After the killing of George Floyd in May, almost every government in the nation with a police department has been forced to reconsider their law enforcement policies. Some governments made major reforms rather quickly, but Urbana cannot make any such claim. In fact, Urbana may very well be moving backwards.
The Urbana Police Department (UPD) has always been creative in finding ways to deny police complaints, but when the pandemic arrived and Mayor Marlin closed the City Building to the public, the UPD hit the jackpot of excuses. They claimed that police complaints needed to be notarized (an invented requirement) and since most places that offer notary services (including the library) were closed, it became very difficult to have documents notarized.
This new rule was especially disadvantageous to individuals who may not have the status needed to request a meeting with a licensed notary. Furthermore, the UPD would not accept notarized complaints at the City Building, which meant that a complainant would need access to a computer with a scanner. Lieutenant Matthew Bain had determined that, due to COVID, police complaints could not be accepted at the City Building, and police staff even refused to allow complaint forms to be slipped under the locked glass doors. However, during the same time period, when local businesses brought surprise deliveries of gifts and food for the UPD, police officers and staff regularly opened the doors and allowed them to enter the building.
After about six months of complaints from residents, the City finally removed the notary requirement. However, in the same motion, a new complaint requirement was added by City Administrator Carol Mitten which claimed that the complainant needed to be physically present at the incident in order to file a complaint. This requirement seemed to be designed to prevent the Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) from reviewing complaints arising from incidents like the Aleyah Lewis arrest, which many people witnessed via video.
On June 1st, when thousands of protestors marched through Urbana in response to the killing of George Floyd and the violent arrest of Urbana resident Aleyah Lewis, both Mayor Marlin and Chief Seraphin (who made a showing at the march) refused to issue any comments about improving Urbana’s Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB).
Exactly one week after the June 1st demonstration, Mayor Marlin appointed Assistant City Attorney Curt Borman, a retired police officer, to be Urbana’s new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Officer. Previously, public records requests were always handled by the City Clerk, but Deputy City Clerk Wendy Hundley said that the City’s FOIA process is now under the control of the City Legal Department.
In response to increasing requests for police records, Curt Borman, along with City Attorney James Simon, crafted an illegal scheme for charging public records fees. Over the course of three months, the Urbana City legal department conspired to charge residents thousands of dollars of illegal FOIA fees, and denied records to any person unable to pay the fees. Borman has denied public records requests which attempt to acquire more information about these fees and how many people were charged. Such a denial is itself another FOIA violationviolation (update: Urbana is now being sued for refusing to provide these records).
On June 16th, an Urbana resident was charged $730.63 for some police body camera video from a single incident, $20 for some emails, and $27.97 for a copy of the Urbana Police Department Policies. The policies were posted online, but heavily redacted, and the CPRB and even the Urbana City Council weren’t allowed to see them. After a review, the Illinois Attorney General said that the $768 total was unlawful (article here), and Urbana could only charge for the DVD’s and a USB flash drive, which totaled $10.63. Several months after the initial request, the UPD delivered a copy of their new policies (still redacted), and the original policies remain a secret.
On June 23rd, one Urbana resident was charged $702.66 for Urbana Police dash-cam video from the arrest of Quintin Brown and Wayne Colson (who sat in Champaign County jail for a year before the State’s Attorney, Julia Rietz, determined there was no evidence to charge them). The City should have only charged $2.66 for the DVD’s, but the request was ultimately denied when the requester could not afford the $702.66.
A different requester was charged $147.97 for a list of Urbana Police officers and their photos, another person was charged $87.97 for some police complaints and injury reports, and yet another Urbana resident was charged $128.35 for one dash-cam video and one police report (article here). All of these fees, as well as all of the instances described above, share two traits: they are all illegal, and they are all fees the likes of which Urbana had never attempted before Marlin appointed Curt Borman as FOIA Officer.
