In the midst of the 24/7 attention he was giving to the relentless march of snowstorms last week, Mayor Martin Walsh announced that he had appointed two new members to the civilian board that oversees complaints alleging police misconduct while reappointing a third member who had been sitting alone on the panel since last fall.

The board, known as the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel (COOP), now has its full complement: Natashia Tidwell, an associate professor at New England Law and former Cambridge police officer, who has been a member since 2011; J. Larry Mayes, the vice president of programs for Catholic Charities; and Judge Regina Quinlan, who sat for 20 years in Superior Court and is now one of the five members of the State Ethics Commission.

While community members had high praise for the appointees, some raised questions that have lingered for years about the body’s efficacy as an oversight mechanism for the police department.

State Rep. Evandro Carvalho said on Monday that he was impressed by the nominations. He added that he was “very familiar” with Mayes’s work in the community and felt that Judge Quinlan’s membership on the ethics board spoke to her “credibility.” He said, too, that he was pleased that Mayor Walsh “has taken this matter very seriously.”

Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney at the ACLU said in a phone interview that Judge Quinlan was “very smart” and “very tough” and would make a good addition to the panel. She added, however, that she thought the bigger issue at hand was the structure of the board, which was created in 2007 under executive order by Mayor Menino.

The COOP does not conduct its own investigations, but rather deals with appeals of police internal investigations that are not ruled in favor of a civilian’s complaint. The panel reviews a mix of randomly sampled cases and also any appeals brought by a civilian within 14 days of an initial police investigation that the civilian found unsatisfactory.

Wunsch said that Mayor Walsh ought to “go back and consider” a change to the COOP, including the issue of its “limited scope of review.”

Similarly, Boston attorney Howard Friedman, who focuses on civil rights and police misconduct litigation, said that while Tidwell has “done a good job,” he considers the board’s structure “flawed,” given the “limited role” that the panel has been given. He also pointed to the long delays involved in the appeals process as a major problem that prevents many people from seeking out the panel’s help.

As an example, Friedman provided the Reporter with a letter that one of his clients had received from the COOP that offered its apologies because it “had been more than five years since the incident giving rise to your complaint occurred and approximately three years since you notified the police department of your intent to appeal the Internal Affairs Division (IAD) findings.” At the conclusion of that case, the IAD did in fact amend its original findings to be in line with the civilian’s complaints against the officer, although the officer was retired by that point.

Some critics have pointed to the research of Northeastern University criminologist Jack McDevitt as favoring a differently structured civilian oversight panel with more teeth. McDevitt’s 2005 report helped form the basis structure for the COOP. When reached by phone on Tuesday, however, McDevitt said that the panel’s current structure matches the recommendations that he provided at the time.

He added that while a more investigatory civilian review panel did work in other cities such as Washington DC, such bodies were also “incredibly expensive.” He also referred to the more independent civilian review board utilized in neighboring Cambridge, where he said officers who are brought before the board “all take the Fifth Amendment” and refuse to speak to the board.

For all that, there seems to be a sense among those involved with COOP today that changes may be in the offing. Eugene O’Flaherty, the city’s legal counsel, billed the community meeting in January as part of the process of “figuring out the scope” of the COOP.

When asked for comment on Tuesday, the mayor’s spokesperson, Melina Schuler, said via email that his top priority had been to “reconstitute the COOP board.” Schuler added that “as the board gets under way, the mayor is open to suggestions relative to the structure of the COOP, and will look to its members to make recommendations.”