Detroit’s police oversight board is facing an extraordinary backlog of citizen misconduct complaints despite recent changes to improve efficiencies. 

The citizen complaint backlog has been an ongoing point of contention for the Board of Police Commissioners. The board’s chief investigator cites “signs of progress” over the past year, including a doubled workforce and multiple technology and process improvements. Even so, the backlog has ballooned to 2,200 complaints, and some board members say the efforts to close cases faster have only provided “small glimmers of hope.”

BOPC has supervisory control and oversight over the Detroit Police Department under the City Charter, and one of its core functions is investigating noncriminal misconduct complaints against sworn and professional employees of the police department. The board staffs and oversees the Office of the Chief Investigator (OCI) which is responsible for conducting these investigations. 

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Over the past year, the complaint backlog has grown by about 1,000, resulting in a backlog of about 2,200 cases overall. Chief Investigator Rev. Jerome Warfield recently told the board that although the office is “somewhat in transition,” it is closing more cases than it’s receiving.

“We’re in a very good position of turning that corner and making sure we’re driving those backlog cases down,” Warfield told the BOPC’s Citizen Complaints Committee last month.

Months after he was hired as chief investigator, Warfield rolled out an ambitious seven-point plan in February 2024 to address the backlog; there were 1,671 complaints in OCI’s inventory. Of those, 1,334 were backlogged. At that time, BOPC Chair Darryl Woods said the backlog was in a “state of emergency.” 

Complaints are considered backlogged if they aren’t closed within 90 days of submission. 

Of the 2,711 citizen complaints in OCI’s inventory today, 83% (2,253) were submitted 90 or more days ago, and 17% (458) of those complaints were submitted within the last 90 days. Most of the backlogged cases are from 2023 and 2024.

According to BOPC’s Police Transparency Dashboard, 75% (1,460) of the complaints submitted last year and nearly half (822) of the 1,731 complaints submitted in 2023, are still open. The OCI has received 133 complaints so far this year and only two have been closed. 

In an interview with BridgeDetroit, Woods refrained from estimating when the backlog could be eliminated but said he anticipates the board will soon have a better idea. 

“We’re in discussions on that and we will have something to report on that very soon because we are taking it very serious,” Woods said. 

The seven-point “Timeliness Initiative Project” was created by Warfield and OCI staff in early 2024 to address the backlog and conduct timely investigations. The initiative included sending complainants status updates on their cases, hiring more investigators, a more efficient, automated report system for investigators, a new intake process and case management software, and creating a mediation resolution process. 

Warfield said at the time that the problem was due, at least in part, to high staff turnover as 22 of the 29 OCI employees resigned or retired between 2020 and 2024. With each resignation, Warfield said, about 50 cases were left behind and had to be reassigned, which further added to investigators’ caseloads. 

OCI has 21 investigators in rotation today, Warfield said during a Citizen Complaints Committee meeting on April 8. Most of the steps in the backlog elimination plan have been implemented, or are nearing completion, he said.

Warfield celebrated OCI’s progress and commissioners expressed disappointment over the continued backlog during the April committee meeting. 

“People are going to expect, since it’s been a while, that it (the backlog) would be less than 2,200,” Citizen Complaints Committee Chairperson QuanTez Pressley said during the April meeting. “That’s going to be hard for my colleagues to hear because, again, the hope is that being fully staffed, having all of these advancements and every report, that the backlog would be at a much lower rate than it seems to be.” 

In the first quarter of 2025, 614 cases were closed, an average of over 200 cases being closed per month, which Warfield said was the highest since the federal consent decree, and these were “signs of progress” because investigators are closing cases faster than they’re receiving them. However, Pressley said these were “small glimmers of hope.” 

Most of the changes OCI is pursuing are similar to measures taken by the board in prior years, such as those the city’s Office of Inspector General later found that the board’s prior secretary and acting chief investigator implemented a pilot program to close complaints administratively without proper investigation. 

“Part of the reason we ended up in this situation with as many backlogged cases is that there was an attempt to create procedures that didn’t bog down investigators with cases that weren’t going anywhere but how it was done ended up backfiring where we ended up having to reinvestigate those cases,” Pressley said during the April meeting, referring to the OIG’s investigation. 

