Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen introduced legislation on Tuesday that would change the oversight process for special police officers in the District. The bill follows several news reports highlighting a lack of record-keeping and thorough oversight from the Metropolitan Police Department, which is currently tasked with investigating most SPO complaints.

The legislation would charge the Office of Police Complaints, an independent agency which already handles complaints against MPD officers, with investigating complaints against special police officers, too.

“Right now, it’s hard to get answers on even the most basic information such as the total number of complaints filed annually against special police officers, let alone ensuring each complaint was investigated,” said Councilmember Allen in a press release announcing the bill. “District residents deserve to feel safe, and any bad actors who abuse their policing powers have to know they will be held accountable.”

Special police officers are officers employed to protect a specific property, like a housing complex or a government building. They’re licensed by the District government to carry a gun and arrest people on the property they’ve been assigned. There are more than 7,500 of these officers licensed in D.C, according NBC 4.

Special police officers have been subject to several high-profile complaints, including the 2015 death of Alonzo Smith, who died while in the custody of special police officers in an apartment building in Southeast. Also that year, special police officers killed 74-year-old James McBride, severely injuring him during a struggle outside of Medstar Washington Hospital Center. The Office of the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner held that the cause of McBride’s death was “blunt force injuries of neck, with cervical spinal cord transection and vertebral artery compression,” and two special police officers were indicted.

After those two deaths, D.C. government officials proposed doubling training hours for special police officers from 40 to 80, and tripling yearly recertification training from eight hours to 24 hours. The proposal never became law.

Earlier this year, NBC 4 began reporting on three separate complaints against one special police officer, John Simon, who was assigned to the Frederick Douglass Garden Apartments in Southeast. Three D.C. residents wanted to file complaints and take action against Simon after interactions where they said he used excessive force. But they all said that MPD’s Security Officers Management Branch was dismissive of their concerns and did not respond to follow-up questions about the investigations into Simon. Per NBC, the department declined to give one resident records of a complaint he’d made, and another was reportedly referred to the security company the officer worked for when she tried to make a complaint.

MPD also declined to provide NBC with a copy of those complaints, saying it would be “an invasion of personal privacy.” Eventually, the police department admitted that it didn’t keep records of complaints made against SPOs.

According to Allen, the investigations into these complaints are conducted variously by MPD, the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (which issues SPO permits), and the private security company that employs the officer. The purpose of the bill is to give all the control for those investigations to an independent body already tasked with this kind of work.

Because there is no actual record of the number of complaints against SPOs in the District, it’s hard to know how much the bill, if it passes, would increase the workload for the Office of Police Complaints.

“When we trust someone with the powers to arrest and carry a firearm, there has to be a strong and independent process for residents to file complaints when that power is abused. Right now, for alleged misconduct by Special Police Officers, there seems to be no guarantee of an investigation,” Allen, who also chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, said in the release.

Every other member of the D.C. Council co-introduced the bill with Allen.