Though they had been doing so for years, the City of Urbana also began to refuse to email public records (article here). Instead, they began charging $7.97 for USB flash drives on each request, no matter how small. They also began charging data fees on requests. Previously, the City was known to email up to 22 megabytes of data for free. Under the new system, 7.19 megabytes was charged $20 for the data and $7.97 for a flash drive. Another request in July was $20 for 0.475 megabytes, plus $20 for another 0.0938 megabytes, plus $7.97 for a flash drive. To provide perspective, the file size on these last two items, if provided as a PDF, indicate that they are about six pages, and one page in size, respectively.
The City also tried to charge postage for mailing the flash drives, which is another fee that is simply not allowed for in the Illinois FOIA statute (article here). Assistant City Clerk Lizabeth Kay Meharry told multiple requesters that they had to pay for postage, or send a prepaid return envelope to her.
Curt Borman even denied FOIA requests that asked for public records showing how the City was charging FOIA fees. However, one person was able to acquire emails which show that Urbana charged illegal fees on numerous requests made by at least half a dozen different residents. The FOIA requests all had one thing in common: they sought police records.
Curt Borman finally ceased his illegal fee scheme after the Illinois Attorney General sent multiple letters to the City of Urbana indicating that the fees were unlawful. In response, Borman immediately invented new techniques to charge fees and deny requests. Borman’s new game is to creatively classify requests as “voluminous” requests, which allows him to charge fees and substantially delay the City’s response time.
For example, in September a requester asked for any recent applications to City of Urbana Boards and Commissions. This is a simple request and one might expect perhaps a handful of such applications in a two month period, but Curt Borman reasoned that because there are more than two dozen boards and commissions, comprised of over 100 people, such a request was “voluminous”. Borman delayed with extensions, charged fees, then after two months, fully denied the request.
Curt Borman and Assistant City Clerk Lizabeth Kay Meharry also began demanding government ID from residents who requested public records – telling requesters to mail or email a scanned copy of their ID before they would be allowed to seek public records (article by Illinois Leaks here). Under the FOIA law, anyone is allowed to submit a public records request, and the Illinois Attorney General has stated very clearly that even anonymous requests must be honored.
The City of Urbana simply has no authority to demand ID for public records requests, but any person not willing to provide ID was charged higher fees and/or had their request denied. At a City Council meeting on October 5th, City Attorney James Simon and Curt Borman made a disturbing admission that they regularly use online search tools to research the identities, phone numbers, and addresses of FOIA requesters.
Even if a resident can bypass the fees, and government ID games, requests are still regularly denied. For example, a FOIA request sent to Champaign County METCAD 9-1-1 asking for public records related to the Aleyah Lewis arrest was fully denied by Operations Manager Betsy Smith. After a review, the Illinois Attorney General ruled the denial unlawful, but METCAD still waited an additional two months to send the records. It should be noted that METCAD has a policies board, and that both Mayor Diane Marlin and Chief Bryant Seraphin are members.
All of the obstructionism and games related to police complaints and police records caused residents to bring the issues to Urbana City Council meetings. Week after week, in addition to speaking about the Aleyah Lewis arrest, residents cited specific violations of the FOIA law by City staff, as well as efforts by the police department to deny access to the CPRB complaint process.
As upset residents continued to bring evidence of unethical, and often illegal behavior on the part of City staff to Urbana City Council meetings, it seems Mayor Marlin decided that her ties to the Urbana Police Department were more important than good governance.
At the September 14th City Council meeting, Marlin cast aside the meeting rules recorded in the City Code and announced that she had independently decided that there would be new public input rules. Speaking time would be three minutes instead of five, and she would interrupt and mute people who mentioned elected officials, City staff, or made “negative comments” (article here). In clear violation of the City Code and the Illinois Open Meetings Act, Marlin interrupted and/or muted residents more than a dozen times at that meeting.
