Norfolk to spend $1M to boost police transparency

NORFOLK — Norfolk will spend more than $1 million to increase police transparency and create a team of mental health workers to accompany officers on emergency calls involving the mentally ill.

City council members voted 7-1 to spend $200,000 to commission an analysis of five years’ worth of policing and crime data, with the help of a third-party and an unspecified “citizen panel.” City officials would then publish the final report and underlying data on the city’s website “to the extent possible.”

Councilman Paul Riddick voted no, saying five years of data wasn’t enough information to get the full picture of how Norfolk officers police the city. He pushed for 20 years.

“We can and should do a better job of disseminating crime and policing data,” City Manager Chip Filer and Deputy City Manager Mike Goldsmith wrote in their 17-page presentation to council members. “Once a year is not frequent enough.”

The most recent aggregate useof-force data is from the 2018 annual report from the Norfolk Police Department’s internal affairs unit.

Council members also OK’d spending $860,000 to create a fulltime “crisis response team” that would be part of the Norfolk Police Department. Mental health workers on that team would join their co-workers — police officers — on emergency calls that dealt with people going through mental health crises. In an effort to prevent those emergency calls in the first place, the teams would also seek out the mentally ill in an effort to “catch them upstream” by making sure they’re being treated and not headed toward psychosis.

“What we’re trying to do is basically stop the 911 call,” said Goldsmith, who served as police chief from 2012 to 2016.

Last week, Police Chief Larry Boone told The Virginian-Pilot he supports “defunding” his department insofar as it means shifting some money from police to other priorities. Supporters of the socalled “defund police movement” say cities should be funding more social workers, nurses or other nonpolice employees who are better equipped to deal with, say, the mentally ill or the homeless.

Police were largely spared from the 2% budget cut city leaders made in May because they anticipate an economy battered by coronavirus will yield them fewer tax dollars. During those budget discussions, the city manager said police will get slightly more funding this year than last, by about 0.5%. But that was less than the 1.9% increase in police spending that had been planned before the pandemic.

With Tuesday’s vote, the council earmarked 1.4% of the department’s $78 million budget this year for Filer’s million-dollar plan.

Also during Tuesday’s meeting, most City Council members said they want citizen oversight of the police department, and the council directed Filer to research “a public safety oversight and review panel” and present them with options at the council’s Sept. 22 meeting. Filer and several of the council members said Tuesday’s vote was the first step of many in the city’s attempt to reform its police department.

Chief Boone has told The Pilot he supports citizen oversight over his department.

Several of the council members, Filer, and members of the public who spoke during the meeting said they want to make sure that, whatever form the citizen oversight takes, they want to make sure it has real power and “teeth.”

Even though he ultimately cast the lone dissenting vote, Riddick expressed support for Filer’s plan during the city manager’s presentation, but also skepticism in its execution.

“All of this sounds good, but make sure it goes into action,” he said.

Filer’s plan comes seven weeks after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by jamming his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes. His death sparked protests around the country, including Hampton Roads and in Norfolk.

It also comes after The Virginian-Pilot requested a decade’s worth of thousands of use-of-force reports from the Norfolk Police Department, reports that show how officers hit, Taser, pepper spray and shoot people in Norfolk hundreds of times every year.

City officials denied The Pilot’s request, electing to keep the reports secret. That led protesters to camp out on a grassy area outside City Hall and the courthouse, a sit-in that lasted six days while they demanded the city release the reports.

One woman who addressed the council Tuesday night said she was one of the protesters and thanked officials for letting them camp on their lawn. Like many of the speakers, she said the city’s plan doesn’t go far enough. She demanded the city release the police department’s raw use-of-force data so Norfolk residents can see if police officers are “servants serving them properly.”

She implied the camp-in protest might not be a one-off.

“We came to fight for this, either in council chambers ... or through our right to protest.”