ENCANTO
The group of about 15 young people was gathered in a loose semi-circle on chairs and sofas inside the clubhouse-style room. Most were teen boys and young men, all of them Black.
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Laila Aziz, the director of operations at the nonprofit community organization Pillars of the Community, was running through a series of questions. Who had been stopped by police in the past three months? Six months? One year? More hands went in the air with each subsequent question.
“Who here has never been stopped by police?” Aziz asked.
Not a single hand was raised.
For Aziz and other leaders from Pillars of the Community, that reality is unacceptable. Based on their own experiences, the experiences of their community and numerous over the years, they argue that San Diego police officers disproportionately stop and search Black people, especially in heavily minority neighborhoods in southeastern San Diego. And they argue that police use excessive force far more than necessary.
“People are still getting beaten up, they’re still getting stopped because of race,” Aziz said. “So we’re seeing those issues, and we’re looking at them and we’re saying, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
That question led Aziz and Pillars of the Community to create a new cellphone app called CopStop SD. The simple-to-use app is designed for San Diegans to report alleged misconduct by police officers so that Pillars of the Community can help those individuals file misconduct complaints.
CopStop SD is not designed to replace the formal complaint process, but rather enhance it. When an individual makes a report through the app, Aziz and others from Pillars of the Community contact that person and help evaluate whether it’s a valid issue and what policies an officer might have violated. Pillars of the Community then helps coach and guide the person on how to make a formal complaint through the San Diego Police Department, the city’s Commission on Police Practices or other proper channels.
The San Diego Police Department did not answer specific questions about the app or the role that Pillars of the Community is seeking to play in the complaint-filing process.
“Every complaint received by the Department is taken seriously and will be carefully evaluated,” the department said in a statement. “The Department recognizes the important role complaint investigations play in accountability and maintaining public trust, and approaches that process with the seriousness it deserves.”
A spokesperson for the Commission on Police Practices, which still lacks many of the independent oversight and investigative powers that San Diego voters approved in 2020, said the commission was aware of CopStop SD.
“While we aren’t deeply familiar with the app … any tool that creates a viable opportunity for community members to express concerns, document an interaction, or approach a solution to repair an injustice done by a law enforcement officer contributes to the process,” CPP spokesperson Aaron Burgess Jr. said in a statement. “As a body we are for any strategy to acquire testimony, insights, or case studies that will help us in our evaluation of police practices.”
Aziz and others at Pillars of the Community are not willing to leave accountability solely in the hands of the police department, or even the CPP. It’s another reason they hope CopStop SD gains traction. They hope that as more reports come through the app, they’ll be able to see patterns of specific policies that are being violated or specific officers who may be causing problems in the community.
“A lot of times people say (filing a complaint) won’t do anything, but what it does is it keeps a track record of these bad police officers,” Mitchelle Woodson, the legal director at Pillars of the Community, said recently.
Aziz said Pillars of the Community is not seeking a monopoly on complaint filing. Instead, “we’re doing a lot of training to community members separately to train them on how to do complaints,” Aziz said. The goal is for friends and neighbors to be able to teach others, Aziz said.
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To that end, Pillars of the Community is holding weekly complaint clinics at its Assata Freedom and Liberation Center in Encanto, where community members can come in and learn how to properly file a complaint. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Woodson led both a complaint clinic and a know-your-rights training for those young people who told Aziz they’d all been stopped by police.
At one point during the session, Woodson asked members of the group to use just one word to describe how they feel around police officers.
“Nervous,” said one participant.
“Unsafe,” another said.
“Threatened,” a third added.
Woodson told the group they could begin to feel empowered by knowing their constitutional rights during a police stop. But she warned that even knowing and invoking those rights could not guarantee they wouldn’t be violated. In those instances, she said, filing a complaint is necessary.
“A lot of times we don’t file complaints because maybe we’re intimidated, we don’t know how, we don’t think it will do anything,” Woodson told the group. “But a lot of it is also internalized oppression. We normalize these kinds of police interactions … because we think a good police interaction is one in which we don’t get a ticket, we don’t get arrested, or we don’t die. But that is not a measure of a good police interaction, which is why it’s important for us to file these complaints.”
The CopStop SD app is simple to use, requiring no email registration or password. A user needs only to download it, provide some basic contact information and then a few simple facts about the alleged misconduct.
Aziz said Pillars of the Community will contact individuals who make a report within 48 hours, then begin working with them to evaluate whether it appears officers violated a policy.
“We make sure that we’re not putting anything in that’s not true … because if we put in something that’s not true, it could harm someone else later on who has that situation and it is true,” Aziz said. “We try to make sure that our complaints are not frivolous.”
CopStop SD is also part of a broader push by Pillars of the Community for police oversight and accountability. In June, the organization and social justice activist Tasha Williamson sued the city and Police Chief Scott Wahl, alleging the police department has been preventing the CPP “from receiving, registering, reviewing, and evaluating” a large percentage of complaints.
In its response to the lawsuit in court, the city asserted that it forwards “all complaints against SDPD officers to CPP. All complaints are uploaded to a Google drive shared with the CPP shortly after being received.”
Burgess, the CPP spokesperson, confirmed that SDPD forwards all citizen complaints to the CPP “and therefore (the commission) has visibility into complaints at the front end of the process. However, the CPP does not receive an investigative case for every citizen complaint.”
San Diego police have said that’s because only certain categories of complaints are fully investigated and required to be turned over to CPP. For example, if a complaint doesn’t identify an officer or allege that a policy was violated, it typically doesn’t reach the category requiring a fuller investigation.
Pillars of the Community’s lawsuit over that issue remains pending in San Diego Superior Court.
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