Chattanooga PARC meets with council members

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) – In a Public Safety Committee meeting Tuesday, Chattanooga City Council Members heard from the Police Advisory and Review Committee or “PARC” on cases they’ve reviewed so far.

The PARC reviews complaints against police and makes recommendations to the police chief on how to move forward.

According to the board, in October, they had 19 cases involving 23 officers and in November, they’ve had 7 cases involving 9 officers.

PARC Chair Kay Baker said that about half of the cases were chain of command initiated complaints and the other half were complaints coming from citizens.

“Of the cases that we looked at, there were non-citizen complaint cases where the conduct is significant enough that if the police can’t police themselves and we can’t help them do that then how can they properly police in the community that they are supposed to serve,” Baker said.

It’s the non-citizen complaints brought to the committee that Councilman Russell Gilbert said he’s surprised by.

The PARC replaces a board that had been reviewing all complaints.

“I can’t speak for all council people, but I would like to see more citizens driven complaints looking at policies that affect the citizens in our neighborhoods more so then something that HR and the police department should be handling,” Councilman Gilbert said.

Councilwoman Carol Berz asked Baker if there has been any issues of citizens complaints not making it to the board.

Baker said she’s not aware of any.

“One of the things we did talk about as a group was that there might be certain citizens that might not want to complain directly to the police department,” she said.

Citizens can submit complaints to the board.

They can also do so anonymously.

Council members have talked about creating a hotline or setting up a special email folks can use if they want to make a complaint.

The PARC will give a quarterly report in January.

By then they hope to have information, data on if their recommendations to the police chief match up with his decisions on the cases.