BLUE STEEL
POLICE CHIEF RESISTED CALLS TO USE CHEMICAL GAS ON LOOTERS AFTER FLOYD KILLING. SHE TAKES AIM AT A FLAWED POLICE SYSTEM AND PRESIDENT
A NEW ROSS born police chief in America who refused to bow to pressure to use chemical gas on looters during a tense standoff in which weapons were fired, has called for changes to how police are trained and the banning of police use of choke holds in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
Jennifer Tejada retired as Chief of Police in Emeryville on Friday, two weeks after the most frightening experience of her long career – looting and rioting by 1,000 people, some of whom were armed, in late May. Originally a Stacey from New Ross, she emigrated to America in 1987 and over the following years climbed the ranks to be a leader in progressive, community based policing, priding herself on her work in building trust within communities of colour. She watched the video footage of Mr Floyd being killed, like tens of millions across the world did. Speaking on the day of his funeral, she said: ‘It is horrendous. It’s just tragic and I just can’t wrap my head around what happened because we don’t train to do that.’
She said she was gob-smacked watching it. ‘I think words fail how deeply saddened I was at what I was seeing and just embarrassed for our profession and just looking at that arrogance of that officer who had his knee on Mr Floyd’s neck. That was one of the most troubling aspects of it. The arrogance of his face, the way he had his hand in his pocket; I looked at him thinking this is just sheer arrogance.’
She said there are other elements that contributed to what happened, none of which are justifiable or excusable. ‘Two of the officers were fresh out of training and when you examine the power dynamic between someone who is fresh out of training and a veteran officer, generally the newer officer is not empowered or trained to interfere. They are told they should, but you are looking at a paramilitary organisation so that element was present in at least two of the officers, and to be quite honest I don’t know if he would have stopped if they tried to stop him, he was so arrogant in is demeanour.’
Chief Tajeda said a new, responsive approach is needed to train police officers: ‘When I see excessive use of force I also look at it through the lens of how have we resourced our people to be the best that they can be on the street because the profession of policing is a constant drip of stress and trauma in an officer’s life and we have done a very bad job of resourcing our first responders to manage that, so there is no doubt in my mind that most officers suffer from occupational trauma that has gone untreated.
‘If we are going to change the landscape of law enforcement today we have to look at not just how officers are controlling external situations but also how we control what is going on internally when they are responding to calls. We know that we are in a situation that is stressful we enter into a situation where the amygdala responds and we enter into a fight or flight or freeze response, so unless we are aware of that and we teach our cops how to know that is happening and how to bring the frontal cortex back online so they have cognitive acuity unless we teach them that we are not going to have reform.’
She said: ‘It’s about weeding out the bad cops and it’s about training to optimum performance which has to include things like mindfulness, compassion cultivation that address the erosion of the soul of the cop, the soul of the human behind the badge because of that constant drip of stress and trauma.’
She doesn’t watch the news anymore because she can’t stand to see President Trump. ‘The last couple of months have been so disappointing in the lack of leadership in the White House. For me he represents the worst of humanity and when we are in the business of othering – which is what he is doing – it’s creating a divide and it’s creating animosity between groups. We are in the business of destroying humanity and creating hostility and certainly not working towards creating peace, collaboration and respect from everybody, which is what most people want.
‘He is not an idiot. He’s very, very clever and he knows exactly what he is doing which makes it all the more troubling. He is speaking to people who are looking for a cause. They are looking for someone to justify their feelings; to justify the deep rooted underbelly of society and he is fuelling that.’
Widespread, organised looting happened in Emeryville – a town about 30 minutes from San Francisco – over the last weekend of May and the New Ross woman found herself facing an explosive situation.
It started at 7 p.m. that Saturday and Chief Tajeda led her police crews for the following eight hours, during which six of them were shot at multiple times. ‘There is a distinction between the looting and the protests. As a police chief I have a duty to ensure that people’s First Amendment rights are protected, which I do and we were prepared to protect the protestors and let them exercise their First Amendment rights. What happened in Emeryville also happened in other cities. We had organised crime and looting occurred. We probably had 1,000 looters all throughout the city. I was out there and I saw one person, a woman with a sign that said RIP George Floyd and she was almost knocked down.’
