The first was that Officer Kyle Brandt had used force without justification, by grabbing and turning a woman who posed no threat, before speaking a word to her, and had then prolonged her detention on the ground and in handcuffs after her identity and her lawful possession of the vehicle were plain.
The second was that he had failed to activate his body camera as policy required, and that only the camera's own design had preserved what happened.
The third finding was the one her union rep had warned her the Board might not want to touch, and she had kept it anyway. It asked the Board to find that the department's own practices had set the officer up to do what he did: a roll-call instruction to confront anyone who "doesn't belong" without any definition of what that meant, and a records migration that had pulled thousands of decades-old entries into a live database without anyone checking whether they were still valid. On the last page of the complaint she wrote:
My father was taken out of this same car in 1979, on the strength of a false stolen-vehicle report, and held for two nights before the charge was dropped. That report was never cleared. Forty-seven years later it was used to put me in handcuffs. I am not asking the Board to punish anyone for what happened in 1979. I am asking the Board to recognize that a record is not neutral simply because it is old, and that if one such record survived, others did. I am asking you to find them.
She did not name the complainant of 1979 anywhere in the document. Her union rep asked her why.
"Because he was twenty-four and doing what his father told him," Naomi said. "And because his son is the one who'll be sitting in that room, not him. And because if I put that name in, the whole thing becomes a story about one family. It'll make the newspaper. It'll be a great story. And they'll fire one officer and nobody will ever look at the database again."
"That's very generous of you."
"It isn't generous," she said. "It's root cause."
* * *
The hearing was held on a gray Thursday in the middle of February, in a room on the fourth floor of the City-County Building that had been built for zoning appeals and still had a faded map of the city's flood plain on one wall. The seven members of the Accountability Board sat behind a curved table at the front, chaired by a retired federal magistrate named Evelyn Sato, who within the first five minutes had told a city attorney to stop interrupting in a voice so quiet that the whole room leaned forward to hear it.
The room was fuller than Naomi had expected. Hector was there in a sport coat that was a size too small, sitting in the second row with his wife. Odette was there, in her driver's uniform because she was going straight to work afterward, and beside her sat Jasmine in a navy dress and a cardigan, her notebook on her lap, her hair in two neat puffs. Captain Patel had flown in from Tulsa on his day off without telling her and slid into the back row with an apologetic wave. Her chief pilot was there, and, sitting off to one side alone with his hat in his lap, a very old Black man with a cane whom she did not recognize.
Officer Brandt sat at the opposite table with the police union's representative. He was in uniform. He looked as though he had not slept well in some time. When Naomi came in, he looked up, and met her eyes, and then he looked down again at the table.