Atlanta Police Urge City to Curtail Citizen Watchdogs' Access

Why is it so bad for the Po-leece to do their investigation first before turning the incident over to the "public"??? Thats what the board is, basically, members of the public, right? I would think the Internal Affairs of the dept would probably have a bit more experience and expertise investigating things than a bunch of "community activists" who sit on a review board.
Quit complainin, you will get to see the report and then can investigate on your own. I doubt the dept would want the local paper knowing the story before they are done with their end of it.

I think it is rediculous for civilians who do not know the rules, regulations, and the day to day rigors of police work to sit back and be able to monday morning quarterback. Civilians who have never been police officers and never seen situations like we do or have been trained to pay attention to the things we pay attention to are more apt to see what is wrong then what is right. Body movements that we know to be suspicious or even dangerous look perfectly innocent to a general civilian, because that is how the bad guy is trying to look. A person trying to simply walk back to his vehicle looks innocent to a civilian, while we know that this is usually a sign that he's trying to get to something in his vehicle that could harm us in some circumstances.
As a supervisor I have had to conduct my fair share of I.A. investigations into the actions of officers and if I did not know what I know about the actions of people, offender backgrounds, what to look for, what to listen for etc.... It would have been easy to say some of the officers did wrong who were actually doing right.
If a rocket blows up you don't go sending a bunch of people off the street to go in and see if the rocket scientists calculations were right or not, you send in other rocket scientists. Police Officers should be the ones saying whether a police officers actions were reasonable or not because they know the point of view to look from. I'm all for an outside police unit to look into really serious allegations. The bad seeds need punished and sent on their way. Too many civilians nowadays are expecting the police to do something wrong and that is what they will look for.

BS. Just plain BS. That's like having an oversight committee for the military that knows nothing about war. Oh wait, we have that too. Guess we're screwed. Checks and balances are vital to our system. That's why cops aren't the prosecutor, and the prosecutor isn't the judge, and every suspect has the right to private legal counsel. Duh.

Ridiculous, who do these civilians think they are? We don't work for them, are job is to bust the bad guys, and if they don't like the way we do it then T.S. Are job is hard enough without some civilian review board looking over our shoulder and second quessing everything we do. I hope the department stands their ground on this one and tells these board to F- off.