A public meeting set for Thursday night (Jan. 8) at St. Peter’s Teen Center will review the city of Boston’s current system for reviewing civilian complaints against police officers. The meeting will feature comments from Eugene O’Flaherty, the city’s corporation counsel who oversees the three-member board that reviews complaints.

The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in the teen center, located at 278 Bowdoin St. It is the third in a series of sessions to discuss police-community relations in the wake of controversial incidents in Missouri and New York that have triggered demonstrations in Boston and elsewhere.

The meeting is being organized by Rev. Jeffrey Brown, a Dorchester resident who is the founder of the non-profit organization Rebuilding Every Community Around Peace (RECAP), a national initiative that seeks to “mobilize cities across the US to end the era of gang violence.” It is modeled on his efforts here in Boston as a past leader of the Ten Point Coalition.

“I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to give some community feedback and a sense of what the community is looking for in their understanding of this process of citizen complaints,” said Brown. “I think we’ve caught this administration at the right moment as they’re building and constructing their system.”

Watch: Rev. Brown discusses meetings on BNN-TV's Neighborhood Network News with Chris Lovett

Police-Community Dialogues Continue from Chris Lovett on Vimeo.

O’Flaherty, who acts as the chief lawyer for the city, is a former state representative who once chaired the Legislature’s Committee on the Judiciary. One of his tasks as corporation counsel has been to review the way the city processes complaints against police.

The chief mechanism for oversight comes from the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel (Co-Op), a three-person independent civilian board appointed by the mayor that is “empowered to review Boston Police Department internal investigations cases appealed by complainants.” The panel was established by Mayor Thomas Menino in 2007.

O’Flaherty told the Reporter this week that two members of the panel have indicated that they do not intend to stay on. A third panelist, Natasha Tidwell, will remain an active board member, he said.

“My initial assignment was to find two individuals that would want to serve on the Co-Op board,” said O’Flaherty. “That has proven to be more vexing than I thought it would be.”

Some prospective panelists have “respectfully declined” invitations to serve,” he said. “Eventually, we will have the board constituted and the mayor has instructed me that this is a priority,” said O’Flaherty. “I have been recipient of many recommendations on how the board might be expanded in terms of their powers and scope. We’ve been going through all of that, not in a formal, public way, but mostly internally.”

O’Flaherty said he welcomed Thursday’s meeting as a chance to hear more input from residents about what they hope to see from the oversight panel. He said that any changes to the structure of the board would take time to finalize and would need to pass muster with the police commissioner and city councilors.

“I’m hoping to listen more than I speak, because I’m still being educated on this,” said O’Flaherty. “A huge part of this is what is the community feeling. The ones that I have heard from are saying our needs haven’t been met yet.”

Rev. Brown said that the meeting is the third in a series triggered by events in Ferguson, MO. An initial meeting happened the day after a grand jury chose not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson; a subsequent meeting to discuss Boston Police procedures around officer-involved shootings was held last month at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury.

“There’s a lot of concern around the community about what has happened here in Boston. We decided to take it head on and talk about police-community relations,” said Brown. “This meeting will focus more on what happens in terms of the process when someone has a complaint and the Co-Op. A lot of people are wondering about this, so this particular forum will be more informational than anything else.”