The chairman of the Baltimore City Council’s Public Safety Committee is questioning whether the city’s civilian-led oversight boards need to be shielded from the influence of mayoral administration officials who oversee the Police Department and manage the city’s liabilities.

Committee Chairman Mark Conway on Tuesday lodged his toughest criticism yet of how Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has enforced police accountability, calling one civilian-led independent review board “a watchdog whose leash remains in the hands of the mayor.”

“The board as it stands today is structurally dependent on the very administration it is meant to oversee,” Conway said in his opening remarks to the hourslong committee hearing. The mayor’s “Office of Equity and Civil Rights treats the Police Accountability Board as a subordinate, rather than an independent body.”

At the hearing, members of Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration conceded that there have been some growing pains in the recently implemented police accountability boards. But they also maintained that the various boards and city officials have good working relationships.

Amber Green, director of the mayor’s civil rights office, said at the hearing that she has personally asked members of the oversight boards if there was anything her office was not providing that they needed and had received no response.

Green also said her office attempted to meet directly with Conway to discuss the issue, but he was not available.

“It’s unfortunate to have this hearing today, where we weren’t able to meet with you all to really discuss that in detail and answer any questions you have,” Green said.

Conway’s heightened criticism comes on the heels of a string of police controversies earlier this year that challenged a decade of efforts by city leaders to rebuild public trust in policing.

While the city remains under a federal consent decree due to an investigation into unconstitutional policing practices, in many ways, the Justice Department is now largely retreating from its oversight function.

That shifting federal landscape has fueled a growing sense of urgency among some local elected officials to safeguard the city’s police reforms from a future mayoral administration that might be less sympathetic to them.

There is also a political calculus to the councilman’s outspokenness — Conway is running for Congress.

Last month, he began his campaign to unseat longtime U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, and Scott is one of Mfume’s biggest supporters. For more than a year Conway has bumped heads with Scott on a host of issues, and part of his congressional pitch is the city’s need for new blood, and new ideas.

In an interview after the hearing, Conway said that in terms of police accountability over the last year, “everything has changed.”

With federal immigration officers “busting people’s windows open and pulling folks out of cars,” Conway said it was “hard to imagine that very same federal government is going to be a true arbiter of justice in incidents where local police are overstepping their boundaries.”

The city’s two police accountability boards were part of a package of statewide reforms passed by lawmakers in 2021. The law creating them, Conway said, limits the City Council’s ability to arm the boards with fully independent attorneys or keep them completely separate from city government. But the chairman said he was looking into “ways for us to figure out how to not have undue influence from the mayor.”

“We have to sort out exactly what that would look like,” Conway said.

Like other jurisdictions in Maryland, the city has a Police Accountability Board and a five-person administrative charging committee, both of which are run by citizens. But the boards are also staffed and advised by administration officials.

The larger accountability board handles policy questions and systemic issues, while the leaner charging committee reviews misconduct cases and recommends discipline.

Since its inception years ago, accountability board members have complained about difficulties accessing data and having more autonomy over its budget. Charging committee members, meanwhile, have called for unbiased legal advice and more timely information from the Police Department.

Ultimately, the Scott administration has so far avoided directly answering whether it believes the accountability board and the charging committee should be fully independent from city operations.

Council Member Zac Blanchard, the vice chairman of the Public Safety Committee, also questioned whether the accountability boards needed more independence.

“We have a mayor who’s, in my impression, really sympathetic to these concerns right now,” Blanchard said. “There’s no guarantee of that in the future.”

The state law creating the city’s administrative charging committee allowed for it to have subpoena power, and the ability to require further investigation from the Police Department. But Jesmond Riggins, a private attorney who serves on the committee, said those powers “exist on paper, but in practice, they are in name only.”

Deputy Commissioner Brian Nadeau, of the Baltimore Police Department’s Public Integrity Bureau, pushed back on some of Riggins’ other statements, denying that requests for more information have gone ignored.

Despite concerns over the process, the citizen-led committee reviewed hundreds of cases in the last year. The charging committee heard 1,190 cases across the 2025 fiscal year and recommended administrative charges in 758 of them, according to city data presented at the hearing.

Banner reporter Lee O. Sanderlin contributed to this story