Despite the circus on September 14th and overwhelming opposition from the community, Marlin brought her new public input rules before the City Council, and they were passed on October 12th (article here). Even past ACLU president (and current ACLU steering committee member) Bill Brown voted in favor of Urbana’s new speech restrictions (article here). Council member Jared Miller was the only person to vote against the new speaking rules, which disallow criticizing elected officials, “negative comments”, as well as “abusive”, “harassing”, and “defamatory” language. The council passed the new speaking rules without even defining “abusive”, “harassing”, and “defamatory”.
As one might expect, such broad and poorly defined rules resulted in speech censorship run amok. At the October 26th meeting (article here), Diane Marlin interrupted a speaker multiple times for criticizing Curt Borman and Lizabeth Kay Meharry for violating the FOIA law and charging illegal fees. Marlin actively muted an Urbana resident for criticizing Urbana City Administrator Carol Mitten in regards to the denial of police complaints. Marlin also interrupted another person for criticizing Diane Marlin herself.
At the November 2nd Urbana City Council meeting, Bill Brown stopped a speaker from criticizing City Administrator Carol Mitten for interfering with Urbana’s police complaint process, but he allowed other speakers to specifically name and praise Diane Marlin and Bill Brown (article here).
A week later, at the November 9th meeting, Mayor Marlin called for two residents to be muted because they were criticizing public officials. One person was muted for criticizing Marlin’s decision to appoint Julie Laut to the vacant Ward 2 City Council seat, and another person was muted for pointing out the conflict of interest that Marlin created when she appointed a retired Urbana police officer and his wife to run the Civilian Police Review Board (article here).
On November 12th, Urbana’s new Community Engagement Coordinator, Lemond Peppers, held an Urbana Police Use of Force Listening Session, but he opened the session by spending several minutes laying down some very heavy-handed speaking rules for the public (article here). Not a single youth attendee was willing to speak at the youth listening session, and Peppers later muted an Urbana resident when she began to criticize UPD’s review of the Aleyah Lewis arrest (article here).
The November 16th Urbana City Council meeting brought even greater insight into the poorly defined public speaking rules and the always slippery slope of restricting speech. Apparently, the rules created by Mayor Diane Marlin also make it a violation to express “opinions” (article here).
When Urbana resident Tracy Chong tried to speak about problems with Urbana’s police complaint process, Council member Bill Colbrook (who serves as Police Chief for Parkland College) interrupted her and said that she was “out of order”. The Chair, Dennis Roberts, responded by telling Chong, “let’s try not to be too opinionated and try to stick to facts, please.”
Just 10 seconds later, after Ms. Chong had attempted to continue speaking, Mayor Marlin interrupted her, exclaiming:
“Mr. Chair, these are opinions. These are opinions, they are not facts.”
Ms. Chong was not allowed to finish her statement and Dennis Roberts moved on to the next speaker. Before doing so, Roberts delivered the following message to Ms. Chong:
“Tracy, you’re doing a little bit better, I think we appreciate your civility. Perhaps the content is not exactly perfect, but thank you for trying.”
All of the events and schemes described in this article have occurred just in the past few months, post-George Floyd, and post-Aleyah Lewis. In all of these combined efforts to restrict civilian access to their government, it is unclear what endgame is being contemplated by Mayor Marlin and her staff. Thus far, the Urbana City Council has mostly played along, or remained passive to the violations. It isn’t even clear where Urbana residents are supposed to express their concerns, since doing so at open meetings appears to be forbidden.
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana
UPDATES: A lawsuit alleging Open Meetings Act violations was filed against the City of Urbana on November 20th. Another lawsuit alleging FOIA violations was filed against the City of Urbana on November 24th.
On November 30th, Urbana City Administrator Carol Mitten threatened to sanction members of the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board for disclosing any details of closed-session meetings about police complaints.
Note: this article was updated some additional images and a number of links to supporting articles after initial publishing.
It was especially difficult to observe certain persons being muted during the public comment portion of a city counsel meeting. Now, for lack of any self-correcting internal controls, the City of Urbana and her weak mayor are going to garner the attention of a state court judge. Let the judgement be swift, firm, and lasting.