Details, details: How much can oversight board be told about possible police misconduct?

The citizen board that reviews complaints about Wichita police officers was told it could have only very brief summaries about police officers investigated for possible wrongdoing because of a settlement between the city and police union.

The Citizens Review Board uses the summaries to determine if it wants to review details of a case to assess police response or discipline.

“There is very little … I couldn’t make a determination based on that information,” John Kisner, a Citizen Review Board member and retired Sedgwick County District Court judge, said when the board was told about the impact of the settlement in January. “I don’t know how we could make a meaningful determination based on that amount of information … with what is probably 1% of the information … and it’s prepared by, we don’t even know for sure.”

The first four summaries in the November packet, the most recent available online, say: “complaint about an officer failing to respond to a call for service,” and then twice “complaint of an officers failing to conduct a complete and thorough domestic violence investigation” and then “complaint of racial profiling by officers.”

However, the settlement doesn’t say anything about the police department not being able to release more details in the summaries, according to City Manager Robert Layton.

“I know the settlement agreement is silent to that, so I don’t know what that interpretation is, and I don’t know why anything would have changed from what we did before,” Layton said in a phone interview.

A police captain told the board that the city’s legal department said the settlement prevented more details from being released. It’s unclear exactly what the legal staff said.

The CRB was established in 2018 to improve transparency in the Police Department by reviewing police conduct and discipline in cases and also reviewing police policy. The board is also meant to help with community relations.

Some board members and community members have long complained about the lack of details from police. Still the summaries have grown shorter and less informative, the opposite of a recommendation by Jensen Hughes, a consultant the city hired for $214,000 in 2022 to develop a roadmap to restore public trust in police and improve the culture within the department.

Layton said the city wants to follow the Jensen Hughes recommendations, including having more robust summaries, and he plans to attend the board’s meeting Thursday.

“I’m just going to guess that it’s an administrative issue more than it is a legal or procedural issue,” he said. “I think just given the volume of items, that it was hard to get the staff time to be able to do more robust descriptions. So we just have to find that happy medium there.”

The average number of words in each of the summaries for the last two meetings of 2024 – the most recent posted online – are 10 and nine. The average number of words in January 2024 summaries was 21.

‘Little tiny … summary’

At the board’s January meeting, Wichita police Capt. Jason Cooley pointed to the legal department as a reason for the short summaries.

“When I sent law the current summaries that you guys get, the little tiny, you know, the recommendation was that was the max summary,” he said. “Nothing more … we really stretch them as much as we can … because of the litigation that was the max of those summaries.”

Jennifer Magana, a city attorney and the director of the law department, was present at the meeting. She said in a phone interview later that the information was given to the police department by city attorney Michael Fessinger.

Fessinger, the city’s labor and employment attorney, did not respond to multiple calls or an email for comment.

The city denied an open records request for emails or correspondence between the law department and police about the settlement and how it affected summaries, saying that information was exempt from open records law because it fell under attorney-client privilege.

This news story published online Wednesday evening. At the Thursday evening CRB meeting, Magana said “nothing has changed in terms of the summary information.”

She said state law and the collective bargaining agreement restricts what information can be shared publicly in the summaries. She did not cite a specific law, but said it was related to privacy. She did not address that the summaries have grown shorter although nothing has changed in the bargaining agreement.

“The information that is given is given to the extent that it can be given without violating individuals’ personal, confidential personnel information,” Magana said. “So anything that could be identified and tied to an individual personnel record is not available, so nothing has changed in that regard in terms of what can be provided.”

Cooley, at the Thursday meeting, also said Jensen Hughes “is a recommendation” and the “bargaining agreement overrules the recommendation of that.”

Some board members pushed back at the meeting.

Gregory VanDyke Jr. said that the current summary “tells me nothing” and that he didn’t think it would be “difficult to elaborate or expound upon some of these descriptions without breaking confidentiality or diving too deep into legality or people’s personal lives.”

The board approved a motion for the police department to explore how they can get more details about the cases.

Controversy around the summaries

Some board members and community members have voiced concern about the lack of details before Thursday’s meeting.

“This kind of information is so frustrating,” former board member Walt Chappell, who has attended meetings since the board’s inception, said at the January meeting. “We have tried for years to get summaries that mean some sense. I don’t know how you can figure out any of this here … it just repeats the same phrase over and over.”

He mentioned how Jensen Hughes said the board should be able to see the written complaint. That could be a complaint from a citizen or from another officer, such as a supervisor following up on an incident.

“You’re not getting it,” he said. “You never had.”

In an email, Capt. Aaron Moses said police would not provide complaint forms for every case because it would “exceed the time allotted for their meetings.”

