AKRON, Ohio — 3News Investigates has uncovered new details on job performance concerns about Akron's only finalist for the city's independent police auditor.
The revelations come as Anthony Finnell, 58, is close to being offered the important police oversight role.
Finnell has spent decades in law enforcement as a former police officer before shifting his career to the field of police accountability. Currently, he serves as president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, or NACOLE.
The position of independent police auditor was created by Akron voters, who overwhelmingly passed Issue 10 in 2022 following the police shooting death of Jayland Walker. The citizen-initiated referendum established a Citizens' Police Oversight Board and the new auditor role with a starting salary of $120,000.
"He is impressive," CPOB Vice Chair Donzella Anuszkiewicz said of Finnell as she addressed an audience at a public hearing last week to introduce him to the community. "He knows his way around boards, he knows his way around police systems. ... He has a stellar background."
However, 3News Investigates found concerns about Finnell's past job performance in similar roles in Oakland, California, and Seattle, Washington.
In Oakland, Finnell 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.
But what raises the most concerns is Finnell's history as a police auditor for Seattle's Office of Inspector General during the height of nationwide police protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020.
When asked whether he ever certified investigations of police misconduct without properly reviewing the evidence, Finnell said, "No." To learn more, we obtained hundreds of records from Finnell's personnel file from the city of Seattle.
We uncovered that Finnell was the subject of an independent investigation into his job performance as police auditor, and was accused of not properly reviewing evidence. Moreover, in one case, he did not review any evidence at all.
Confidential personnel report on Anthony Finnell
The confidential personnel report by law enforcement consultants OIR Group reveals damning details of Finnell's job performance.
The report found "troubling patterns of very quick certifications following review of few documents or other pieces of evidence, including body-worn video." This was also the case even when the most scrutiny was expected, like in complaints of unnecessary use of force.
The independent investigator found that "lengthy investigative summaries, numerous subject and witness interviews, and sizable quantities of evidence were certified in as few as 15 minutes after Mr. Finnell first accessed the case." The report also found that body-worn video was available in 22 cases, but Finnell did not review any of the available footage.
In one high-profile investigation into use of force involving an officer who deployed a blast ball (or gas canister) near a news reporter, the report noted that the chief of police initiated the complaint because of local media coverage. Despite this, the report found that Finnell did not access any interviews, reports, or linked video.
Finnell resigned from his position in June 2022, just as the OIR Group's public report was to be released. You can read the entire report below:
Finnell's response
Finnell explained that his quick certifications were due to the overwhelming number of police complaints that the city of Seattle received in 2020, citing 18,000 complaints that were registered with the city's Office of Police Accountability.
That may be the case, but according to the Seattle OIG's annual report in 2020, Finnell and his fellow auditors issued certifications for 397 investigations in 2020, only a 3% increase from the year before.
In a memo to the Seattle OIG, Finnell acknowledged that reviewing the available body camera video would have been the proper course of action, but asserted both in the memo and to WKYC that his experience makes it possible to review cases this quickly and still fairly judge an investigation's thoroughness and objectivity.
The independent investigator strongly disagreed, writing, "reviewing key evidence like body-worn video and interview recordings or transcripts is a crucial step in verifying that investigations are fair and unbiased. Mr. Finnell's reviews of nearly all the cases we examined missed this crucial step."
Finnell responded to 3News, "I examined independent video that showed me what I needed to see, so I didn't need to open body-worn [video] at that time."
"I'm looking to see whether the allegations are addressed, not re-investigate the investigation," he added.
"Right, but that actually is his job," Michael Benza, a criminal law professor at Case Western Reserve University specializing in police use of force, said. "In many ways, [his job] is like a court of appeals. The court of appeals doesn't retry the case, the court of appeals doesn't redecide what the evidence is. Instead, the court of appeals looks at the case in front of them and says, 'Did the trial court do the right thing to get to the outcome that it did?'"
The independent report concluded, "We can think of no circumstances where a complaint about an officer's use of force (or any serious misconduct allegation) could be resolved with such limited review."
Benza believes that even if Finnell were capable of doing the job as independent police auditor, there are concerns about trust.
"It's something the mayor has said, it's something the police chief has said: 'We need to do better,'" Benza stated. "Bringing somebody in to 'do better' who has this type of baggage is already going to put this person in the distrust side."
The Citizens' Police Oversight Board is expected to vote on whether to extend a contract offer to Finnell in the next week. 3News Investigates requested comment from the Board and from Mayor Shammas Malik, but both wanted to wait to see our report before responding. They also requested a copy of the personnel files that 3News Investigates received from the city of Seattle, and we responded that we obtained the documents through a public information request.