2016-07-01 1

Residents' views echo critical report on APD

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Posted: July 1, 2016 - 7:09pm

As a lifelong resident of the predominantly black North Heights neighborhood, Keith Grays remembers police officers on bicycles that regularly patrolled his neighborhood.

“They participated in playing basketball with the kids,” the 58-year-old civic leader said of the patrol, which was based out of the now-closed North Branch YMCA. “You would see them all over the neighborhood on bicycles.”

Grays saw community policing efforts start to disintegrate within the last decade, but he hopes the practice will eventually be reinstituted: “You get to know the officers in your neighborhood, in your community. They become part of the family,” he said. “They know the pulse of the community.”

Gray’s hopes were echoed by an independent audit of Amarillo Police Department conducted by Colorado consulting firm KRW Associates LLC.

The 86-page report describes a department lacking leadership, communication and a clear vision as well as a number of other issues, including the way police interact with the community.

The KRW report put forth 49 recommendations for improving the police department.

Among those recommendations was the need to nail down an exact definition of community policing.

“Although the APD professes to be involved in community policing, it is not practiced in the APD. In fact, there is little evidence of community policing being practiced or discussed,” the review read.

The KRW report recommended reviving the bicycle patrols and community police outposts, like the one that operated out of the North Branch YMCA, as a way to fight a perceived adversarial presence.

“Relationships are lacking; we only seem to interact with the police when they are writing us tickets,” one of the more than 300 people interviewed for the report was quoted as saying.

During an October news conference about police reform, Amarillo City Councilman Elisha Demerson criticized what he called a reactive approach to policing. Demerson called for the department to increase community policing efforts and assign officers to specific geographic areas so they can better build relationships with residents.

In a written response, now-retired Police Chief Robert Taylor said, “Our street officers are assigned to police beats, and although officers will be transferred around from time to time, for the most part, the same officer rides the same beat every day they work.”

“APD is engaged in community policing and welcomes any opportunity to increase our efforts in this area,” he also wrote.

Among Taylor’s examples of community policing practiced by APD were a citizens police academy, programs to teach young children about law enforcement, special units that are assigned to correct “neighborhood crime problems” and the Crime Prevention Unit, which is tasked with providing education to the community.

Calls Thursday and Friday to Amarillo Police Department leaders seeking comment for this story were not returned.

“I realize this is a little critical, but we can’t be afraid to take someone in,” Taylor said at an Amarillo City Council meeting Tuesday about allowing consultants into the daily operations of the police department.

“This is how we grow. This is how we become a better police department. Now that we are looking toward the future, we are going to need more support.”

The KRW report also advised the department to take a number of steps, such as initiating department and community dialogue, to get rid of a perception of police discrimination, especially when it comes to traffic stops.

Jeff Blackburn, a local civil rights lawyer, said he saw the report as a positive step, but he looked at community policing as merely a Band-Aid fix that won’t solve larger structural problems.

“I think the biggest reason that the police are poorly perceived in the community is that they’re acting as the enforcement arm of a municipal court system that is way out of control and jailing people because they are poor,” said Blackburn, who is litigating a civil lawsuit against the city for what he says is an unlawful policy of incarcerating people who are unable to pay misdemeanor fines.

“As long as you have that going on, the police who are the ones out there having to arrest people on these warrants that are issued are going to be getting a bum rap.”

In 2015, Blackburn and the Rev. Herman Moore founded Amarillo Citizens for Open Government with a goal of “addressing dysfunction” in the local criminal justice system.

The organization was formed after an incident involving a black man named Robert Johnson, who rode his bicycle past police patrol cars responding to a separate incident.

Johnson was forcefully apprehended by Amarillo police officers and arrested on a marijuana possession charge.

Police officers were cleared of an excessive force complaint in the incident, which many viewed as an instance of police brutality and evidence planting, creating tension between law enforcement and local minority groups.

Charges against Johnson were dropped after an examination revealed that Johnson had an intellectual level equivalent to a 6-year-old.

Members of ACOG read the dismissal as a cover-up.

Blackburn said the incident demonstrated a need for a civilian review board to oversee the police department complaint process, something that he was disappointed to not see recommended in the audit.

In August, ACOG published a report authored by Blackburn that examined the Potter County Attorney’s Office.

The report argued that the county attorney had encouraged and facilitated police abuse by creating a system that prosecutes a large number of misdemeanor crimes that rely on a police officer’s discretion, such as resisting arrest or failure to identify.

“Police in Amarillo know that their charges, no matter how subjective or unfounded, will likely be accepted,” the report, which called for a top-to-bottom audit of the county attorney’s office, read.

“It’s a holistic problem and you have to have a holistic solution,” Blackburn said of the image problem the police were described as facing in the audit.

“The police are really the symptom and not the disease,” he said, “and you can’t cure the symptoms without going after the disease.”

Demerson said he was pleased with the KRW audit. Improving police diversity — one of the proposals that Demerson laid out during his October call for reform — was a recommendation included in the KRW review.

The 2015 Amarillo Police Department annual report showed an overwhelmingly white police force, with 296 white officers accounting for nearly 84 percent of the department strength.

The remainder of the force was composed of 49 Hispanic officers, four black officers and two Native American officers.

And, aside from the interim chief the city is bringing in from Plano to replace Taylor, who announced his retirement shortly before the release of the KRW audit, minority officers have yet to break into the upper echelons of the police department.

It was just last year that the police department saw its first black sergeant. The first Hispanic officer was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in May.

“I don’t think that it’s necessarily as critical to have a one-to-one matchup per say, but I think that the police force certainly needs to be reflective of the community,” Demerson said.

He said he hoped Interim Chief Ed Drain, an assistant chief at Plano Police Department who is essentially on loan, will begin instituting some of the ideas outlined in the KRW report and address some of the “low-hanging fruit” recommendations.

Larger recommendations will likely be left for a new permanent police chief. Interim City Manager Terry Childers has said the replacement process will likely take three to four months.

Demerson said, “I will be suggesting to the council that we be furnished with a 30-, 60-, 90-day implementation plan that will give us some idea of those recommendations that can be adopted and enacted immediately and also a plan for the implementation of those recommendations that will require additional time.”

He added, “What we don’t want is just another report that will be placed on the shelf.”