Few attend committee meeting

By Harry Plumer

Published March 14, 2008

The Columbia Citizen Oversight Committee sponsored its first of a series of six meetings that will allow citizens to voice their opinions Thursday night at Smithton Middle School.

Only two citizens chose to speak at the meeting. Despite the grim predictions set forth about attendance at the previous committee meeting, the numbers still fell below expectations.

“I was hopeful there would be more people here,” committee member Ellen LoCurto-Martinez said. “But despite the attendance, I still think it was a great meeting.”

The two citizens who spoke were residents of Boone County but not the city of Columbia. Boone County resident Bruce Mier said the Columbia Police Department needs a citizen review board.

“The rise of crime in the city of Columbia is not an excuse for the corporate culture inside the police department to go out of bounds,” Mier said to the committee. “Their job is to serve us and our job is to make them serve us.”

Mier would not go into specifics during the meeting, but referred to two incidents when people he knew reported the police were “profoundly out of bounds.”

“When something like that happens, people lose their trust in the police,” he said.

The other citizen who spoke before the committee was Paul Brugmann, who also supported a citizen review board.

“We entrust these officers with power,” Brugmann said. “If they violate our rights, there should be a neutral venue for complaints.”

Brugmann said he hoped more people would attend the meeting.

“But I think the process is being done as it should be and that momentum will build as it moves forward.”

The main purpose of a civilian review board in Columbia would be to give citizens a third-party outlet through which they could voice their complaints against the police department.

“The goal of these meetings is to gauge public sentiment about citizen review,” committee co-chairman Jeffrey Williams said. “We want to know about their feelings and their experiences and whether they feel any complaints have been adequately dealt with.”

The next meeting will be at 7 p.m. March 20 at Oakland Junior High School.

“I’m optimistic about the turnout,” LoCurto-Martinez said. “We plan to make the next one a little less formal.”

The committee will sponsor one of its meetings at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center on MU’s campus, but the review board would have no effect on MUPD.

“We just want to make the information available to anyone,” Williams said.