Richmond’s City Council denied a mayoral appointment to the Community Police Review Commission (CPRC) Tuesday night, the latest example of lingering tension between police union and the civilian commission tasked with investigating complaints against its officers.
Mayor Eduardo Martinez’s choice for the commission seat, Crescent Diamond, needed three yes votes from council members to be approved but received only two, from Sue Wilson and Claudia Jimenez. Councilmembers Cesar Zepeda and Soheila Bana voted no, Doria Robinson abstained, and Jamelia Brown was absent.
The disagreement centered around Diamond’s affiliation with Reimagine Richmond, a public safety reform group that was formed in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Prior to the council’s discussion and vote, Martinez defended his decision to put Diamond up for the seat, which he said was based on the strength of her application and interview.
“I don’t ask for political positions,” Martinez said. “I ask for authenticity.”
Martinez said that he’d considered the council’s reservations about Diamond but remained “steadfast” in his decision.
“I have interviewed everyone who has applied and I have asked people from all points of view to apply and only one sector of the population has applied,” Martinez said, seemingly referring to police-reform advocates from Richmond Rising who’ve applied for the positions over the last several years. “So it’s my prerogative to appoint or to have a commission that is not filled.”
Richmond’s mayor can appoint nominees to boards and commissions, however, they must be approved by at least three voting members of the council who are not the mayor.
Blocking a mayoral appointment is rare. Typically, mayoral appointments are voted on unanimously during the approval of the consent calendar — a list of agenda items that are considered uncontroversial and don’t usually require discussion.
The CPRC currently has only five of its nine positions filled. Its members are the commission chair Marisol Cantu, Carmen Martinez, Charlene Engle, Ana Tellez-Witrago and Carol Hegstrom.
Diamond’s appointment was pulled from the council’s consent calendar twice in October by Bana, who asked why Diamond was not present to answer questions. Bana said she wants a commission that is “balanced.”
“The police have power. They carry guns. They have a uniform. They have a lot of power. The city wants to make sure they do not abuse the power. That’s why we have the Citizen Oversight Commission, and it’s an excellent thing,” said Bana. “At the same time, that commission has a lot of power, too. So we want to make sure the commission doesn’t abuse its power, either. We want a balanced commission with no bias, pro or against the police. We want a balance of views.”
Bana said she believes Reimagine Richmond already has five members on the commission, and described the group as having “defunded” the police, though it was members of the city council in 2021, which at the time included Jimenez and Eduardo Martinez, that voted to reallocate money from vacant police positions to fund non-police “alternatives” to public safety. Those programs included the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), Reach Out with Compassion and Kindness (ROCK), the homelessness intervention program SOS Richmond, and YouthWorks.
Of the five current commissioners, Cantu and Carmen Martinez are known to be affiliated with Reimagine Richmond. Both are also members of the often-aligned Richmond Progressive Alliance. Richmondside could not determine independently if Tellez-Witrago and Engle are members of Reimagine Richmond. Hegstrom, the longest tenured CPRC commissioner, joined the body before Reimagine’s inception.
Councilmembers Bana and Brown proposed in May 2025 that the CPRC be investigated by a third party over allegations of unethical practices levied by its former investigator, Jerry Threet. The council ultimately voted 4-3 against that independent investigation, with Robinson siding with RPA members Eduardo Martinez, Jimenez and Wilson.
Before Tuesday’s meeting, the Richmond Police Officers Association sent a letter to the mayor and council opposing Diamond’s appointment, saying that her affiliation with Reimagine Richmond and views that she’s expressed on social media against policing made her biased against officers.
“This is not opposition to civilian oversight. The RPOA has worked with the CPRC for decades, and our members accept that public accountability is part of the job,” the letter reads. “What we cannot accept is a commissioner who, by their own public statements, has already decided that police officers are the moral equivalent of slave catchers and the Ku Klux Klan, and that LGBTQ officers do not belong in their own community’s Pride celebration. A person who holds those views cannot sit in fair judgment of the officers whose complaints, investigations, and appeals come before this Commission.”
Attached to the letter were posts from Diamond’s Instagram, both from 2017. In one, Diamond posted a picture with a badge with the words “runaway slave patrol” next to a police officer badge, with the hashtag #copsandklangohandinhand. The other, a picture from a 2017 San Francisco Pride march, shows demonstrators holding a “Police out of Pride” banner, using the same hashtag.
Also attached to the letter was a screenshot of an animated video on Reimagine Richmond’s YouTube page, advocating for the now-ROCK program, with an illustration of a Richmond police officer and badge next to a runaway slave patrolman holding a whip, and next to a badge.
“The council is being asked to put someone who believes police officers are klansmen in charge of judging police officers,” RPOA president and Sgt. Ben Therriault said during public comment.
