Undersight Board: PCOB still struggling to establish itself

It's been six years since the City decided to establish a new civilian oversight board to keep an eye on the police...and the police are still pushing back.

Here we are in 2024 and the effort to create a functioning Police Civilian Oversight Board is still a work in progress. The RTD reports that information sharing between the Charlottesville Police Department and the PCOB ceased last October when new Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis paused that process after determining that the "city didn’t have the adequate information-sharing agreement required by the ordinance." The move effectively thwarted the PCOB's effort to investigate a complaint about a police traffic stop in July and others.

Kochis, city manager Sam Sanders, and PCOB director Inez Gonzalez are working on an update to the information-sharing agreement. Still, at this point, after three attempts in as many decades to establish some kind of police civilian review board, it is apparent that such efforts are often slowly suffocated in the process of their establishment by police chiefs, PBAs, and lawmakers content to allow police to police themselves. Review boards in …