In three years, a citizens review group intended to provide an independent review of police misconduct in Birmingham has heard just three cases.

And only one case proceeded without dismissal.

“Since this board was created, we’ve paid for funerals for Black men that were killed by Birmingham police,” said Cara McClure, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Birmingham.

McClure served on Mayor Randall Woodfin’s task force that recommended forming a community-led group to review police misconduct.

In April 2021, Woodfin did that. He announced a new civilian review board, saying it would provide an independent forum for police accountability.

“This is an opportunity to build bridges, to cultivate trust, to create more checks and balances and for ensuring justice,’’ Woodfin said at the time. “We’re putting reform in the hands of the people.”

Three years later, the group has a new name – the Birmingham Public Safety Advisory Committee – and less power.

“The problem with this committee is that it has no authority,” said Florence L. Finkle, vice president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. “It doesn’t have any authority to do anything. So what is it supposed to tell the public its authority is? The goals set forth in the mayor’s executive order do not match with the actual authority they have.”

The committee can hire investigators and mediators, but it doesn’t have the authority to subpoena anyone to testify or to get records like body camera video, police reports or personnel records. In fact, the committee isn’t allowed to consider the most controversial cases, because the committee can’t get involved if there’s an internal police department review, a lawsuit or other reviews by the district attorney or the county personnel board.

The group was initially set up as a board. But the city revamped it after the city’s legal department realized that “boards” have specific legal authority that this committee wasn’t intended to have, according to Birmingham’s Division of Social Justice and Racial Equity.

“I wanted to identify any holes,” said Uche Bean, who is deputy director of the Division of Social Justice and Racial Equity. “We looked at everything and we just wanted to take a more critical look.”

Spokespeople for Woodfin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘Communities aren’t showing up’

Committee members and city officials say they haven’t processed a lot of cases because of a lack of community participation.

Rev. Lawrence Conaway, the head of the committee, told AL.com that no news is good news when it comes to police misconduct.

“I think it’s low because there are no cases,” said Conaway, a pastor and the chair of a housing organization in Birmingham said at the committee’s most recent meeting in April. “Hopefully there are no cases that police officers are doing what they shouldn’t be doing.”

The Birmingham Police Department did not provide data about how many complaints have been filed with internal affairs in recent years. AL.com has filed a public records request.

“We also want to get the good comments as well,” added committee member Victor Revill, a criminal defense attorney in Birmingham.

The five-member citizens committee also includes a former Alabama governor, a police department retiree, and a reentry activist — all appointed by the mayor.

They serve on a voluntary basis and aren’t paid. The mayor can remove any of the members, per the committee’s website.

At the group’s most recent meeting in April, just three people sat in the audience — two city employees and an AL.com reporter. The committee’s only action was to vote to meet less frequently — on an “as needed” basis.

“A lot of times communities are complaining, but communities aren’t showing up. That’s my thing,” committee member Dena Dickerson said, suggesting live streaming or recording meetings to boost participation. “Why aren’t you coming if this is an issue for you?”

There were no new cases of residents alleging police misconduct brought to the committee to consider. The meeting lasted 14 minutes.

Conaway said fewer than five people had attended the committee’s five meetings since September.

Bean said low participation is typical for a new committee.

“If our residents know about it and understand, they will have confidence in it,” Bean said. “At this point our only obstacle is the public understanding what’s available to them.”

Don Siegelman – who is a former governor, secretary of state, lieutenant governor and attorney general for Alabama – told AL.com that he believes the committee is in its “embryonic stage,” but said he has faith in its potential for impact.

“It’s going through some growing pains,” he said in an interview. “I think that the public knowledge of it is probably one reason why we haven’t had a great deal of interaction from the public. The word will get out, I’m sure.”

City officials say they have launched targeted ads and other social media posts. Police officers are also expected to inform community members about the committee.

Deterring misconduct

Johnathan Austin is a lawyer and former member of the Birmingham City Council. He dismissed the notion that there aren’t cases of police misconduct in the city.

