Atlanta police auditor used to dealing with firestorms

Cristina Beamud doesn’t pull punches. Her supporters say that’s a good thing, saying she doesn’t back down and isn’t afraid of a fight. Others say she’s brash and abrasive.

“I don’t agree that I’m brash,” Beamud (pronounced BAY-a-mood) said. “I am direct, however. I try to temper my criticism in a way that it can be heard and received. … However, I do have a direct style. After all, I’m a lawyer by trade.”

Enlarge this image

CHRIS PIETSCH / The (Ore.) Register-Guard

Cristina Beamud hands out copies of an ordinance – governing complaints against police – to news media in Eugene, Ore. She earned some criticism for holding a news-conference about her claim that Eugene’s police chief broke the law when he withheld from her a complaint against an officer.

Enlarge this image

CHRIS PIETSCH / The (Ore.) Register-Guard

‘I don’t agree that I’m brash,’ Cristina Beamud says. ‘I am direct, however. I try to temper my criticism in a way that it can be heard and received.’

Recent headlines:

[an error occurred while processing this directive]    • Atlanta and Fulton County news

Beamud, 56, will take over next month as executive director of Atlanta’s Citizen Review Board, which will soon investigate complaints against city law enforcement officers. It’s the second time the former police officer, prosecutor and police legal adviser will head a police oversight effort.

For almost two years, Beamud has been the police auditor in Eugene, Ore., where a sex scandal in the Police Department led to the city’s first-ever police oversight system.

Beamud knows police oversight systems often follow in the wake of a police scandal or an incident that has torn down the community’s trust for police officers.

Yes, she knows the story of Kathryn Johnston — the reason Beamud is coming to work in Atlanta.

Atlanta police narcotics officers shot and killed Johnston, 92, in November 2006 after a botched drug raid built around lies in a search warrant and bad information from an informant.

Two officers pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and federal charges and are awaiting sentencing. A third was found guilty of lying during an official investigation and was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison.

The Police Department shut down its narcotics unit, built a new one and city officials created the Citizen Review Board in March 2007.

Beamud’s goal is to rebuild the trust. Atlanta police need the residents’ help to solve crimes, she said, and residents need the police for a safe community.

As executive director, Beamud will report to the

11-member board of volunteers, which has something the board in Eugene didn’t: subpoena power. She will help coordinate investigations into police complaints and prepare reports for the board to review, among other duties. In the end, the board can recommend a police officer be disciplined or fired, but the city’s top law enforcement officials, including Police Chief Richard Pennington, get the final say.

Sharese Shields, the board’s chairwoman and spokeswoman, who has talked previously about wanting a transparent and accessible board, agreed to an interview for this story but did not make herself available despite numerous phone calls and

e-mails during a five-day period.

In Eugene, Beamud walked into a firestorm and, several colleagues say, handled it well, not bowing to advocacy groups or the police union or anyone else who tried to pressure her.

Her time in Eugene has not been without bumps. A Eugene police sergeant accused Beamud in February of misconduct grounded in bias — a charge deemed to be unfounded.

In June, Beamud accused Eugene Police Chief Robert Lehner of violating city law by not turning over details of a complaint about a city police officer.

“Both sides are really digging in their heels here,” Eugene City Council member Jennifer Solomon said. “It’s just gotten kind of ugly.”

Even so, Solomon and some other city officials say they believe Beamud did her job well since arriving in October 2006.

“We wish we could keep her here longer,” Mayor Kitty Piercy said.

Eugene enjoys a high level of civic involvement, and the convictions of two city police officers for using their authority to take advantage of women put even closer attention on Beamud and the Civilian Review Board, City Council President Chris Pryor said.

Beamud “did a really good job, in my opinion, of navigating that system,” he said.

Part of that involved not bending to special-interest groups, said John Brown, a Eugene real estate broker who served on the city’s police commission.

“She has been challenged by specific groups, by saying: ‘You need to do this. You need to do that,’ ” Brown said. “She did a wonderful job. She didn’t back down.”

Eugene’s police union clashed with Beamud from the start, but Piercy calls that “natural tension” between a police agency and the person hired to monitor it.

“There’s nobody at the Police Department that’s going to have anything positive to say about her,” said Willy Edewaard, a 22-year Eugene police veteran who is president of the officers’ union.

Edewaard, who was on one of the panels that interviewed her before she was hired, said Beamud made a bad first impression on him, and their working relationship soured soon after she arrived.

“She came across as confrontational,” he said. “She came across as someone who would be very pushy.”

The City Council, meanwhile, didn’t do Beamud any favors by not creating a detailed job description for her and by not meeting with her frequently, Pryor and Solomon said.

“I was not as good a boss as I could have been,” Pryor said.

Said Solomon: “She was just sort of handed an empty plate and told to go forth and make it happen.”

And she did, they say.

Beamud monitored about 50 internal police investigations, and the Civilian Review Board has reviewed 20 of those.

Yet Solomon said City Council members had to “prod” Beamud to keep them posted on what she was working on.

Solomon also didn’t like that Beamud called a news conference on Aug. 1 to discuss the police chief’s refusal to share documents about a May 22 complaint against an officer.

The chief contended it was a sensitive matter and bringing Beamud into the loop would have put someone in danger, said Beamud and city officials.

Beamud said he violated city law stating the auditor gets all complaints filed by the public.

“I’m disappointed that she took that route on her way out the door,” Solomon said of her decision to air the dispute in the media. “She didn’t give us the chance to talk about it as a group. Instead, the whole thing is being played out in the media.”

Lehner, the police chief, declined a request for an interview.

Beamud said she only held a news conference to respond to numerous inquiries she’d gotten. “I didn’t reach out to the press; they reached out to me,” Beamud said.

The misconduct accusation against Beamud came in February from Sgt. Ron Swanson, who alleged she was biased while working on an investigation into an officer. The Eugene City Council and Lane County District Attorney’s Office cleared Beamud of any wrongdoing.

Beamud’s time in Eugene was up on Friday, and she’s expected to start work in Atlanta on Sept. 2.

She said she’s excited to return to the East Coast and to start up a police oversight system all over again, minus the controversy.

“I’m not expecting to have the same experiences in Atlanta as I did here,” Beamud said.

If she does, “I think I will be prepared and I’ll know how to deal with it. I’ve developed some skills, I think, and I’m hoping to put those skills to work.”