Tampa ACLU asks mayor to not interfere with police review board’s potential independent attorney

As Tampa City Council prepares to hear a potential law that could provide the local police accountability board with an independent attorney, a civil rights group is asking that the city legal team not stand in the way of the process.

Yesterday, the ACLU Greater Tampa Chapter sent an email which claimed that City Attorney Andrea Zelman’s current version of the ordinance would actually give the city extra control over the police review board attorney.

“We note what appear to us to be discrepancies between Councilwoman Hurtak’s motion requesting preparation of the proposed ordinance and the language that was prepared,” ACLU wrote to council.

The motion to create a draft of the law was passed on Jan. 19 by Lynn Hurtak and the rest of council. They asked the legal department to create an ordinance allowing the Citizen Review Board (CRB) to select a lawyer who is not an employee of the city to advise the board.

Currently, the board is advised by a city attorney who works under Mayor Jane Castor, a former police chief who has pushed back hard on police transparency over the past several years. Castor’s also been at the center of two Department of Justice investigations of TPD programs that profiled people of color.

An independent attorney for the CRB has been demanded by citizens who’re concerned that there’s a conflict of interest in having an attorney who works under the mayor advising the board. Those calls have grown louder in recent months, with police transparency activists protesting outside of city hall and making their voices heard during public comment.

Last month, city council voted to let Tampa decide at the ballot box if the CRB should have an independent attorney.

But Castor interfered with that process via mayoral vetoes and making council re-vote on the issue, where the attempt to let the voters decide failed 3-4. So last month, Hurtak presented the idea of creating an ordinance, or city law, which council voted to move forward with.
But Zelman’s proposed language for the law, which is set to be discussed on Thursday by council, had some glaring additions that council didn’t ask for, the ACLU points out.

First, Zelman’s draft would send the decision back to the CRB itself, and the board would have to hold another vote to obtain independent counsel.

“This is not consistent with the [council’s] motion,” the ACLU wrote.

The city attorney’s current draft of the ordinance also gives the city attorney, not the CRB, the power to solicit applications for the independent lawyer.

“This would make the City Attorney a de facto gatekeeper with the ability to screen out attorneys who are not aligned with the City Attorney’s views and, hence, would not be truly independent,” the ACLU continued.

The language also gives the city attorney the final decision on which lawyer would represent the CRB, not the board itself. And, the draft seeks to require the city attorney’s approval before a lawsuit is enacted, “presumably including a suit to obtain public records,” ACLU wrote.

The letter to the city included examples of how Miami, Key West and Orange County let their police review boards handle the hiring of their own attorneys.

“We invite you to compare the proposed language to some other municipalities’ ordinance provisions providing for independent attorneys for their citizens-review boards, none of which contain language similar to that proposed by the Zelman Memo,” wrote ACLU.

The group also offered its own suggested language for the ordinance that would give the CRB more control over hiring its own attorney.
Zelman was not available today to respond to comment on the letter sent from the ACLU.

But her memo to council confirms that everything the ACLU highlighted is accurate. Zelman did also mention in the memo that she is open to input from council at Thursday’s council meeting.

Hurtak said that the ordinance as it stands now is not what she asked for.

"The biggest thing to me is that we are absolutely going to have an independent attorney for the CRB, not the possibility of one as this ordinance suggests," Hurtak said.

She said that another concern of hers is that city council's legislation is hitting roadblocks, rather than moving forward, as the public wants.

Today in an Op-Ed for the Tampa Bay Times, the President of the Hillsborough NAACP, Yvette Lewis, urged Castor and her administration to let there be transparency in the police department.

“If we are to move forward as a racially just city that truly celebrates our diversity, Mayor Castor needs to dispense with the hollow words and stop standing in the way of citizens seeking accountability in Tampa’s law enforcement,” Lewis wrote.