Aged from 14 to 28, the looters stormed large stores and supermarkets. ‘They came in car loads. They got dropped off at predesignated points. They jumped out of the car and ran to loot stores. You’re talking 40 and 50 cars at a time; they jumped out, looted the store, went back to the car. Got in with all their goods, drove to the predesignated stash points where a truck was waiting, went back to the next retail area did the same thing; it was very well organised.’
Throughout police had to hold the line to prevent further looting. ‘It was really scary, I have not been in anything like that in my entire career. I have never seen anything like it. And then in the midst of these looters, we know we had people who were carrying weapons.’
Two shootings occurred, a 17-year-old shot directly at six cops, firing several rounds and fortunately missed.
‘We had another shooting where a 16-year-old who was waiting in the car for her looters to come back got shot by another looter and then they were using guns to try and get in through doors and locks so it was a very volatile situation. At many flashpoints where it erupted it got a little crazy. Thankfully, with the exception of the 16-year-old who was injured, all life was protected and that is my duty.’
She said her officers had to show incredible restraint. ‘They took rocks and bottles. My orders were to show restraint, to hold the line. To not use chemical gas because the crowd was a mixture of people who were looting, spectators who were walking around with their phones trying to record what was going on, I even saw someone with a baby so it could have gone sideways very, very fast so my officers did an outstanding job.’
She said the actions of the police in Buffalo, New York, where one officer knocked over a 75-year-old man, who suffered a brain injury, highlighted once again the need for changes to police training. ‘The optics of that incident are horrible but when you peal way the layers, in police training the first line of defence moves forward and anything that gets in the way – they push it out of the way because they have an objective to take care of whatever is at the heart so they are taught not to stop. They have medics
coming behind to take care of whatever injury occurs.’
She said what the training is missing is the ability of a cop to respond rather than react.
‘You have to give officers the opportunity to have a moment between the stimulus and the response and that is challenging, but is doable.’
As she retires she is calling for an overhaul of how American cops are trained in the wake of Mr Floyd’s death.
‘Unfortunately we are not immune to these situations. The killing of people of colour is not uncommon unfortunately. What you see happening is what you see now. You have the killing. You have the outrage. You have protests. You have attempts at legislation and you might have a change in policies and after that you have the town hall meeting and we check the box and we move on and we never change anything. It repeats itself all over again. I advocate that we change our response to these incidents; that we look at them through the lens of mindfulness, resiliency and compassion and what is happening in the officer, but also we need to retool the way he build relationships with marginalised communities and we have not done a good job with that.’
Ms Tejada, who is a Masters lecturer in Law and Public Safety at the University of San Diego, said there is no trust within communities of colour, communities where members have been shot by police and killed.
To build trust she started doing Circle Process meetings in marginalised communities. ‘I have been doing these circles here in the Bay area and it’s absolutely phenomenal. I have brought in leaders of marginalised communities. It has taken a lot of work to get them in to do this but over the years: building trust, having conversations, being vulnerable, being transparent – I was able to do it and today I have relationships with those communities and had conversations with some of them when George Floyd was murdered and when the rioting and looting started. These are people who wouldn’t have even accepted a cup of water from me three years ago because it’s against their philosophy to accept something from a cop. I believe there is a path forward and it’s very different from what we have been doing.’
She said cops need to have guns with the current American gun control laws. ‘You can’t bring a knife to a gun fight because people have access to guns and we are not talking about a little five shooter, we are talking about automatic weapons out in the community.’
She wants to see choke holds banned. ‘It never made sense to me if you were trying to control somebody and had used all other means and that you would then get close enough to do a garrotted hold on them. Not many people use a choke-hold. It was used back in the day when officers
didn’t have much else as they knew they could gain control of a person but now we have things like tasers to subdue someone who is out of control.’
