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 2009, the fatal shooting of a teenager by a Champaign Police officer sparked calls for change in the years that followed. One of those calls was for a civilian review board to provide broad oversight over the Champaign Police Department.
Almost a decade later, the Citizen Review Subcommittee was formed — an entity with significantly less power than what activists wanted. Instead of being provided broad oversight authority, the CRS was tasked by officials to review a small handful of the department’s misconduct investigations and weigh in on whether they agreed with its findings.
Experts and former members interviewed by Invisible Institute and IPM News point to issues with the CRS’ structure, ranging from an inability to determine which cases it reviews to a lack of any requirement that police officials even respond to recommendations, let alone implement them.
Each of these issues can be traced to obstacles created by officials during the years-long push for civilian oversight of police in Champaign.
Outrage over Kiwane Carrington’s killing leads to demands for broad oversight
On Oct. 9, 2009, Kiwane Carrington, a Black 15-year-old, was trying to get into his aunt’s house in Champaign, where he was living at the time. A neighbor, who suspected he was trying to break in, called the police. Carrington and the friend he was with were both unarmed.
RT Finney, the department’s chief, arrived first, followed by Officer Daniel Norbits, his gun drawn. After a brief confrontation with the boys, Norbits’ gun fired, hitting Carrington, an Illinois State Police investigation determined. A Champaign County Coroner’s jury ruled that Norbits’ gun fired accidentally, and he was disciplined for mishandling his weapon. The city settled with his family for $470,000; in a separate civil lawsuit dropped shortly after it was filed, Carrington’s friend alleged that Finney had been the one that killed Carrington, not Norbits.
After Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz declined to prosecute the officers involved, many people in the community were outraged.
In the months that followed, local activists pressed city leaders for reforms to address police brutality against Black people. They advocated for Finney’s resignation, residency requirements for officers, more Black representation in the police force and the formation of a civilian review board, according to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign African American Studies and history professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, who wrote a journal article on the local racial justice movement after Carrington’s death. Two years prior to Carrington’s killing, the city council had considered and rejected the idea of a civilian review board.
In early 2010, then City Manager Steve Carter announced several initiatives aimed at addressing the activists’ demands, including one to review the current police complaint processes, without necessarily introducing larger reforms. But Cha-Jua notes Carter’s initiatives were later “derailed” after a video surfaced of Champaign officers using excessive force on Brandon Ward, a Black 20-year-old, again prompting calls for a civilian review board with broad powers.
Activists wanted the board to look over police complaints and use of force cases and be involved in their subsequent investigations, with the ability to use subpoenas; to act as a tool to ensure the police department didn’t have racial bias; and to replace the department’s power to hire, fire and discipline officers, Cha-Jua wrote.
“What we wanted was to actually be able to determine if an officer was penalized for their behavior up through firing,” he said in an interview, “because if you can’t do that right, then civilian review boards have no purpose.”
In late 2011, under pressure, Finney resigned, and a few months later, Anthony Cobb, a Black former assistant chief of police in Urbana, was announced as Champaign’s new police chief. Cobb publicly endorsed a civilian review board during his candidacy for the position, according to Cha-Jua.
The appointment of Cobb, who had worked on the creation of Urbana’s civilian review board years earlier in his role as a representative of the Urbana Fraternal Order of Police, was only the next step in the years-long push by activists. It wouldn’t be until the actions of another officer prompted further outrage that the city would make good on Cobb’s endorsement.
Unabated excessive force by Matt Rush eventually forces the city’s hand
In October 2011 — two months after Finney announced his planned resignation, and a month before the news about Ward’s beating would push city leadership to appoint Cobb — Champaign Officer Matt Rush was reportedly involved in the beating of 18-year-old Calvin Miller, the son of a notable local Black activist, during a traffic stop. It would be the first in a series of excessive force incidents perpetrated by Rush on mostly Black residents of Champaign.
After the second incident — in which Rush allegedly beat Myron Scruggs, a Black dialysis technician who was staying in a hotel where a fire had broken out in March 2012 — local activists approached then Mayor Don Gerard and Deputy Mayor Tom Bruno about the results of the investigation, which cleared Rush despite having broken bones around Scruggs’ eye socket. There, they continued to push for a civilian oversight board, court documents obtained by CU-CitizenAccess show.
