Should a community leader who has advocated for reallocating tax money away from law enforcement and said officers can’t be trusted serve on a police oversight panel?
That’s the question the Boulder City Council will consider Thursday when it decides whether to remove Lisa Sweeney-Miran from the city’s Police Oversight Panel.
The vote follows a $20,000 investigation into complaints filed by Boulder residents that the group that selected Sweeney-Miran failed to properly consider her advocacy for police reform and involvement in a lawsuit against the city for forcibly removing tents from people experiencing homelessness.
The City Council will weigh whether having opinions on police reform counts as bias and should disqualify someone from participating on a panel tasked with improving the Boulder Police Department. The selection committee and the council previously reaffirmed the decision to impanel Sweeney-Miran, but an outside investigator last month recommended she resign.
Sweeney-Miran refused and insists she hasn’t done anything wrong.
“My heartfelt concern over past instances of police violence, and that I am open to alternatives to police responses when force is not needed, does not make me biased — it makes me the sort of thoughtful person who is intended to be on Boulder’s Police Oversight Panel,” she said on Twitter.
The 11-person Boulder Police Oversight Panel reviews and makes recommendations on police discipline investigations, recommends policy and training changes and suggests topics for the city’s independent police monitor to investigate. The City Council created the panel and the independent monitor position in 2020 after a Black student was detained at gunpoint while picking up trash in front of his own home.
Sweeney-Miran and other people added to the panel in January were selected by two members of the existing panel and representatives from two local nonprofits: the NAACP of Boulder County and El Centro Amistad. City ordinance requires that panelists demonstrate “an absence of any real or perceived bias, prejudice or conflict of interest.”
“If we don’t follow the law, what good is it?”
Complaints filed against the oversight panel by Boulder residents John Neslage and Emily Reynolds allege Sweeney-Miran’s social media posts show she is biased against police and her participation in the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado’s lawsuit against the city over its treatment of people who are homeless represents a conflict of interest.
Sweeney-Miran — executive director of Mother House homeless shelter and vice president of the Boulder Valley School District’s Board of Education — removed herself from the lawsuit five days after being appointed to the panel.
In an interview Wednesday, Neslage said the lawsuit and Sweeney-Miran’s social media posts constitute a clear record of her bias and conflicts of interest. He’s not opposed to civilian oversight and said he has nothing personally against Sweeney-Miran, but said the selection committee should have appointed someone else instead of her.
“The ordinance is the ordinance and if we don’t follow the law, what good is it?” Neslage said.
Sweeney-Miran’s social media posts featured in Neslage’s complaint include references to a book about abolishing police and say police cannot be trusted to monitor themselves.
“Of course we cannot trust police to monitor themselves nor to report honestly on their behaviors and crimes — we cannot trust them to conduct a traffic stop without committing murder,” Sweeney-Miran said on Twitter in 2022.
“Instead of housing we get cops. Instead of mental health services we get cops. Instead of social service networks we get cops. I’m so tired of nonprofits and neighbors and GoFundMe doing the work our governments should be doing while my taxes pay for sirens and fear and brutality,” she said in another 2022 post on Twitter.
Sweeney-Miran said in an interview Wednesday that she has had both positive and negative experiences with police. Police are necessary to respond to some types of incidents, she said, but are often asked to intervene in situations where they are not the most appropriate response because they are not trained social workers or homeless resource navigators. She supports creating alternative responses for some types of 911 calls.
“I stand by everything I said and everything I shared,” she said.
Neslage said he couldn’t specifically identify exactly what in Sweeney-Miran’s social media posts shows bias against police but, when taken together, they demonstrate her predisposition.
“I take it holistically, as a reasonable person approach,” he said.
In his complaint, Neslage compared Sweeney-Miran’s criticism of policing to racism and misogyny.
“Imagine a self-proclaimed racist adjudicating claims against a historically oppressed minority defendant, or a misogynist sitting in judgment of a woman’s allegation of harassment,” Neslage’s complaint states. “Wouldn’t there be at least a perception of bias in both instances?”
Precedent of removing civilians from police oversight
The discussion around bias and civilian oversight is common in many cities, said Cameron McEllhiney, executive director of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. People who serve in civilian oversight positions always have their own opinions about policing, but the processes created by oversight entities should be a fair and neutral process.
“It’s incredibly important that once you’re there, that you’re there for a process,” she said. “You have to put aside what side you may have come from and trust in the process.”
Efforts to remove civilians involved in police oversight should be handled with care, McEllhiney said.
“It becomes something where precedent is set,” she said. “You want to make sure that this is really the right decision and that someone else’s biases aren’t driving the process to remove someone, which is often the case.”
The two complaints against the Police Oversight Panel over Sweeney-Miran’s selection prompted the city to hire an outside attorney to review the situation. That attorney — Clay Douglas — recommended Sweeney-Miran resign or, if she refused, for the City Council to remove her because of her involvement in the ACLU lawsuit and her social media posts.
“Available evidence of Lisa Sweeney-Miran’s ‘real or perceived bias or prejudice’ could undermine public trust in and effectiveness of the Police Oversight Panel,” Douglas wrote in his report.
Sweeney-Miran and her attorney, Dan Williams, have argued in multiple letters to city attorneys that the Boulder City Council does not have the legal authority to remove her from the panel and that she has not violated the city’s code of conduct.
She has participated in the panel’s work, including reviewing discipline cases, since being appointed to the panel.
Williams said the opposition to Sweeney-Miran’s appointment is part of a broader social backlash following the 2020 protests against police brutality.
“There’s a sense among some that we’ve gone too far in holding police accountable for misconduct,” he said. “Our memories seem so short.”
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