This story is part of a partnership focusing on police misconduct in Champaign County between the Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project of Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, and IPM News, which provides news about Illinois & in-depth reporting on Agriculture, Education, the Environment, Health, and Politics, powered by Illinois Public Media.
CHAMPAIGN — In 2021, shortly after she became the chair of Champaign’s civilian police review board, Alexandra Harmon-Threatt sat down to review records and video from investigations into civilian complaints that had been filed earlier that year.
In one case, a man had accused Champaign Police Officer Nicholas Krippel of being physically and verbally aggressive toward him and making physical contact without cause during a response to a verbal disagreement between a landlord and the man who filed the complaint.
“Officer Krippel got in my face, in my space,” the complainant said in an interview with Lt. Kevin Olmstead, who conducted the Champaign Police’s internal investigation. “His vest actually touched my skin, that’s how close he was to me.”
The man said Krippel had escalated the situation: “He only told me to stop talking and shut up, but he [said] nothing to the dude that threatened me.”
Harmon-Threatt’s review of Krippel’s bodycam video confirmed, in her mind, that both of these allegations had merit. But when she read Olmstead’s report, she found that it contradicted the video evidence.
Olmstead’s ultimate finding of the complaint was that it was “not sustained.” He said Krippel maintained close distance to the complainant to ease the situation, and that “if there was physical contact, it had been incidental and unintentional.”
But Harmon-Threatt’s conclusion after viewing the same evidence was that Krippel’s behavior had escalated the situation. Olmstead had also incorrectly written that Krippel did not curse at the complainant, as Krippel is heard in the bodycam footage saying, “I ain’t gonna sit here and let you start a fight in the middle of the f***ing sidewalk.” The Champaign Police Department did not make officers available for an interview or respond to specific questions about this case.
The city of Champaign created its police review board, known as the Citizen Review Subcommittee, or CRS, in 2017, after years of issues involving police misconduct. Activists called for reforms to the Champaign Police Department following the killing of Kiwane Carrington in 2009 and excessive force lawsuits against former Officer Matt Rush.
The goal of the CRS is to ensure investigations into police officers are “complete, thorough, objective and fair,” according to a city ordinance.
But its structure has been criticized by former members and experts in civilian oversight of law enforcement. Harmon-Threatt — and others who’ve served on the CRS over the years — claim the group has no power to hold police accountable for inappropriate behavior.
One major flaw, in her view, is that police officers investigating their own colleagues appear to not be swayed when CRS members call for reforms, policy changes and more accountability for police officers who exhibit inappropriate behavior. Additionally, certain cases are not reviewed by the CRS at all, and police aren’t required to implement or even respond to CRS recommendations.
“We can sit here, and we can make all these recommendations, and we can have all these concerns about the investigation,” Harmon-Threatt said. “But the only people we’re complaining to are the people who did the investigation.”
‘There is no mechanism by which we can hold the police accountable’
Harmon-Threatt was first appointed to the Citizen Review Subcommittee when it formed in 2017. She and four other board members, who are appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council, met roughly every other month to review complaint investigations filed by civilians against police officers. The members receive training including police ride-alongs, firearms simulator training and briefings on the police policy handbook and citizen complaint procedures.
She was excited to find a new way to give back to her community, given a longtime interest in social justice. An entomology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harmon-Threatt felt that this was an opportunity to bring her analytical side to public service.
“As someone who is African American and grew up in a poor community, I know the role that the police can play and what happens in those communities, whether that be positive or negative,” she said.
When a civilian files a complaint, the department conducts an internal investigation, carried out by either the officer’s supervisor or the department’s Office of Professional Standards, depending on the severity. The investigators present their findings, the body-worn camera footage and any other materials involved in the investigation to the CRS, whose members work to determine whether they agree with the findings and what recommendations they’d like to make.
The CRS writes a letter to the police chief, who ultimately decides whether the civilian’s allegations against officers are sustained, and if so, what steps will be taken to address the misconduct.
In the case involving Officer Krippel, Harmon-Threatt and the rest of the CRS disagreed with the findings of the investigation.
“The video footage clearly shows the officer initiates physical contact with the complainant … For this to be not sustained suggests ignoring important video footage,” Harmon-Threatt wrote in her notes responding to the case. “Lots of effort… [was] made to absolve the officer’s egregious actions.”
She and other members of the CRS lodged their dissent directly with Tom Petrilli, a longtime Champaign Police official who was serving as interim chief, saying that Krippel’s behavior constituted misconduct and deserved further scrutiny.
