By Joe Gamm
News & Record
GREENSBORO, N.C. — In early February, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch began tours of cities whose police departments illustrate what she considers to be “pillars” of 21st-century policing.
Lynch first visited Miami on Feb. 11-12, leaving the same day the city announced a civil rights settlement in which her agency will monitor police training, supervision and investigations into officer-involved shootings. She arrived at Portland, Ore., last week and announced new U.S. Department of Justice awards for community policing.
She soon will visit Fayetteville, a city whose police department has a history of strained relations with the public but has improved on the public’s trust, according to U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Kevin Lewis. When Lynch will visit Fayetteville has not been determined, Lewis said. The city visits will probably be spaced out by a couple of months.
“She wants people giving her direct feedback,” he said.
Lynch is focusing “on communities that have had strained relationships but have managed to strengthen that relationship,” Lewis said.
Other cities she is scheduled to visit include Indianapolis, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
In May, President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing released its report on the rifts between the public and local law-enforcement agencies that serve them.
The White House report laid out six general pillars of policing and provided 59 recommendations to improve interactions between departments and their communities.
The pillars include: Building trust and legitimacy, policy and oversight, technology and social media, community policing and crime reduction, training and education, and officer wellness and safety. Each category contained recommendations on building the pillars.
For example, a recommendation for training suggested that police academies engage communities by letting the public evaluate and offer input into its training, and letting some members of the public go through the courses if they so chose.
Another of the recommendations, this one for building trust and legitimacy, was for a department to strive to reflect the diversity of its communities.
After release of the report, the DOJ sought examples of departments that were already implementing those recommendations.
“We asked law enforcement which cities were doing a great job,” Lewis said.
Fayetteville was among them.
Shortly after his 2013 selection as Fayetteville’s police chief, Harold Medlock began implementing the DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing Services methods.
Community-oriented policing uses data and public and private partnerships to help reduce crime.
“One of the main ones (recommendations) is fair and impartial training,” Lewis said. “They do that at the Fayetteville Police Department. They’ve seen a 20 percent decrease in overall complaints.”
That wasn’t easy, Medlock said.
“When I came in, there were a lot of people that were angry and frustrated,” he said. “A lot of community leaders were angry and frustrated. A lot of my officers were angry and frustrated.”
Most just wanted to be heard.
A phrase he often heard, one that a New York Times article also used to describe police practices in both Fayetteville and Greensboro, was “driving while black,” he said.
The phrase refers to black drivers being more likely than white drivers to be pulled over for minor infractions and searched.
“I don’t disagree that this is the case,” Medlock said. “The disparity still exists in those traffic stops, but it’s coming down.”
Because police should not be making stops in Fayetteville just to search a vehicle, Medlock said, the department de-emphasized regulatory traffic stops — such as those conducted for unused seat belts, a broken tail light or an expired registration. In those cases, drivers oftentimes feel that they have no choice but to consent to a search, even though they can refuse if an officer asks for consent to search a vehicle. The Fayetteville City Council has since instituted a “consent to search” form. After the department started using the forms, the number of consent searches dropped, he said.
The department also recently began using body-worn cameras.
High-ranking members of the department traveled to Greensboro in December to discuss the technology, Greensboro Police Chief Wayne Scott said.
“They’re still working through what to do with them,” he said.
Because Greensboro was one of the first cities to issue body-worn cameras to all its officers, other agencies check with the agency to see how the devices might work for them, he said.
And like Fayetteville, Greensboro has been rolling out its own COPS program, which it calls Neighborhood Oriented Policing. The NOP has a bit of a geographical focus, placing more police on the streets in areas intended to cut down their response times.
“We looked at ‘How often do our officers patrol the areas where they’re assigned?’ ” he said. “More often than not, they had been called out of their area.”
The department started the shift last year. It also organized walks through communities. Command staff wanted residents to get to know the officers who serve them.
“We did special assignments, when we went out and walked neighborhoods,” Scott said. “We were just going out, knocking on doors, sitting on porches and talking.”
The department created a new Street Crimes Unit, which uses information provided by the department’s Criminal Intelligence Squad, knowledge of regular offenders and crime data to resolve spikes in crime, he said.
The 100th Police Academy (a new name for Greensboro’s school) began in February.
The new academy will set aside significant class time to focus on communications.
“How do you become an active listener?” Scott asked. “How do you communicate when tension is up? Saying ‘Calm down’ usually doesn’t calm anybody down.”
So, cadets will learn to read body language and incorporate communication in other policing techniques, like “soft hands,” which is the use of placing a hand on a person to guide, hold or restrain them with minimal force.
To help cadets become more invested in communities, for the first time, they will be required as part of their training to participate in community events, such as “Tip-a-Cop,” in which officers serve tables at a day for charity. They donate their tips to Special Olympics.
“To my knowledge, we’ve never even talked to them about that,” Scott said. “There’s no better way to (make them part of the community) than that.”
A reason Lynch first visited the Miami-Dade Police Department was to highlight its recognition as a department whose officers integrate into their neighborhoods, Lewis said.
The department emphasizes police officers becoming a part of the community — just as much as anyone else, he said. “Their children go to school there. The community is an extension of their own family.”
Lynch’s office thinks that philosophy can be adopted by agencies across the country, he said.
“It was more than just, ‘Hey, I feel safe,’” Lewis said. “Law enforcement officers were going above and beyond to reduce violence and make them feel safer.”
Officers were solving problems on a local level.
As part of the new Greensboro academy, cadets will learn to be problem solvers, Scott said. They’ll possibly have to work with other agencies in the city.
For instance, officers and firefighters in early 2014 were being called to Heritage House three to five times a day, Scott said.
“We had shootings. We had drug dealing,” he said. “It was a number of things. That problem created a drain on city resources and the way police calls and fire service calls were handled.”
A continuing problem is getting the demographics of cadets to match that of the city, Scott said.
According to city data released in January, the population has pushed above 282,000. About 53 percent of those residents are nonwhite.
About 40 percent of the 100th Academy is nonwhite.
“That’s not right where the city is. I know that,” he said.
Still, he said, “We’re making great strides.”
The Greensboro Police Department has made an all-out push to recruit minorities through radio and TV ads. It also bought ads sprawled across city buses featuring smiling faces of African American and Hispanic men and women. The department advertises in Spanish-language newspapers, at job fairs, and has designated three officers to recruit students and veterans.
Still, the department has critics, particularly after the New York Times article featured Greensboro as a city with a significant disparity between the number of black drivers and the number of white drivers pulled over for equipment infractions.
In November, Scott temporarily suspended officers from making stops for minor traffic infractions, such as broken headlights. The department is analyzing data from the first 90 days of the order.
The department has received an analysis of traffic stop data, in which researchers looked at about 20 factors that lead to decisions to conduct traffic stops, he said. It is producing a summary report to release along with the analysis.
“It’s an extremely complicated question,” Scott said. “There are not any … quick fixes. I am going to get the report out by the end of March.”
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