Boston’s year-old police-civilian review board - touted as the people’s watchdog on cop abuses - is so shrouded from public view it stands out nationally as among the most secretive panels of its kind, a Herald review shows. Not only is the public not invited to the board’s rare meetings, but its activities cannot be monitored because there are no minutes. Since Mayor Thomas M. Menino created the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel and Complaint Mediation Program in March, the three-member board has convened just 11 times, in six locations - all of them closed to the public, said corporation counsel William Sinnott. The meetings lasted two hours on average, Sinnott said, but no minutes were taken to record what transpired. To date, only one Boston resident has brought a complaint to the panel, Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce said yesterday, and that happened after the Herald began making inquiries two weeks ago. Sinnott said the board has thus far reviewed seven cases picked at random by the Boston Police Department’s internal affairs department. City officials refuse to provide any details of those cases, or of recommendations the board may have made to BPD brass, saying it would violate the privacy of city employees. One national expert, who was consulted by city officials when they were creating the current board, expressed shock and dismay at the way the Hub panel conducts business. “How can you have an agency that doesn’t keep minutes?” said Sam Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska. “That doesn’t even meet the minimum standards. I knew there were a lot of compromises in what was finally created. (But) that’s not acceptable.” Cloaked in secrecy, the Hub review board operates in stark contrast to similar agencies in New York, Miami, Washington, D.C., Cincinnati and 10 other cities, where panels post times and dates of meetings, hold them in full view of the public, describe cases under review and announce findings on a regular basis. “We see transparency to the public as part of our mission,” said Thomas Sharp, deputy director of the Police Complaint Commission in Washington, D.C. “So we make as much information as possible available so the people know the types of complaints we receive and how they’re resolved.” The Hub board was created in response to the controversial police shooting death of Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove during a riot after the Red Sox [team stats] won the 2004 pennant. Local critics say the board’s secrecy defeats its very purpose - “to build trust and confidence within the community,” according to the executive order that created the panel. “We ought to see the workings of this agency,” said Sarah Wunsch, an American Civil Liberties Union staff lawyer in Boston. “It will not build the kind of confidence in the community that’s needed if they operate in secret and don’t make the information public about what they’re doing.” The three board members - New England School of Law dean John O’Brien; Northeastern University School of Law professor David Hall; and Ruth Suber, a former member of the state parole board - all declined to comment. Sinnott said the board will publish an annual report next month, but few details about the cases reviewed will be revealed. “The concern was if you get into the details of a particular case you may end up embarrassing police officers unnecessarily, and you may embarrass civilian complainants,” he said. “That’s why there’s some reluctance to get into individual cases.” The ACLU’s Wunsch says she’s seen this story before. “There is a history in Boston that the city sets up some panel after a tragedy (but it) becomes useless and dies out,” she said. “That looks like what is happening here.”
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