After weeks of delays and seemingly countless procedural hurdles over the past year, the Citizens’ Police Oversight Board on Friday evening approved the appointment of the person who will lead civilian oversight of the Akron Police Department.
Anthony Finnell will be the city’s first independent police auditor after a 6-2 vote by the board during a special meeting, which reached the two-thirds threshold necessary for him to be offered the job. Finnell will start on March 25, CPOB Member Bob Gippin told Signal Akron.
“There is no better candidate,” said CPOB Member Tristan Reed of Finnell after Friday’s two-minute meeting appointing him as auditor. “His credentials and his experience are undoubtedly the best that we could find. I don’t think there’s anyone better than him.”
Gippin agreed.
“I think he’s a superb candidate,” he said. “Literally there is no one else in the country interested in the position who’s better qualified than him – by far. I’m just delighted he’s going to be our auditor. I think he wants to make Akron a model for oversight, and I think he knows how to do that, and I really think he may be that. We’re going to show how it really can be done well. He’s an excellent choice.”
Finnell, a former police officer, is president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE), a position he indicated he’ll keep, and has worked in civilian oversight of the police departments in Seattle and Oakland, California, among other roles. He was the leading candidate for the Akron position since he was first interviewed in October, Reed said. He went through numerous interviews and came to Akron for a community town hall in February.
In his new job, Finnell will lead the Office of the Independent Police Auditor, which will eventually have a deputy auditor and administrative assistant. His office will track complaints about and submitted to the APD, as well as the department’s use-of-force reports, and then will evaluate the department’s internal investigations into them. The volunteer CPOB will oversee and work with the full-time staffers of the OIPA.
“He’s highly decorated in law enforcement, he knows his way around boards, he knows his way around police systems, he’s the president of NACOLE and he was just reelected to that,” said CPOB Vice Chair Donzella Anuszkiewicz. “To be honest, we don’t know how to be auditors, and now we’ve got the best guy we could possibly have.”
Friday’s vote was delayed as the CPOB worked to get its first set of rules approved by Akron City Council, which board members believed had to be completed before it could hire an auditor. The full board wasn’t available for a vote until Friday’s special meeting.
Finnell’s appointment did not come unanimously.
CPOB Chair Kemp Boyd had long signaled he would not vote to appoint Finnell as Independent Police Auditor. He followed through on Friday, joined by CPOB Member Cati Castle.
“For me, it was more about not ‘if’ Anthony Finnell, but ‘how,’” Boyd said to Signal Akron on Friday. “I’ve always felt we should bring him in more as a consultant, and kind of crawl, walk, and run this thing into existence versus just hiring him as an auditor. We need to understand that this was something new for our city, so how do we ease ourselves – and him – into this situation versus just bringing him in and throwing him in the deep end? That was something I said two and a half or three months ago after we interviewed him and that’s always been my stance.”
Finnell’s appointment did not come without some controversy.
Last month, WKYC reported on controversies involving Finnell at his previous jobs. In Seattle, he was accused of not thoroughly reviewing all evidence of complaints during the 2020 protests after George Floyd was killed.
In Oakland, WKYC reported, “he was abruptly fired for a dispute with police commissioners who wanted access to investigative files. Finnell sued the city for wrongful termination, and the city settled the lawsuit for $40,592 without admitting any wrongdoing.”
At a town hall at Ellet Community Learning Center a week prior to WKYC’s story, Finnell addressed the issues, which were first reported locally by the Beacon Journal in early January. At the Feb. 21 CPOB meeting, shortly after the WKYC story aired, Akron Mayor Shammas Malik’s chief of strategy, Nanette Pitt, advised the board against hiring Finnell and instead suggested they hire him as a consultant. That irked some of Finnell’s most ardent supporters on the board. Pitt didn’t say publicly why the mayor’s office didn’t support Finnell.
Malik elaborated in a statement to Signal Akron on Feb. 26.
“I encourage the Board to fully review the documents from Mr. Finnell’s past employment referenced by WKYC in their recent report to form their own opinion about the concerns which have been raised by some in our community. The decision of whom to hire rests with the Board; our administration will work constructively with the Board and whoever is selected.”
The board had long been aware of concerns about Finnell’s past.
“Literally, since day one we were aware of these allegations,” Gippin said during the Feb. 21 meeting. “We raised them with Mr. Finnell, we discussed them at length, and we came away satisfied that his conduct concerning those Seattle allegations gave no reason for us not to proceed to hire him as auditor. … The allegations in Seattle were, in a sense, distorted and exaggerated. His conduct did not provide any reason not to move forward.”
Ultimately, the CPOB did move forward on Friday.
“If all of the naysayers were authentic and/or correct in what their negative impressions were about him, he would never have been reelected to NACOLE,” Anuszkiewicz said. “They do their research. We are privileged to have this man.”
“There’s still a whole lot of work to do, but now we’ll have a full-time leader with his experience, and it’s going to make a lot of difference,” Gippin said.
“This is a major step very much in the right direction.”
Editor’s note: Kemp Boyd is a member of the Signal Akron Advisory Board.