The appointment of Reimagine Richmond members to the commission has been a point of contention with the police union in the years after Floyd’s death as cities across the country grappled with calls for increased oversight of departments. Since then, commissioners and the RPOA have battled over the commission’s efforts to strengthen its police oversight over the department’s rank and file.
In Aug. 2025, two weeks after Richmond police in the Iron Triangle shot and killed Angel Montaño, a 27-year-old Marine reserve officer with a history of mental illness, the council voted to approve a slate of CPRC recommendations to strengthen its oversight power. Those included extending the citizen complaint filing deadline, expanding the commission’s scope to all complaints, allowing anonymous complaints, subpoena power to compel the police to provide internal documents and evidence, an annual public report by the CPRC investigator, and publishing non-confidential records on the city’s website.
However, the changes are currently still being negotiated as part of the police union’s collective bargaining agreement with the city. The RPOA is currently without a contract after its most recent one expired on June 30, 2025.
The two officers involved in the shooting death of Montaño, Nicholas Remick and Colton Stocking, were cleared of wrongdoing in February by Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton.
Richmondside reached out to the RPOA for comment Friday but did not hear back by publication time.
In an emailed statement to Richmondside, Reimagine Richmond defended its work saying that it is the “only movement holding the police and RPOA accountable” in the city.
“We are an easy target to attack Richmond’s holistic public safety approach,” the group wrote. “This year, the RPOA spent $340,000 on Ahmad Anderson’s mayoral campaign. The RPOA holds tremendous power in our city and is using it to attack anyone who questions their authority or narrative of what safety should look like.”
In their statement, the group added that “if the city council and mayor believe in co-governance, they should understand that every single resident has some community or political affiliation,” and that such relationships shouldn’t bar people from participating on city commissions.
Robinson, who abstained from the commission vote on Tuesday, said she has supported Reimagine Richmond members for the commission before and doesn’t think that membership in the organization should exclude a person from serving. But she said the commission has swung in one direction in recent years and acknowledged the view held by some that officers have not gotten a “fair shake” from the commission.
“What kind of governance, what kind of government do we want? Do we want one that actually believes in diversity or only believes in the diversity that we approve of, but not actual diversity of thought?” Robinson said. “I personally don’t like to become the oppressors we try to overturn.”
Jimenez, the council’s CPRC liaison and incoming mayor, blasted back at the concerns surrounding Diamond’s association with Reimagine Richmond.
“I disagree with how we are portraying somebody, a resident of Richmond, just because she is a part of an organization,” Jimenez said. “What I have experienced is that the police union president has been threatening the people who are serving in the commission and its public comments…When you say, ‘I know where you live, I know where you work,’ in public meetings, it’s difficult to get more people to actually want to serve when this is the comments that you receive.”
Richmondside reviewed minutes from CPRC meetings dating back to 2024 and found one instance, during the Feb. 5, 2025 meeting, where Therriault mentioned members of Reimagine Richmond by name. None of the people mentioned were commissioners.
During that meeting, Therriault pointed out that he was “tracking” some of the people commenting on behalf of Reimagine Richmond, adding that some lived in San Pablo, and he described their participation as a “coordinated effort” by the group. Former Commissioner Dan Lawson, who is the husband of Councilmember Wilson, objected in the middle of Therriault’s comments and described them as having a “chilling effect.”
On Tuesday, Jimenez defended Reimagine Richmond, lauding its immigration enforcement rapid-response work alongside the Richmond police and its help connecting those affected with legal resources.
Wilson said the RPOA was bordering on “obsession” with “investigating” Reimagine Richmond’s commission applicants and urged the council to push back on what she described as a quasi-vetoing power.
“I hear the concerns about having things balanced. But for me, it’s more important that we don’t create a sort of a governmental process where the police union or any union for that matter gets a veto power over who we appoint,” Wilson said.
Robinson said the perception of bias on the commission is an issue the city is not addressing.
“I do feel like there’s a problem here that we’re not facing,” Robinson said. “Yes, the commission is moving in a good direction, there’s good accountability that’s happening, all these things. But if you have a body that’s supposed to play a role in governance that the people who are subject to it don’t feel like they trust, then you’ve got a fundamental problem. And I just feel like we need to face that.”
According to CPRC public summaries of complaints, only one complaint out of eleven filed in the last two years ended in a ‘sustained’ finding of misconduct for an officer. That finding came against Sgt. Alexander Caine in the case of Kwesi Guss, the Richmond cowboy who got into an altercation with Caine and Remick while he tried to film the aftermath of a police chase that ended in the Iron Triangle. Remick was also named in Guss’s complaint but the finding of unnecessary force was not sustained.