She refuses to be compliant and silent in an America where expediency trumps humanity,
‘We can’t be silent on the things that matter and I will never be silent from the things that matter. It’s the Rossonian in me, for sure. My parents Tommy and Maureen, they really instilled strong values in us about helping others and I can distinctly remember one time my Dad, saying: “We are only here to help each other” so I suppose it’s in my DNA.’
She is not concerned about any potential backlash for her tweet memorialising George Floyd and for refusing a request from numerous officers to use chemical gas on the looters.
‘My officers were highly agitated when I said we couldn’t use chemical gas on the rioters and protestors. They were angry and we had to sit down and thrash it out. I explained them why we shouldn’t use chemical agents in that situation.’
She said racial profiling by police happens but only because people in white communities report people of colour to police.
‘When I was a cop on the street I would get dispatched to
calls from community members calling on their own neighbours, saying this person doesn’t look like he belongs here, or those men are on the corner talking to each other, or that man has a car he shouldn’t have because it was expensive. All of these calls were incredibly embarrassing to respond to, so when you talk about racial profiling, you have to include who drives the call to the police department, it’s the community and certain communities still engage in that today.
‘We have a duty to respond to our community, so I say to every community who say cops are racially profiling: you look in the mirror because you are making the phone call. It’s like everything else [in America], it’s very complex and multi-layered but we do a lot of training around implicit bias and we do everything we can to bring this to light and we also empower our officers to give them permission to say “no, there is no crime here” to ensure the person feels whole before they leave the scene.’
Along with looting and rioting, Chief Tajeda was running the policing of a busy town throughout Covid-19. She took a trust based approach to Covid-19. ‘I took the approach with Covid that it was educational and awareness rather than enforcement because it’s such an unusual situation
Most people want to do the right thing and forcing people into apartments is just unrealistic but if we saw people out gathering in parks we would do education and awareness contact and let them know they need to be six feet apart and in their homes unless they have official business. We didn’t arrest anyone and we were very measured in our approach to that.’
Working in a city where 45,000 people work and live every day has its challenges.
‘It’s a commercial city, Pixar is based there, as are the headquarters of several bio tech companies.’
Chief Tajeda is hoping change can happen and that presumptive Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden can beat President Trump this November.
‘We were making great strides in reform under President Obama and a lot of things that were put in place disappeared under President Trump. Just the philosophy of policing, what we represent and what we should be doing. All of that was on the radar of President Obama. The current president just wants to glorify the profession and not look at what we are doing and how we should be doing it.’
Asked if America has become a police state under the current President, she said: ‘We have a long ways to go to make meaningful change. I believe we can do it and I will never lose hope.’
She retired on Friday several months after she was supposed to. ‘Covid-19 hit and then the Floyd tragedy happened.’
She hasn’t ruled out relocating to New Ross during her retirement.
Jennifer, who is married to Eric, has two children; Aoife and Tighe. Aoife spent much of TY year at Our Lady Of Lourdes in New Ross, a school her mother attended. ‘We do have plans to spend more time over there.’
She is looking forward to retirement, but doesn’t plan to stop fighting systemic and structural racism and for changes in policing, having earned a reputation as a progressive advocate for the rights of minority communities.
She is recognised state-wide across California as a strong advocate for community outreach work and in 2013, she was the recipient of the James Q Wilson award in Community Policing.
Throughout her career, she has created programmes and worked in a leadership capacity in several specialised areas, including threat management, emergency and disaster preparedness, workplace violence prevention, domestic violence and sexual assault prevention, and hostage negotiation.
Jennifer has also served on several violence prevention and victim services committees, boards and commissions, both locally and regionally in the State of California. ‘I am very sad to be leaving this profession because obviously I have great pride in the badge. Having worked 13 of the last 14 days I’m ready now!’
She hasn’t ruled out a stint in politics. ‘I plan to continue to be a voice of change for law enforcement and to work on how we can build these community relationships with marginalised communities and volunteer my time. I have a few job offers that came in.’
FOR ME HE [TRUMP] REPRESENTS THE WORST OF HUMANITY AND WHEN WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF OTHERING IT’S CREATING A DIVIDE AND ANIMOSITY