Internal oversight is oxymoronic.

The City Inspector General Neftali Carrasquillo Jr. has resigned, link.  Carrasquillo says he isn't being allowed to do his job.

The City Council is concerned that the inspector-general system needs to be fixed. 

Apparently, many of the complaints that his office would normally investigate, are being investigated by private investigators whose findings then belong to the Mayor Richard Berry administration, to publish or to hide.

One of the private investigators is Robert Caswell Investigations, who get a lot of Berry's contract work.  He gets a lot of business from APS as well.  Apparently, he is the go to guy for pols and public servants who want to find out what in the hell happened and then keep the findings to themselves.

APS hired Caswell to investigate felony criminal misconduct by senior APS administrators, and now the findings are being keep secret from public knowledge by both APS and Caswell, link, in blatant disregard for public records law.

When there is incompetence and corruption in government, though the responsibility flows up, accountability diminishes in direct proportion.  One of the most effective ways to diminish (the likelihood of) accountability, it is to control the spread of truth.

Robert Caswell investigates corruption and incompetence in the spending of public resources and in the wielding of public power.  He earned $300K from the city alone last year; and no telling how much from APS.  Seriously, there is no telling.  The city's website discloses the amount they paid Caswell last year; APS has no such disclosure on their own "award winning" website.

Why are Caswell's investigations and findings secret from the public?  Why are we not entitled to the truth about politicians and public servants who have betrayed our trust and stolen our resources?  Why do they get to simply slip away unscathed?

Most fundamentally, why are politicians and public servants allowed investigate their own conduct and competence in the first place?  It is a manifest conflict of interests to allow politicians and public servants to redact their own record.


There are two kinds of oversight; internal and external.
Internal oversight creates the appearance of a conflict of interests and is unacceptable for that reason alone.  That leaves only independent and impartial external investigations and review.

So why do we allow internal investigations at all?  Why do we allow police departments to have internal affairs, why to we all school systems to field publicly funded private police forces, why do we allow Perry and Berry to ever be the only ones who hold in their hands, the unvarnished truth about their own conduct and competence?

When an investigation reveals widespread problems, the people start wondering whether the politicians and public servants they have hired, are up to the task.  It is to their advantage of pols and public servants, to be able to hide the truth about their inability to eliminate the circumstances that enable corruption and incompetence below them.

The City Council will discuss the future of the Inspector Generals Office and authority in a meeting late in January.  It represents an opportunity for the people to insist upon truly independent oversight over the spending of their power and resources.  It represents an opportunity to insist that self investigations of complaints is at once and for all, prohibited in politics and public service.