Prior to this incident — under previous chief Anthony Cobb, who had supported the creation of the CRS — the CRS’ responses were explicitly acknowledged. Cobb even acted in line with some CRS recommendations, overturning the original findings of at least one investigation and, in other cases, ordering further investigation into officers or Champaign Police policy. But this kind of response is atypical, based on our reporting.
Petrilli never acknowledged the subcommittee’s questions about Krippel’s conduct or concerns about the quality of the investigation. No response from him was included in any of the records released by the city regarding the case.
In a statement, the Champaign Police Department said that per policy, the findings of the CRS are reviewed by the police chief, “even if they are not noted as such,” but the chief isn’t required to respond to CRS decisions.
This is a problem, said Sharon Fairley, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studies civilian oversight of law enforcement. She said local laws that dictate how review boards operate can severely limit their power.
“In order for the community to feel like the police department is actually listening to community feedback on the work that they do, it’s important that the department respond in some way,” said Fairley, who previously led Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
Toward the end of his term as interim chief, Petrilli appeared to reinstate the practice of acknowledging CRS findings in writing. In another case where the CRS disagreed during Harmon-Threatt’s term as chair, Petrilli responded — but only to state his own dissent with their decision. In this case, a complainant alleged an officer was discourteous and failed to de-escalate an argument after a woman dinged the complainant’s car door. Champaign Police investigators did not sustain the allegations, to which the CRS disagreed, stating that they found the investigation to be biased toward the officer.
But Petrilli responded that the incident was minor, and did not respond to the CRS’ findings about bias.
Harmon-Threatt was not even aware that there were instances where CRS’ disagreements went unacknowledged by Champaign Police — until she spoke with Invisible Institute and IPM News for this story.
But she said she’s not surprised; this lack of response to cases in which the CRS had lodged dissent “demonstrated to us that we had no power and that there was not a commitment on the other side to improving.”
She said there were other times when an officer’s name would come across their review on multiple occasions, yet when members tried to note a pattern of behavior, they were told by police and city staff that it wasn’t their responsibility to point out trends.
“The people who are attracted to serving on the committee really do want to do good,” Harmon-Threatt said. “They want to make policing better, but that requires the other side to want to make policing better and not to see this process as just a burden… There is no mechanism by which we can hold the police accountable for doing or not doing anything.”
During her time on Champaign’s Citizen Review Subcommittee, Harmon-Threatt said she studied up on what qualities make for an effective police review board and found the CRS lacking.
“The CRS as it is structured had almost none of those abilities or powers,” she said. “You’d have to basically recreate the entire structure of the citizen review in order for it to meet what has previously been determined to be effective.”
Among those qualities is transparency. Although they are public record, none of the reports filed by the CRS — or the police — about civilian complaint cases are publicized in any way. The only way to obtain them is through open records requests, which can be difficult and lengthy. And the portions of CRS meetings during which cases are discussed in detail all occur during closed executive sessions.
This lack of public awareness about what happens behind closed doors is another problem that severely limits what police review boards can accomplish, Fairley said.
If the public is not informed, people can’t put pressure on the police department to help bring about change.
“A better approach is at least to require the police department to respond to the board’s findings, so that disagreement can then be made public,” Fairley said, “because the whole point of the review model is having this entity — even though they don’t have the power to make the disciplinary decisions — it’s about shining light on the problems.”
Many complaint cases are never even reviewed by the CRS
Complaints filed against Champaign Police are broken into four categories. Formal Complaints are made by civilians alleging misconduct by an employee within 60 days of the alleged incident — these are the only cases reviewed by the CRS.
The other three complaint categories are outside the purview of the CRS. These include External Allegations, which are made by civilians alleging minor misconduct; Internal Allegations, made by Champaign Police employees alleging misconduct by another employee; and Internal Investigations, conducted when a complaint allegation does not meet formal complaint requirements, according to Champaign Police policy.
All told, dozens of allegations of misconduct against Champaign Police officers are made each year that never get reviewed by the CRS. A larger review of these cases revealed some that Sharon Fairley and former CRS members said should have been reviewed — but never were.
One of those cases involved a complaint against an officer alleging excessive force. In May 2023, Lee, who requested we use her middle name only to protect her privacy, was studying for an exam for her masters degree when she got a call from her wife. A woman holding a baby had jumped in front of her moving car on a Champaign street while trying to run away from someone, so Lee’s wife let the woman into her car for safety.