As for the length of the summaries, he said Police Chief Joe Sullivan had directed staff to review each case to “ensure closed case summaries are as detailed as possible while maintaining the confidentiality of individual employees.”

He noted the department was obligated to protect personnel records. He added that the department’s “aim is to balance transparency with our legal responsibilities while enhancing the information available to the CRB and the broader community.”

On Thursday, Joshua Siebenaler said board members all signed a confidentially agreement, so they should be able to get more details on each case, even if it is not presented at the meeting for the public to see.

“I do think that for us to be able to gauge which cases we see, the full complaint form needs to be made available ahead of time. It doesn’t need to be provided in this meeting or to the public, because I understand if there’s laws against that.”

After the meeting, Moses told The Eagle that the Jensen Hughes recommendation is to make the summaries more robust, but it “doesn’t really provide specific direction to anyone on how to get that done.”

“It’s not just confidentiality to the public,” Moses said. “Our employees have a right that their personnel records are confidential to other employees ... if a summary is too specific another employee could identify, ‘oh, I work with that person, and they were sustained for this violation’ and community could also draw those connections.”

Jensen Hughes recommendation

It’s been more than two years since Jensen Hughes delivered its recommendations to the city about how to restore public trust and improve culture within the department.

The audit was ordered after an Eagle story about 12 officers who sent racist, homophobic, extremist and inappropriate messages. The only officer initially disciplined was one who insulted then-Police Chief Gordon Ramsay in one of the messages.

Jensen Hughes said the summary that triggered the CRB to review the case in “no way characterized the seriousness of the allegation.” The entire description said “an investigation was requested in reference to text messages involving officers of the Department and a member of an outside agency.”

Board member Odell Harris Jr. previously told The Eagle the Holy Spirit led him to pull the case for review.

But even what he had to go on then is more detailed than what the CRB gets today.

Among the dozens of recommendations, Jensen Hughes wrote that Wichita police should “provide a detailed summary of the origin and nature of the complaint … or a copy of the completed complaint precipitating the investigation.”

On an online dashboard to show the department’s progress on Jensen Hughes recommendations, the police department has that listed as a completed objective. The department did not respond to a question from The Eagle asking why it was listed as completed.

The length of summaries has ebbed and flowed from month to month over the years but took a noticeable dip in the amount of details in the past couple of years.

The Eagle analyzed summaries posted in online archives since January 2021. Earlier summaries are not posted.

The Eagle used January of each year or the closest month to that where the records are available with the summaries. None were available for the first few meetings in 2025, so The Eagle used the last two available from the second half of 2024.

Jensen Hughes released its report, with recommendations to increase the summaries, or release the entire complaint, in March 2023.

Some of the reports in 2021, 2022 and 2023 included additional details about the discipline the officer received and whether it was a written reprimand or suspension. Those extra details show accountability. That information stopped being provided at some point in 2023.

Compare these examples. The first two are about an officer being terminated for wrongdoing. In the third, the outcome is unclear.

A summary from March 2021 says an “officer was terminated for allegedly committing a felony crime.”

Fast forward to an August 2023 report that says an “officer was terminated after being arrested for a felony crime that occurred out of this jurisdiction.”

Then, a summary in August 2024 said a “report of WPD employee committing a criminal act.” That employee was sustained on discipline that should have led to a termination, but the CRB would only get those details if they reviewed the case — the public would not know.

Cooley, at the January meeting, said the department’s professional standards bureau writes the summaries. Emails obtained in an open records request a couple years ago showed that at that time captains, a deputy chief and a lieutenant also helped write them.

What the settlement actually says

The settlement the city reached with the police union, signed by Magana and Layton with the date of Aug. 30, 2024, next to his signature, actually involved two cases the police union filed with the Kansas Department of Labor under the public employer employee relations act: one in June 2022 and another in August 2023.

The first was in response to changes the city council made to the CRB, which required allowing the person making the complaint against the officer to give their side of the story, instead of only what the CRB is told by police, and allowed the CRB to write public reports about cases with its findings and recommendations. The CRB’s only report so far was on the text message scandal.

The police union wanted the city to “rescind the amendments” to the ordinance, according to its initial filing. The union filing also included other complaints.

In its second filing, the union also had multiple complaints, the first being that then Mayor Brandon Whipple, in a council meeting, went over the number of grievances filed by the police union.

A grievance is a disagreement with the discipline the officer received.

The union argued that it violated the act.

The settlement, reached between the city and police union, includes board members signing a confidentiality agreement before reviewing each case. Board members already sign one before joining the board in order to get the details they do in closed meetings when reviewing a case.

Contributing: Chance Swaim of The Wichita Eagle

This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 5:58 PM.