text: My question: If the Police Commission represents the people, why are they not elected positions?  Although they can still be volunteers, why don't the voters get to decide who sits in the seats?  The mayor appointing the commission - whether it be Caldwell or not - doesn't hold up as a check and balance of the system.  It seems susceptible to cronyism.  
  
  And as for the transparency of the Commission and Internal Affairs, why can't they do like we do in Intelligence and redact all the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from the reports?  That too would protect the identities of the officers.  Because think about this:  Some reporter from the New York Times can levy a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request against me and force me by law to produce derivatives of highly classified national security information for some story he's writing in the newspaper, but I can't find out what HPD did to discipline an officer.  That doesn't make sense to me.