Lee met up with her wife to address the situation. Lee told the woman with the baby to get in her car since it had a car seat, and they drove to the woman’s house while calling police about the man chasing her, who the woman said was the baby’s father.
When they got near the woman’s house, police officers were already outside — because the man had also called the police, and claimed the woman with the baby had a gun. As Lee got out of the car at the house, several Champaign officers approached the vehicle, including Officer Dillon Holloway, and attempted to talk to the woman and search the car. After officers pulled the woman out, Lee tried to close the door to keep the baby warm, prompting Holloway to force the door back open.
Holloway told Lee the woman was reported to have a gun, but Lee told him she didn’t believe that was true. When he tried to open the door further to search the car, Lee tried to close it and said she didn’t consent to a search of her vehicle, and that the door should remain closed to keep the baby warm. That’s when Holloway proceeded to arrest Lee, pinning her to her car in the process.
“He pushed me between the driver’s door and the back door, took my arm, my right arm, twisted it up behind my back, and lifted me off of my feet and slammed me on my car,” Lee said in an interview for this story, noting that her wrists and arms were injured during this incident.
She was held in Holloway’s patrol car for several minutes, then released and given a Notice to Appear for resisting a peace officer. She went to the hospital the next day for her injuries.
About a week later, she filed a complaint against Holloway, arguing that he improperly detained her for no valid reason and used excessive force. In audio obtained by Invisible Institute and IPM News, Lieutenant Greg Manzana told her upon filing the complaint that he would “begin the Formal Complaint process,” meaning that the investigation would eventually be reviewed by Lee’s fellow Champaign residents on the CRS.
The police department completed the investigation more than a year later — but it was never seen by the CRS. Somewhere along the process, her case was re-classified by Champaign Police from a “Formal Complaint” to an “External Allegation.”
The main difference between Formal Complaints and External Allegations is that the latter are often minor or administrative issues, or the complaint is ruled to have no merit, said Janel Gomez, the community relations manager and compliance officer of the city’s Equity and Engagement Department and staff liaison between city hall and the CRS. According to Champaign Police policy, a complaint may be classified as an External Allegation if the complainant fails to cooperate with the complaint process or the complaint is filed more than 60 days after the incident.
But that reasoning doesn’t explain why Lee’s complaint was classified as an External Allegation: She filed the complaint within 60 days, and she cooperated with the investigation. Her allegations against Officer Holloway were not sustained by Champaign Police. She thinks it should’ve been reviewed by the CRS.
“I’m sure that they have established procedures to make sure that citizen complaints are thoroughly reviewed, and I think that they would have disagreed with the findings of the detective,” Lee said. No records released by the city or Champaign Police explain why her complaint was reclassified as an External Allegation.
Fairley, the law professor who studies civilian oversight of police across the U.S., said this type of structure is abnormal. She explained that most civilian review boards are subject-matter-based, meaning they review cases that fall under central themes, such as excessive use of force and verbal abuse.
“The jurisdiction should not be based, in any way, on having the department have control over what kinds of cases the agency is permitted to investigate,” Fairley said. “It sounds like the system is allowing the department to screen cases, and then only have certain ones go to this entity for review. That’s definitely not a best practice in civilian oversight.”
She said a best practice looks like the procedure in Chicago, where the civilian oversight body takes in all the complaints, keeps the ones that fall under its jurisdiction, and passes the rest to the department for investigation.
“By allowing the police department to choose the investigations that they’re going to then pass on to the civilian oversight entity, that takes away from the oversight agency’s independence,” she said. “Independence is really important.”
Without independence, “it’s really hard for an oversight entity to have the impact that it needs to have to improve policing.”
In recent years, similar concerns have been raised about the Civilian Police Review Board in Urbana, which also has a structure that makes it ineffective, according to Fairley. Complaints about Urbana police and staff are first investigated by the department itself. Once the investigation is complete, the chief of police decides on next steps, including whether to order additional training or discipline. If the complainant decides to appeal that decision, only then does the board start a review. Previous reporting by Invisible Institute and IPM News showed the system to be rarely used, and as in Champaign, previous members of its leadership have called for reforms.
In response to questions sent via email, Gomez, the city’s liaison to the CRS, said complaints and allegations are handled internally by Champaign Police. Since External Allegations are those that she and the Champaign Police have deemed less pressing, they’re not reviewed by the CRS because members need to spend their time on “valid and serious complaints.” These distinctions do not appear to be present in the ordinance that created the CRS.
