• In solidarity with food safety activists across the globe, Wichita, Kansas will march against Monsanto at the Old Town Farm and Art Market at Mosely and First. Mark your calendars now. Monsanto is poisoning our food, and our government has proven that they support protecting Monsanto's profit margins over the safety of the American people. https://www.facebook.com/events/594393820573193/ Wichita, Kansas View Map · Get Directions

                     6-Point Proposal for a Functioning Citizens’ Review Board (Presented on 032913)

We are a group composed of victims of police violence and Occupy Wichita. We have been demonstrating to inform the community about the problem of police violence in Wichita. We have also gone to city council to make an appeal for a functioning citizens review board of WPD. So we have come to this meeting to say what we’d like to see this board become to continue pushing for a functioning citizen’s review board.
We feel that this board needs to make the following changes to the way it operates in order to become what we believe would result in an effective and trustworthy oversight on the WPD from the community:

1. The board needs to meet after every police shooting, and investigate the claims made by the police in the media to see if they have any evidence to back up their claims aside from their own testimony.
2. The board needs to be independent from city politics and the people running the board need to come from the communities affected by police violence, because that’s the problem with the institutional oversight presently in place: the DA is willing to give the police a pass when it’s patently obvious that the police should be reprimanded for the use of excessive force.
3. The board needs to have some kind of legal teeth so that its operation doesn’t depend on political connections and appeals. This legal power needs to be accessible to the community so that the community, likewise, doesn’t have to depend on political connections and appeals to the board. I recommend subpoena power so that people affected by police violence don’t have to fund their own KORA requests when they often don’t have the resources or time to pursue an investigation all on their own.
4. The board should collect complaints about the police department and forward those onto professional standards so that there’s an archive of police complaints accessible to the community that doesn’t require KORA requests.
5. The board should have press contacts so that they can release information about cases along with the police, so that both sides of any given story are told to the public.
6. We’d also ask every one of you presently on the board to sign this petition which states that KS-21-3215 needs to be modified to require physical evidence to justify the police’s use of lethal force. This would go a long way to showing that the members of this board are serious about implementing real oversight of police powers.

Thank you,
Occupy Wichita

We protest police brutality Tuesdays, noon at City Hall Tuesdays, noon at City Hall
(south entrance off 3rd and Main)
General Assembly-Sat. at noon at the Central Public Library, 3rd floor