The Lawrence Community Police Review Board on Thursday advanced a charter to create a new Community-Police Oversight Task Force. The CPRB has long wanted greater authority than the scope that city law currently allows — a scope so narrow that since the board was created in 2018, it has not reviewed a single complaint. The current ordinance only allows CPRB members to review appeals of the police department’s decisions in complaints about bias-based policing. Starting in 2020, at the direction of the Lawrence City Commission, board members began drafting an ordinance that expanded its duties. But an outside consultant’s review of the Lawrence Police Department, completed about a year ago, suggested that the CPRB and police department form a task force to determine the best way to move forward.
Source: The Lawrence Times