Gomez said she’s one of the people who screens civilian complaints when they come in, partly to make sure they’re classified by investigators correctly. She said she couldn’t comment on why Lee’s complaint was classified as an External Allegation because she’s “unable to answer questions about specific cases that were not reviewed by the CRS.”
Lee said she was never notified of the outcome of her case, even after contacting the police department for months after the complaint was filed. It led her to conclude that “the police protect their own” and she ultimately wasn’t surprised about the findings.
“I didn’t quite understand how detectives that work side by side with these street officers or patrol officers are allowed to do the investigation of the citizen’s complaint,” Lee said. “If anything, that should be sent to a different department or anybody outside the department that’s hired to do this specifically.” Her case’s investigator, Gregory Manzana, has since been appointed as current Chief Timothy Tyler’s deputy chief of operations, overseeing patrol officers as well as the CIT, SWAT, field training and other specialized units.
She’s decided to let go of her feelings about what happened, but said she has lost trust in Champaign Police.
“I do try to stay clear of Champaign Police,” Lee said. “You know, you drive a little straighter if they [are] behind you, or a little slower, just because I know that at any time they could mishandle me. I could be right back in handcuffs, when I was just trying to help somebody.”
Efforts to expand the scope and impact of the CRS have been unsuccessful
Emily Rodriguez was appointed to the CRS alongside Alexandra Harmon-Threatt in 2017, and was named the board’s first chair.
“I felt like our goal was to recover from the murder of Kiwane Carrington and to establish some kind of process that my neighbors could be proud of,” she said, “…I think the goal was to make people feel like they had a voice among police policies.”
After going through months of training and getting used to the board’s responsibilities, Rodriguez said she began pushing for ways the board could improve and better serve the community. But she said she often faced pushback from the city of Champaign whenever she attempted to expand the CRS’ roles and responsibilities.
Once, in 2019, she tried to organize a public informational session about drug use and Champaign Police’s experiences with the issue in the community. She worked with the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District to try to bring in Joe Trotter, the district’s harm reduction program coordinator, to discuss the issue. But she said the city shut the plan down, and Trotter was made unavailable to her.
In a statement, Trotter said his invitation to speak with the CRS was later changed to a speaking arrangement with the Champaign County Community Coalition instead, but that he doesn’t know who changed the invitation or why he was no longer working with the CRS.
Rodriguez said most of the improvements she recommended “fell on deaf ears,” which was frustrating.
“It was just very clear that they did not want our body to be holding conversations like that,” she said.
Under her leadership, the CRS released annual recommendations on a wide variety of policies, including denied recommendations to eliminate time restrictions on filing complaints. When her term as chair ended in 2020, she hoped future CRS members would continue her momentum to make improvements to the subcommittee and overall community.
But the CRS struggled in recent years to even meet consistently, let alone put out policy recommendations or make changes to its structure. According to Janel Gomez, the city’s liaison to the CRS, there were regular vacancies on the five-member subcommittee for months at a time, making it difficult to meet quorum and hold meetings. The board is now trying to catch up with the resulting backlog of cases: The first complaint filed in 2023, for example, wasn’t reviewed by the CRS until mid-2024.
The city of Champaign has not been transparent about why the subcommittee was created with little enforceable power or influence on police department practices.
Former City Manager Dorothy Ann David, who was involved in the process of creating the subcommittee, refused to speak on this during an interview with IPM News in December. The office of current City Manager Joan Walls, who worked under David from 2013 to 2024 and was previously a public information officer for the Champaign Police, also declined to answer specific questions about why the CRS was structured the way it is, or to address the concerns of former CRS members.
“As an advisory board, the Subcommittee can make recommendations concerning police practices and policies to the Human Relations Commission, but it must work within the parameters specified by City Ordinance,” her office said in a statement.
But those parameters were “manipulated” by the city manager’s office to limit the board’s power during the working group sessions that led to the ordinance, according to Laura Hall, a former assistant city attorney.
“There was a lot of pressure from the community to form something like this because something had to be done. Someone had to be held accountable,” Hall said. “But then, once that decision was made, everything was done to contain it.”
Concerns about the CRS’ recent lack of dissent with Champaign Police
Documents also show the CRS, which previously dissented from Champaign Police findings once every year or two, hasn’t disagreed with the findings of a complaint investigation in more than three years. Over the course of its existence since 2017, it has only ever lodged dissent as a body five times out of 45 reviewed cases. All of those dissents are prior to 2023. (Nor has it ever used subpoena power granted to it in its ordinance.)
