Applications are open for Boulder Police Department’s new nine-member civilian oversight panel, which will review complaint investigation files and make disciplinary, policy and training recommendations.
The oversight panel is the result of recommendations made by a task force that studied various models of police oversight after Boulder officers confronted a Black Naropa University student who was picking up trash outside his apartment building.
The panel will be chosen by a committee of people who were on the implementation team tasked with setting the plan in motion but are not interested in serving on the panel as well as two representatives from local nonprofit organizations that serve the Boulder community, populations with significant contact or difficult relationships with law enforcement and historically excluded communities.
Ideally, at least half of the panel will be those who identify as a person of color, “notably African American, Latinx, Asian and/or Indigenous,” according to a city news release. The selection committee will give preference to those who are multilingual and aims to include someone with a disability, a person experiencing homelessness or having lived such an experience, a person identifying as LGBTQ+ and a person who has experienced incarceration. Current city employees and their immediate family members are not allowed to be members of the panel.
Those selected will go through a training program developed by the city’s first Independent Police Monitor Joey Lipari.
The applications are open until Jan. 8. To apply, visit bit.ly/police_oversight_panel. Anyone with limited internet access can call Lipari at 720-376-3980. Interviews will be Jan. 11 through 15 and shared online so people can watch.