In February, a federal jury handed down a nearly $4.5 million verdict against the city and one of its officers for a 2019 shooting.

“The citizens themselves know of many instances of police misconduct,” said Austin, one of the attorneys who brought the federal lawsuit. “If you really cared about these people, then you would provide them another avenue to lodge their complaints. I don’t understand why [Mayor Woodfin] doesn’t get that.”

Attorney Richard Rice pointed to the case of Carl Grant, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran who died from spinal cord injuries months after a Birmingham police officer body slammed him into the floor at UAB Hospital in 2020.

Grant became confused and disoriented after trying to drive to the grocery store from his home in Georgia but ended up in Birmingham, where a police officer found him wandering, lost. Rice said that he was a victim of poor police training for responding to people who are having a mental health crisis.

“Nobody was taking the committee seriously and nobody is taking the Carl Grant case seriously. This is somebody’s uncle, grandfather, brother who didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “They have been trained to use force to resolve situations.”

Siegelman, who spent six years in prison for a federal bribery conviction, has been outspoken about condemning excessive force by police, something he said he studied while working for the Department of Justice. The committee, he said, is a “first step” toward curtailing such violence in Birmingham.

“The fact that there is a process that’s in place that can be utilized by members of the public is important and helpful, and can serve as a deterrent,” he told AL.com. “Not only a deterrent to the use of excessive force, but also used as a means to better improve the quality of training and improve the qualifications for specific law enforcement positions.”

In the committee’s case that went to mediation, a resident said she was unfairly diagnosed with a mental illness by officers after she reported her neighbor for harassment. After mediation, police officials apologized to her, corrected the police report that mentioned her perceived mental state, and required the officer involved to go through customer service training and the full department to go through report writing training.

As for the other two cases, one was withdrawn after the person who filed the complaint said their accusation was false. The committee dismissed the other case as “unfounded.”

Filing complaints

The concept of a civilian review board, while newer to Alabama, is decades-old. It emerged as a popular reform option with more attention amid Black Lives Matter protests and calls for more police accountability in the summer of 2020. There are similar committees formed to weigh in on police misconduct in Alabama, in Huntsville, Mobile, Decatur, Montgomery and Madison.

In 2020, Mayor Woodfin created Birmingham’s Public Safety Task Force – which included Revill, McClure, and others – to improve public safety. Among that task force’s findings was a recommendation to create a citizen’s advisory board to develop in the first quarter of 2021.

But after it formed, with more than a year of no public meetings, Birmingham relaunched the board last September as a committee.

McClure, who is also executive director of Faith and Works, said that the task force envisioned the committee being community-led and having “more power” than just advising. She said the task force wanted city council members, not just the mayor, to have authority to select community members as representatives.

She suggested that the committee launch a campaign to spread information about how to file a complaint through libraries, neighborhood associations and knocking on doors.

“That will show that this body is real. Right now, it’s not real. It’s not real if the community don’t know about it,” she said. “You have to ask yourself, the mechanisms to file a complaint, is that realistic, if there’s already no trust?”

Birmingham activist Frank Matthews said he’s advocated for civilian oversight since the 1990s.

He wants the current group to be able to review more of the police department’s activity and policies. He said the committee should look into how police handle crimes like homicide and exhibition driving, in addition to investigating complaints of misconduct.

“The review committee has to have more teeth, and they have to have more access,” said Matthews, who was a longtime gang liaison to the mayor’s office and ran against Woodfin in the mayoral race in 2017. “To me, it’s just window dressing.”

Finkle said that recommending mediations between police departments and community members can be valuable.

But NACOLE, the national organization that Finkle represents, lists the principles that make review committees effective. And those include unfettered access to records, community involvement, and independence.

“You can’t investigate a complaint by just interviewing the person that files the complaint,” Finkle said. “You need access to records, body worn camera footage, and police officer personnel.”

Joseph D. Bryant contributed to this story.