“I think the lack of disagreement likely signals a lack of interest from the board,” said Rodriguez.
In one representative case from mid-2023, a woman filed a complaint against several Champaign Police officers after an incident that occurred during a traffic stop. According to the complaint investigation, she had changed lanes but failed to activate her turn signal, prompting an officer to activate his lights and sirens to signal her to stop.
She did not immediately stop or pull over for the officers, but she also did not speed away and continued to obey traffic laws, according to the Champaign Police investigation. When she stopped at a red light about three miles down the road, the officer parked his vehicle in front of hers to prevent her from fleeing. Officer Nicholas Krippel, whose actions were questioned in a 2021 case by Harmon-Threatt, then arrived on the scene and deflated one of her car’s tires with a knife. The investigation states that she resisted arrest when officers tried to detain her, so they took her to the ground and used “pressure point compliance” on her arms to secure her hands behind her back.
She later filed a complaint against the officers, alleging that they used excessive force in arresting her, damaged her property during the stop and that one of the other officers was unprofessional toward her.
The members of the CRS at the time, appointed by the mayor between 2022 and 2023, agreed with the Champaign Police’s findings that each of the allegations by the complainant should be not sustained.
The documents regarding this case were shared with Rodriguez, who is now a Champaign County Board member. After reviewing the complaint investigation, she said if she were still leading the CRS, she would not have agreed with the investigation, noting that this was one of the most concerning cases she had ever reviewed.
“The big risk and threat to the community was not this complainant. It was the officer,” said Rodriguez, referring to Krippel, who is on the executive board for the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council. “It was a huge escalation, and I don’t think that they had any regard for this person’s existence or experience afterward.”
The Illinois FOP Labor Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Rodriguez said the tire-deflating was a misuse of discretion.
“Discretion is something that’s expected of officers,” she said. “Just because you have a gun doesn’t mean you shoot it. Just because you have something to puncture doesn’t mean that you deflate tires.”
In an interview for this story, Pia Hunter, the current chair of the CRS, was asked to respond to criticisms raised by Rodriguez. Hunter said she felt Rodriguez made unfair assumptions about the CRS. She noted that a lack of disagreement by the CRS with Champaign Police in recent years could mean that the police department is doing a better job at investigating complaints.
“Until you’ve actually had an opportunity to see the exact cases in the exact circumstances, it’s not particularly reasonable to make assumptions about other people’s dedications,” said Hunter. “I think that that’s the sort of commentary that may discourage people from volunteering and coming forward to do this type of work.”
There’s no way to know whether a lack of disagreement with police investigations signals a failure to hold police accountable, said Fairley, the law professor and former civilian oversight agency leader.
“That, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily problematic, right? It could be that the police are doing a great job,” Fairley said. “People ask me all the time, ‘What should that number be?’ There is no set number. There is no, ‘If they’re not sustaining 20% of the complaints, then they’re doing a bad job.’”
Hunter said she stands by her decision to agree with the police department’s findings in the tire-slashing case, saying, “police need to understand how to act with the community, and the community needs to understand how to interact with the police.”
The cases the CRS observes can be very emotional, she said. But Hunter, who is a U of I law professor, said she tries to bring in her legal background and come down on the side of the law.
“I’m not going to relitigate and justify any decisions that the committee made on that or any other incident, but I think it is unfortunate that there’s not a better understanding amongst all of us about how these things should go,” she said.
“I’d be happy to have anybody rejoin the committee and observe those things and have that discussion in chambers, and review the content, review the conversation, review what was said, because it is easy to look at these incidents from an emotional perspective and not a legal one.”
Other city officials also defend the structure and practices of the CRS today. Gomez, the city equity official who serves as its liaison to the board, said while she sees how the board may lack some weight in its influence, its recommendations and case reviews are still significant to the complaint investigation process. She added that the city manager acts as the police chief’s boss, so if the chief consistently disregards CRS decisions, the city manager can act as an accountability mechanism.
Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, the former CRS chair, said she ultimately felt the board’s structure meant that it was never going to be impactful.
“It was not going to be doing the things that we needed to be doing, which is improving overall health and functionality of our communities, to make them safer, to make people have fewer interactions with police, and have reduced the need for police,” she said.
“The problems just ran deeper than what CRS was ever going to be able to address. I don’t think that this is really getting at the root of whatever challenges we have in policing.”
Invisible Institute journalist and editor Sam Stecklow contributed reporting.