However, it would still be another two years before the city would take any action on Rush, who would be accused of excessive force several more times, including a case in which he allegedly caused a woman to lose her unborn child, and was reinstated twice by arbitrators before eventually signing a $50,000 separation agreement with the city in 2017. In total, $620,000 was paid to victims of his excessive force.
After years of inertia, Rush’s excessive force cases and failed disciplinary proceedings jolted the city back into the idea of pursuing a civilian police review board. In early 2016, the Champaign City Council held a study session to discuss the police complaint process and the possibility of a review board. The council directed Cobb to form a working group to research that possibility, including eight community members and six city employees, police officers, city staff, local activists and others heavily involved in the community.
‘Everything was done to contain it’: City insider claims officials pushed for reduced oversight
The working group held a total of ten meetings over six months, going over the current complaint investigation and use of force review processes, and various civilian review board structures.
In the working group minutes from a meeting on Aug. 18, 2016, members discussed how much power to give the civilian review board, with some city representatives voicing concerns about due process for officers and labor protections under the city’s Fraternal Order of Police contract.
Then City Manager Dorothy Ann David, who replaced former City Manager Steve Carter in 2012, is noted saying, “So as we grapple with these issues of transparency and trust and perception, anything we do here we still have to fit into the traditional disciplinary process and the due process rights that the employees are entitled to by law, which is going to make it challenging for us.”
In another working group meeting on Dec. 5, 2016, Officer Brian Greear raised concerns about how officers feel they don’t have the support of the community, “even if they follow policy, state law and their own moral compass and things go wrong.” The meeting minutes notes that Greear wants the civilian review board to “bring the officers and the community together” and not be “something that would make officers further disengage from the community.”
Greear expressed concerns on behalf of officers who worry that more community engagement comes with greater risk to themselves.
“Officers have a real fear that they might be the next officer on CNN,” Greear said, according to the meeting minutes. “There’s already a lot of oversight on Officers and to add more oversight might make officers further disengage from the community.”
Laura Hall, who attended the working group meetings in her capacity as an assistant city attorney, said the final form of the subcommittee is less a result of ideas from community members, and more an outcome predetermined by David.
Hall was there to provide legal insight into the review board options. In an interview with Invisible Institute and IPM News, she said some senior city staff, including David and members of the Champaign Police, “manipulated” the group into choosing a less powerful form of civilian review by using their influence to push the group’s members to prefer some options over others.
“There’s many options on the forms of these committees, boards, whatever you want to call them, but the city manager wanted a specific, neutered type of board,” said Hall, who has since retired from Champaign city government.
The working group members, she said, “were boxed into what they felt were the better of … three options, but they were really guided to that decision. That’s what the city manager wanted, and that’s how it was guided.”
She said a major reason why the city agreed to even consider a civilian review board was to ease the pressure they were facing from local activists pushing for reforms, and that officials had no intention to create a board that could make a substantial impact.
“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.”
The CRS ‘has none of the power that we were advocating for’
The working group ultimately recommended that the Champaign Police open applications to civilians to join its internal use of force review board, and that the city create a new board to review civilian-initiated complaints.
In July 2017, the City Council, following the working group recommendations, authorized the creation of the Citizen Review Subcommittee, organized under the city’s Human Relations Commission.
The final proposal from the working group was a very similar ordinance to what eventually passed, with restrictions built in around what findings the CRS can come to, and no requirement for a response from the police department. As Invisible Institute and IPM News report this week, some former members and outside experts feel these significantly hamper the board’s work.
David, the former city manager, refused to answer questions on the CRS and its creation 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.
“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,” Walls’ office said in a statement.
Cha-Jua said in a recent interview that he’s disappointed with how the CRS turned out. The police department should not be able to investigate its own employees, he said, and complaint investigations should be conducted by an independent body, which is what activists argued when they called for a civilian review board.
He also criticized the city’s intentions in creating the CRS.
“They take the name and the kinds of things we’ve argued for, and they say that they’re going to implement it, they slow walk it, and then when they do, it has none of the power that we were advocating for,” Cha-Jua said.
“If the city administration was interested in making profound, transformative change, they wouldn’t need activists. They could just do it. It was clear to me early on that it was just something to provide cover for the city administration, and that there was no serious effort to make it viable.”
Invisible Institute journalist and editor Sam Stecklow contributed reporting.