Lexipol in Oak Park: Privatizing Policing Policy in a "Community Policing"-era Part 1

A series on Oak Park Police policy making, opacity, and community oversight.

The purpose of this blog post is to introduce a private contractor called Lexipol and relate it to on-going police reform in Oak Park. After introducing Lexipol to the community, we attempt to understand the type and degree of work this private contractor is providing to the Village and Police Department. Lexipol is currently contracted by the Village of Oak Park to update and implement changes to the Oak Park Police Department existing policies called general rules or orders. The public has a right to know, after all, what its agencies are doing; the public has a right to participate in community safety.

Lexipol’s conservative, police indemnification tendencies aim to minimize officer liability rather than promote community safety. It is essential that we better understand how these risk-mitigation strategies are used by a risk-averse municipality that plays lip-service to community participation in its government. Furthermore, we must demand accountability, and we community members must build our own ways to hold public agents--staff or sworn officers or elected officials--to account for decisions made in our name. We need OPPD to adopt a fully transparent and accountable suite of police policies that are in the best interest of everyone who must deal with the Oak Park Police.

What is Lexipol?

In the April 2020 Freedom to Thrive/ Local Progress report “Analysis of Policing Policy and Budgets in Oak Park, IL” we first mentioned an independent contractor called Lexipol. We’re republishing the Lexipol page from the April report here (with links and notes for easier retrieval):

“On Jan 28, 2019, Oak Park’s Village board voted to approve a contract with Lexipol, a company that provides state-specific public safety policies designed to reduce risk and avoid litigation. Lexipol is used by more than 3,200 public safety organizations in 35 states. We are concerned that policy derived from Lexipol’s guidance will prioritize risk mitigation and financial concerns over democracy, justice, and true public safety.
Freedom to Thrive researchers learned that Lexipol is being used to update the current general orders of the police department. General orders are internal operating guidelines for policing. These policies are not reviewed by any citizen commission, or elected board. What’s more, the general orders are not freely available to the public. Freedom to Thrive Oak Park obtained Oak Park’s general orders relevant to this report through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The general orders evaluated in this report represent the current and former versions of the orders. It is unknown what changes, if any, the Lexipo-lwritten general orders will contain. But any changes written by Lexipol should be viewed with a critical lens.
When Lexipol is employed by a municipality to draft police policy, Lexipol’s stated goals of risk reduction and the avoidance of litigation can often mean the lack thereof or the hindrance to accountability or oversight. As Oak Park’s Independent Oversight analysis shows, police oversight is an area in need of serious improvement, and Lexipol’s drafting of police policy without civilian or even elected oversight further obfuscates the policing process in Oak Park, and creates even more barriers to implementing citizen-led progressive policing reform.
In fact, Lexipol demonstrates resistance to progressive policy reforms, as shown by their rebuttal of advocate-proposed changes to the Chicago Police Department’s Use of Force policy. Lexipol cites significant legal liabilities to officers and police departments in their resistance to the proposed policy. Given the language used by Lexipol in their blog post, and Lexipol’s stated purpose of reducing risk for public safety departments, and their conspicuous lack of regard for the risks of the public at large, it is clear that use of Lexipol should be heavily questioned by any municipality dedicated to enacting progressive policing reforms.”

Why are we talking about Lexipol now?

Freedom to Thrive seeks to reimagine public safety and community oversight of the police. To those ends we undertook further research on Lexipol soon after the June 22 Village Board Meeting, which included a vote in favor of reviewing Oak Park Police Department’s use of force policy and related reviews initiated by the Obama Mayor’s Pledge. We came to the following critical juncture:

We want the community to know about the organization responsible for policies that govern our police department. Despite being an organization that writes policy and provides training for one-third of suburban Cook County police forces, 95% of Californian police forces, and over 3000 municipalities, Lexipol is barely mentioned in the press. Even with a national spotlight on so-called police reform, Lexipol isn’t a household name;
Legal oversight, police reform, and police operations are being contracted out to an unaccountable third party. That is, OPPD might not even fully comprehend the changes being made to their standard operating procedures by this unaccountable third party.There is currently no meaningful community oversight of Lexipol’s contract and relationship to the Oak Park Police Department. Lexipol styles itself as a ‘sole source’ for the services it provides, which means, in effect, there is no critical review or appraisal of such services, since this contractor is unique. Furthermore, the policies codified in Lexipol’s contracted work have no community or elected representative oversight. Village Trustees seem ignorant and uninterested in the current and on-going work of Lexipol with the Village even though they express interest in reviewing policies;
Obscurity and opacity are de rigueur for the OPPD and Village staff; the opacity of Lexipol’s review and reformation of policy exacerbates tendencies in OPPD generally which make community access to policy and data an epic poem, relying on a murky and cumbersome FOIA process

In sum, we want to know how police policy is changing now, in light of national unrest; now is not the time for obscure and opaque police policies. Simply put, Oak Park deserves to know.

