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A found that the citizen body formed to review police practices has largely been ineffective due to lack of support from the Sacramento City Council.
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Of 178 recommendations the Police Review Commission has submitted to the Sacramento Police Department, 10 have been voluntarily implemented and just one was approved by the City Council, according to the report. The other 167 remain in limbo, with no infrastructure requiring that they be considered by the council or the department.
The report said that the lack of resources, mechanisms for tracking recommendations and mandatory responses from either body “leaves the Commission’s work largely in the dark.”
“Rather than shine a light on policing, the Commission has further shrouded it in darkness,” the report reads.
The commission was created in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, which spawned national discussions over community-police and acted as a milestone in the Black Lives Matter movement.
After months of community meetings organized by then-Mayor Kevin Johnson, the council unanimously voted to form the commission with the goal of providing community-driven review department policies, practices and initiatives. It was meant to advise the council on policing best practices.
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The history of the commission has been fraught, with longtime community criticism that it lacks true oversight power. The grand jury report reaffirms the findings of a 2021 city audit, which said that the commission lacks the resources and investment from the city to effectively achieve its goals. The city has failed to act on the audit recommendations, according to the 2026 report.
The report comes as the city slashed its Office of Public Safety and Accountability, a police oversight office created in 2020 as Sacramento reckoned with national police violence against Black Americans; as activists recently shut down two consecutive City Council meetings over issues relating to the Police Department; and as the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union released a report alleging that Sacramento police engage in racially-biased traffic stops.
Findings and recommendations for Sacramento
The findings and recommendations in the report mostly fall into the purview of the City Council, asking it to develop and implement procedures for reviewing the commission’s recommendations and to require the police department to provide formal written responses to all recommendations.
The grand jury recommends that:
- City Council and the police each take steps to encourage community participation with the commission, including creating a website and dedicated email address to the commission.
- The City Council implements a procedure for considering all recommendations. They are currently approved via a consent calendar, which council members typically approve without discussion alongside several other items.
- The City Council formally respond to the recommendations made by the city auditor’s 2021 report.
The City Council is required to respond to the grand jury within 90 days, and the body has also requested responses from City Manager Maraskeshia Smith and Zachary Bales, the city’s interim police chief.
City Council members and Mayor Kevin McCarty could not be immediately reached for comment, many of them hosting visitors from Sacramento sister city Morelia, Mexico, in preparation of a ceremony Thursday afternoon.
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The Police Department declined to comment.