When San Diego police arrested Muslah Abdul-Hafeez in 2024, he said they left his then-3-year-old daughter with a stranger in the shopping center.
“A stranger seen they was taking me and she came and grabbed my daughter, and I just, I threw my phone to her and I told her to call somebody,” he said.
The nonprofit Pillars of the Community filed a complaint on his behalf, demanding an investigation. It was three pages long. It gave the date and location of the incident. It cited six different policies and laws they believe the officers violated with explanations for each.
SDPD labeled the complaint “miscellaneous.”
SDPD spokesperson Lyndsay Winkley said they conducted a thorough investigation and found the allegations “frivolous,” defined by the Code of Civil Procedure as “totally and completely without merit or for the sole purpose of harassing an opposing party.”
At the time, Abdul-Hafeez didn’t know what the “miscellaneous” label technically meant, just that “they didn’t care about my kid.”
The Commission on Police Practices (CPP) are not entitled to review miscellaneous complaints, according to SDPD’s Internal Affairs operations manual.
San Diegans voted in 2020 to create the CPP to conduct independent police oversight.
The approved ballot measure read, in part: "The Commission would also be required to receive, register, review, and evaluate all complaints against City police officers. The Commission may investigate complaints, unless the complainant has requested that a complaint be handled without investigation or where no specific allegation or police officer can be identified."
But at their most recent meeting, CPP executive director Roger Smith said most complaints are labeled miscellaneous.
Members of the public can submit complaints against SDPD directly to the department or through the CPP.
Smith told the commission that in 2025 alone, 481 of the 723 complaints received by CPP were designated miscellaneous cases, not including cases that were resolved by other informal means or ones the complainant withdrew and didn’t intend to go through the full process. He said including those cases, the CPP can only review less than one out of every seven complaints.
Winkley said their data show 79% of complaints are labelled miscellaneous.
“This commission is being actively prevented from doing its work in the vast majority of complaints received,” Smith said. “Now this alone is a problem. The implications beyond this are an even bigger problem. It means the commission is not in position to take a view on the department’s complaint work.”
“A complaint may be classified as ‘miscellaneous’ for several reasons,” Winkley wrote by email. “These include, but are not limited to, complaints not directed at a specific Department member; those concerning Department-wide policies or protocols; complaints that are withdrawn; and those that, under current law, are determined to be unfounded, frivolous, or objectively without merit after the conclusion of an investigation.”
Every complaint is reviewed by a detective sergeant who conducts a preliminary investigation, she said. Given time and resource constraints, the department prioritizes the most serious cases for investigation based on these preliminary findings.
If they classify a complaint as miscellaneous, they prepare a memo summarizing the review and the basis for that classification, and submit it to an Internal Affairs lieutenant for approval.
In August, Chief Scott Wahl agreed to provide memos to the CPP for each miscellaneous complaint. But Smith said they haven’t received any.
Before the department can expand the kinds of cases given to CPP for review, Winkley said they have to move through a meet-and-confer process with the union – “a process that is underway.”
Smith said many questions arise from the cases the commission has looked at, begging the question: What do the other six-sevenths of cases look like?
“And we don’t know the answer to that question,” he said. “We’re not in a position to find out.”
The existence of what she called a “loophole” to police oversight didn’t surprise Mitchelle Woodson, legal director for Pillars of the Community – but the sheer magnitude of it did.
“Really just puts us in a position to say, how could we ever trust the police?” she said. “Is there any process that will hold them accountable, or will they just continue to find the loopholes to not face the criticism straight on?”
Woodson still sees value in filing the complaints, even if they never make it out of Internal Affairs.
“In the same ways that the police document our community members, right – it makes it easier for them to keep track of our community members, it makes it easier for them to violate their rights – and so the idea of filing complaints kind of flips a script on the officers, right? To make sure that we're documenting these encounters so we have evidence to use in court,” she said.
Filing complaints provides data to support the experiences of community members harmed by police, and provides a paper trail on which officers appear in these complaints more often than others, she said.
“We don't trust that the process is going to ultimately change the system in a way that builds a true, trusted relationship with the police. We're doing this because we're showing the flaws in the system. It's the only way to point out the flaws in this system. It's the only way to point out the harm that's being caused in the community,” she said.
Winkley said by email: “The Department recognizes the important role complaint investigations play in accountability and maintaining public trust, and approaches that process with the seriousness it deserves.”
Meanwhile, members of the public are asking the CPP to address the issue of miscellaneous complaints head-on.
“What you gon’ do now?” asked Francine Maxwell, who lives in southeastern San Diego, at the CPP meeting.
“We’ve been knowing what we know,” she said. “But we ask you, our commissioners, to stand in front. Hold the line. Because that’s what this was elected for.”
CPP’s director of media relations said they were unable to answer by KPBS’s deadline why the police department is able to limit the extent of the commission’s complaint oversight. The City of San Diego also did not answer that question by deadline.
