Richmond’s City Council unanimously approved a slate of recommendations that strengthen its Community Police Review Commission (CPRC).
Tuesday’s vote comes after months of tense discussion and accusations of unethical behavior that centered around the commission of appointed citizens and its role in investigating accusations of police misconduct.
The vote coincided with a display of public concern over the Aug. 4 death of Angel Montaño, an armed man who was shot by two officers as he came at them with knives. Nearly 50 people came to the council meeting, many holding signs calling for justice for the 27-year-old’s death — the second officer-involved shooting of 2025.
Though the CPRC’s initially made 13 recommendations, the list was trimmed to seven, including: Extending citizens’ complaint filing deadline to one year; changing the misconduct review standard to “preponderance of the evidence;” expanding its scope of review to all complaints; allowing anonymous complaints and redacted names; having subpoena power to compel the police department to produce documents and evidence; an annual public report by the CPRC investigator; and publishing non-confidential records on the city’s website.
Now, the city must meet with the Richmond Police Officer’s Association before the changes are officially adopted, which will require another city council vote, according to City Attorney Bill Aleshire.
The CPRC created the recommendations at the start of 2025 in an attempt to beef up its influence over how it investigates complaints involving the police department.
CPRC members and public safety reform advocates who’ve said they support the recommendations say they’d like the commission to be run more like those in neighboring cities such as Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco.
During the council’s discussion, District 4 council member Soheila Bana questioned what would constitute a non-confidential record that would need to be published.
John Alden, member of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE), said that California’s SB 1421 and SB 16 require that certain sustained findings of uses of force and misconduct investigations be made publically available.
Aleshire clarified that, currently, the city’s CPRC does not voluntarily publish any of the non-confidential records related to sustained findings of police misconduct but does provide them to those who submit California Public Records Act requests.
District 5 council member Sue Wilson said that she agreed with the idea of not creating “barriers for information.”
“If it is public information I would like to see it on the (city’s) website,” she said.
Jamelia Brown, District 1 council member, said she agreed that a 120-day deadline for citizens to file complaints was not enough time but was concerned that, by extending the deadline, it would run into the one-year statute of limitations for departments to discipline officers along guidelines guaranteed by the Peace Officers Bill of Rights — a set of legal protections designed to safeguard the rights of law enforcement officers during internal investigations and disciplinary actions.
“If we are saying that we are going to extend that time it sort of undermines the department’s ability to discipline an officer if we have extended that and, for instance, someone files a complaint in the 11th month or 12th month and it sort of eliminates that window of time necessary for the investigative clock,” she said. “Are we actually wanting to see officers disciplined or are we just wanting to extend it because that is the norm that Oakland and San Francisco are doing?”
Richmond Police Assistant Chief Tim Simmons told the council that if misconduct within the department is discovered by police management, the one-year clock for disciplinary action starts at that moment.
“The potential overlap would be if the commission investigator comes up with a conclusion and we’re running up against the one year, we may not be able to use the conclusion that the commission investigator comes up with as part of our process in making a disciplinary decision because that information was known, before perhaps, it was reported to the commission by a complainant,” Simmons said.
Simmons added that some of the ways that the one-year clock may be extended is when there are criminal investigations concurrent with the misconduct or if an officer or complainant is injured.
Anti-police attendees interrupt meeting, yelling “Jail killer cops”
During the public comment session, a tense moment occurred when a small contingent of demonstrators yelled, “Jail killer cops” as Mayor Eduardo Martinez called for order. Ultimately, the crowd quieted down and the meeting continued without anyone being arrested or escorted out of the council chambers. Dozens of attendees stood during most of the public comment period, holding signs and pictures of Montaño.
Jesus Pedraza, a childhood friend of Montaño, called for the release of an unedited version of police body camera footage of the Aug. 4 shooting.
“Richmond PD claimed transparency but true transparency doesn’t come with redacted files or footage that ends at the first bullet,” he said. “Not once has Richmond PD admitted how many bullets were fired. Do they know or do they not want us to know?”
Pedraza added that those close to Montaño want the department to also fire officer Nicholas Remick, who was one of the officers involved in Montaño’s death as well as the police shooting death of Jose de Jesus Mendez Rios in February. (In both cases a second officer was involved as well.)
“This was not an unfortunate event. This was murder. They took our brother’s life without exhausting non-lethal options. We are asking for justice, not just for Angel, but for his family and the community,” he said. “Real Richmond is our Richmond.”
Hope Dixon, a staff member at Contra Costa College, said that the new CPRC recommendations are a start to the conversation about police accountability in Richmond.
“They (the recommendations) are not justice. Justice is accountability. True accountability,” Dixon said. “I also hold all of you (council members) with a sense of guilt. If we had worked through this and not taken so many years to get ROCK going there could have been an alternative.”
Richmond Police Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, blamed the state’s laws related to compelling people with mental health issues to get treatment.
“I want to speak to one of the most glaring failures in California today, not the police, but the state’s broken mental health system,” he said. “We live under laws that make it impossible to compel people into treatment until they are a danger to themselves or others.”
Therriault added that the results of those current laws are “predictable and dangerous.”
“It leaves untreated individuals on the streets and the inevitable happens,” he said. “Officers are forced into these situations that should have been prevented long before a 911 call.”
Instead of “real reform” at the legislative level, Therriault blamed activists, specifically calling out Reimagine Richmond, for scapegoating officers “doing their job.
“Let’s be clear, no one from ROCK (the city’s new non-emergency crisis intervention program) or A3 (the county’s crisis response team) is walking into a violent encounter, which is what this was,” he said of the Aug. 4 shooting. “His family members called for the police because they were being threatened. No mental health clinicians are being dispatched down to face a man with a knife or a gun. It’s going to fall on law enforcement. The facts are what matter,” he said.
