The Tampa City Council spent hours on Thursday reviewing proposed changes to strengthen the city’s agency that oversees the police department – but failed to placate critics who claim the board lacks sufficient powers to hold the Tampa Police Department truly accountable. 

City Attorney Gina Grimes says the changes made by Mayor Jane Castor following the protests for police accountability and racial equality held last summer have given the Citizen’s Review Board (CRB) enhanced powers from its original iteration in 2015, but more than a dozen citizens told the council during the workshop that the changes don’t go nearly far enough. 

Specifically, the ACLU and others want three changes to what Castor proposed:

1. Subpoena powers for the CRB;
2. An independent attorney who would work for the CRB;
3. Give city council the power to select the majority of the 11-member board (currently the council selects five members; the mayor selects five members; and the NAACP gets one selection)

City officials have said from the onset that to give the CRB subpoena powers or to give the agency its own attorney would require changes of the city’s charter. 

That prompted Councilman John Dingfelder towards the end of the meeting to propose putting both those measures before the voters next year. But after getting some pushback from other council members, he dropped the idea.

Currently, the CRB attorney comes from the Tampa Police Department, which Stetson University law student Tiffany Hilton said is inappropriate.

“As it stands right now, the attorney that is functioning for the CRB is a city attorney,” she told Spectrum Bay News 9. “So as another speaker said, how can they be trusted to act in an independent capacity when something they find may lead to liability for the city?”

Grimes, the city attorney, said one of Mayor Castor’s changes would be to have a recently hired attorney for the city work as the new CRB attorney.

Councilman Luis Viera proposed that the city hire an independent attorney to work approximately 10 hours a month as the CRB attorney, calling it a “common sense approach.” However, his proposal lost on a 5-2 vote.

The board did vote to give themselves the power to select the majority of the members of the CRB (Seven – one for each member of the council) and to give the mayor the power to appoint four members. However, after the vote, Grimes said that change could only come from Mayor Castor (during the meeting activists mentioned how city councils or county commissions in other Florida communities that have citizen review boards choose the majority of their members).

Earlier in the day, James Shaw, a volunteer attorney with the ACLU, disputed the city’s charge that the only way to give the CRB subpoena power is through amending the city’s charter, saying that other city agencies like Code Enforcement do have those powers.
“The only time you hear about this phantom legal problem is when we’re talking about giving subpoena power to a board that would review police misconduct,” he said.

Danny Alvarez, a spokesman for the Tampa Police Benevolent Association, agreed that other cities in Florida with citizen’s review boards do have subpoena power but said “they all still have some of the same problems that they were supposed to fix, and some have been around for 10 years.”

In addition to many citizens who said the board needed greater powers were supporters of the Tampa police, who said that they were part of a group called “Community Patriots.”

Tampa resident Mari Fernandez said that while the current citizens review board was fine because it was now led by citizens, she claimed that the ACLU wanted to become part of the new board.

“These measures that they’re trying to submit to the city are invasive to say the least,” she said outside of City Hall. “They are trying to literally interfere with the reviews, interfere with the investigations, and interfere with how the police do their job.”

The proposed changes to the CRB made by Castor will come back before the city council in May.