What does police reform look like in Oak Park?

Changes are being discussed and made now and we don’t know anything about them. That’s why we’re demanding more from our Village Board and our Police Department. At present the Village of Oak Park staff (not the elected board) are working with the Oak Park Police Department on an internal review of the department. Community listening sessions were held remotely the week of August 7th and turnout and participation are hard to determine. The organization and structure of this internal review is as follows:

*Excerpt from the “Memo Review of Police Policies 6.8.2020” attached to the Village of Oak Park Board of Trustees June 22, 2020 meeting agenda.*

This review is occurring now and the role of private consultants doesn’t seem to register in the process! There are now two layers of obscure and opaque changes occurring with no community oversight.

What are they reviewing?

At present, we are not sure where we are in either process (Lexipol or so-called internal review), as nothing has been made public about either process. That said, we can consult the June 22 board packet for the following list of items to be reveiwed:

It is in section 4 Where we might find Lexipol’s work. We are attempting to FOIA these materials for the sake of public oversight.

How is this connected to Lexipol?

In June of this year, we asked the board what their role(s), as elected officials, are in the Lexipol review process, especially with regard to revision of General Orders. This was our question:

“The agreement with Lexipol was voted by trustees in 2019. However Lexipol was to produce a manual for the police department. That’s the point of the vote: to produce a manual for the Oak Park Police Department at some future date. [Our] question is this: what is the board’s role in the production of the manual Lexipol was contracted to produce? If changes are made to general orders, to policy, etc What’s the board's role there?”

Only one Trustee responded, and they weren’t aware of the process, noting correctly that the vote occurred before they were seated as Trustee. She and the Village Clerk connected us to the Village Manager to answer our question. The Village Manager wrote the following (for which we are grateful) in response to our question:

“Lexipol compares each document for consistency with all others as well as for compliance with Local, State and Federal Laws which can change from time to time. The recommended updates by Lexipol are to be submitted to the Chief of Police for internal review. The Chief uses an internal team of Village staff prior to his issuance of any new or modified General Orders/Rules.
As you may be aware, the Village of Oak Park, since 1952, has operated under the Village Manager form of government under the Illinois Constitution. All employees perform their duties subject to the direction of the Village Manager or that of the supervisor to whom the Manager may assign such employees. It is the Police Chief’s authority to oversee the members of the Police Department and issue orders governing their conduct (which are called the General Orders/Rules), subject to the control and supervision of the Village Manager.”

And so when we wrote that opacity was de rigueur for the Village Staff and Oak Park Police Department we misspoke. Opacity and apparent reluctance to transparency and oversight are enshrined in the municipal structure! In all of the criticism of Freedom to Thrive’s work, we should be wary of the simple principle: the community has a right to know. This blog post is an attempt to introduce two key hurdles we must overcome: privatization and outsourcing to obscure third parties is hard to talk about by definition and the opacity and shadows that allow for shady privatization are enshrined in municipal structure and practices themselves.

What is to be done (about Lexipol)?

In the interest of transparency and community oversight, there are many ways to follow up on Lexipol and Oak Park. One way is to investigate the Village’s use of external consultants for internal reviews. This is a common Oak Park approach to oversight: critique consultants. . Another accessible way would be to advocate for the posting/publication of all current General Orders and standard operating procedures in use by the OPPD. Yet another way: Knowing Oak Park has a Citizens Police Oversight Committee, we can work to strengthen the oversight and ability to review the practices and actions of those who serve the community (this is an open question for the Board at present).

Our next step, however, is to demand actual transparency of the Oak Park Police Department and the Village of Oak Park. We are working to have all the General Orders published. We are constantly FOIA-ing for data and policy so that the community can engage in the data produced by policing practices. The police department is not doing this, so the community must. Reimagining community safety requires that we are able to oversee, consult, and critique the policies, practices, and decisions that our public officials engage in in our name. How do we put an end to the private profiting occurring in Oak Park’s shadows? “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

As always, contact us to get involved with public records, transparency, and accountability work to re-imagine community and community safety.