Thirty boxes containing over 1,400 complaint files were removed in February 2023 from OCI’s office by the Office of Inspector General pending its investigation into the closure of complaints. The files were returned a year later. Approximately 700 of those complaints needed to be reinvestigated and properly closed, according to an internal memo from Warfield to the police oversight board. 

Warfield presented details about the OCI’s proposed amendments to its Standard Operating Procedures manual during the April committee meeting. The changes would create a permanent process to eliminate future backlogs. If 50 or more backlogged cases arose in the future, the amendments would provide a formal process to address the delays at the direction of the chief investigator. 

“This came out of the meeting that we had with the mayor. How can we look at this in a more proactive and aggressive way to make sure that we get through some of these cases a lot quicker?” Warfield said.

The backlog elimination process allows for faster resolution for four types of complaints — unresponsive complainants, egregious cases submitted a year ago or longer, cases with additional findings, and when the officer is no longer employed by the Detroit Police Department. 

“Egregious” complaints, Warfield said, would be defined as “something that would clearly embarrass the department if shown publicly.” 

OCI conducts a preliminary investigation for all cases regardless of the circumstances, however, the proposed process would allow the chief investigator or a supervising investigator to close a case administratively if it falls under any of the four categories. 

If a complainant isn’t responsive, or refuses to participate in the investigation, the manual would require a preliminary investigation and, depending on whether the conduct is substantiated based on information in the initial complaint, the case would be closed administratively. 

DPD’s union contracts set a limit on the timeframe officers can be disciplined to one year after an alleged incident, even if a citizen alleges misconduct, Cmdr. Michael Parrish explained to the committee in March. While there are exceptions for extreme cases of misconduct and officers with a history of misconduct, disciplinary action is typically limited to informal counseling when the OCI refers cases beyond one year of the incident. 

Cases that involve a former DPD employee are closed administratively. These cases, Warfield said, “can be done at the front desk.” 

Woods and Pressley emphasized the importance of investigating complaints that weren’t closed and referred for disciplinary action in a timely manner, despite not being able to hold current and former officers accountable. 

The board is considering additional changes to its policies and procedures to expedite the process for resolving complaints without wasting resources, to address frivolous complaints and those that don’t fall under the BOPC’s purview, Woods told BridgeDetroit. 

Specifically, Woods said the board should explore its options for handling complaints from “frequent fliers” that exhibit signs of “abuses of the process,” such as when someone repeatedly files the same complaint. He noted similar commissions, such as the attorney grievance commission, that hold people accountable when they abuse the process.  

Additionally, Woods told BridgeDetroit the board is looking at ways to ensure resources aren’t wasted on investigations into allegations that don’t fall under the board’s jurisdiction, such as those related to the fire department and city services. 

What’s next?

The BOPC worked with the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT) to upload approximately 16,000 cases dating back to 2014 to the Open Data Portal, where the public can view the status of investigations, with plans to add another 16,000 going all the way back to 2003. 

Additionally, the board is working to upload citizen complaint reports to the public transparency dashboard. The dashboard was launched in November in an effort to improve transparency and allows the public to check the status of complaints. Personal information, including complainant and witness names and addresses, and officer names and badge numbers will be redacted to protect the privacy of those involved.

BOPC Data Analyst Mary Barber told BridgeDetroit that hiccups with technology and the time-consuming process of redacting the reports has delayed the release. However, citizen complaint reports submitted between 2021 and 2023 will be publicly available on the dashboard by the end of this month. Complaints for 2024 and 2025 will be uploaded as they’re redacted, Barber said.

Several other improvements are underway, such as the integration of disciplinary data from the police department to the OCI’s case management system. Once fully implemented, the board and OCI will be able to review disciplinary information for officers and DPD will have “limited access” to OCI’s case management system to pull officer’s disciplinary history. Integration of the two systems is expected to free up administrative staffers who previously pulled those records for the police department, Warfield said in April. 

The Citizen Complaints Committee will meet again at 3 p.m. on May 13 to discuss the complaint backlog. On the same day, the Policy Committee is scheduled to convene at 5 p.m. to discuss DPD’s policy for citizen complaints. The public has an opportunity to comment during both meetings.