief Bryant Seraphin presented another variant of the first section of the UPD Use of Force Policy on August 23rd, but the presentation still left many Council members unsatisfied. After his presentation, Seraphin actually refused to answer some questions from Council members.
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.
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.