OIG follow-up audit finds SPD chiefs disciplined officers at minimum or below recommended ranges in 50-69% of cases; 106 arbitration appeals pending, 82 carried over from 2021

Reform implication

This audit is a confession dressed as a follow-up. The 2021 audit told the City that SPD chiefs were systematically pulling discipline below recommended ranges and that mitigating-factor citations outpaced aggravating-factor citations by 140%. The 2024 follow-up confirms the pattern not only persisted but in some years got worse: 69% of cases ending at or below the minimum range, 92% in the subset where only a mitigating factor was identified.

The political timing matters. Mayor Harrell fired Adrian Diaz on December 18, 2024, two days after this audit dropped, for unrelated misconduct involving a chief-of-staff affair. The disciplinary determinations story got buried under the firing. That is convenient for the City, because the audit's actual finding is structural: two consecutive chiefs (Best then Diaz) ran the same pattern, which means the next chief will face the same incentives unless something in the underlying process changes.

OIG could have recommended a great deal here and chose not to. The audit explicitly states it "did not assess whether aggravating or mitigating factors were valid." It does not propose a written rubric. It does not propose limits on Loudermill mitigating-factor introduction. It does not propose external review of below-range determinations. It does not propose anything about the 106 pending arbitration appeals, 82 of which have been pending since the 2021 audit. The one recommendation it does make — document the DCM timeline expectation in the OPA manual — is procedural housekeeping.

The reform implication is twofold.

First, the Inspector General regime needs sharper teeth. OIG can document patterns but cannot compel structural change. The 2017 Accountability Ordinance's design — PSCSC as primary appellate body — has not been operationalized in seven years, and OIG's audit notes this without prescribing a fix. That is the structural-failure pattern that consent-decree-era reforms were meant to break.

Second, the pattern this audit describes is exactly the upstream mechanism behind the litigation totals in the 2025 OIG Claims and Lawsuits Report. When 9.1% of OPA allegations are sustained on cases that produced $13M in settlements, and the Chief's discipline on sustained cases trends to the minimum, the City is paying tort settlements for conduct that produces minimal officer-level accountability. That is the accountability gap the federal Consent Decree was supposed to close. The Consent Decree lifted in September 2025. The gap is documented and unaddressed.