Policing turns political
It’s beginning to appear that the Little Rock police chief’s shooting episode New Year’s Eve may boil down to a political debate that will last most of the year between Mayor Frank Scott and car dealer Steve Landers.
The point of contention will be accusations that the chief doesn’t practice the police accountability he preaches for the rank-and-file police officers who can’t abide him. The question will be whether he’s a genuine reformer or a managerial wrecking ball, or both.
Chief Keith Humphrey came back to work at the end of the week, almost two weeks after going on forced administrative leave.
While on self-appointed New Year’s Eve patrol, he came upon an ugly road-rage incident that included gunfire and fired his own weapon, blessedly hitting nothing except a car.
He went back to work after 13 days on the basis that the incident report indicated no apparent negligence on his part and he had completed the requisite psychological review required of officers who fire their guns.
Still pending is a State Police criminal investigation. No one has yet seriously indicated any criminality on the chief’s part. Also pending is an internal city police department review that probably will report that the chief was not wearing at the time of the incident the body-camera equipment he requires of all patrol officers as a matter of public transparency.
If the police chief rolled out on self-appointed patrol New Year’s Eve, mainly to look for violations of the city’s ordinance against firing celebratory gunshots into the air, and if, in the course of that, he wound up in real police work without the same kind of accountability the real police officer lives with day after day at the chief’s insistence … that’s suitable political fare.
It seems likely to turn out that the chief indeed did not wear a body camera. It would have been easy enough by now for someone to confirm that he’d worn such gear rather than lean on the convenience of an ongoing investigation.
I’ve been advised by sources I won’t identify that I should read the Little Rock Police Department policy on body cameras. It’s online on the “meet the chief” page, under “policies,” and I have now read it.
The policy says body camera equipment must be assigned by a supervisor and that officers may receive the equipment only after completing training.
Humphrey’s defense likely will be that he was not a regular officer and therefore didn’t qualify for the equipment through established procedure. Someone is likely then to argue that he shouldn’t have been playing super-trooper in the first place.
He and the mayor are likely to counter that a police chief ought to keep an eye on his city and has no choice but to take emergency action if happening upon real trouble.
All of this is already getting caught up in the unfolding mayor’s race between the once-popular but now struggling mayor, Scott, and Landers, a successful car salesman ubiquitous in television advertising.
Scott personally hired Humphrey and continues to believe he is doing a competent job that would be better if department in-fighting would subside.
Landers is plugged into police ranks and convinced by what he’s hearing from inside the department that Little Rock policing is a disaster and the mayor is to blame.
That’s a dynamic fraught with potential racial tension. Scott is the city’s first popularly elected Black mayor. While he received a lot of admiring white votes three years ago, his base was Black voters. The Black community tends to resent the police. Scott has sided with the Black community against the police in a couple of incidents, one tragic.
And now comes a prominent white businessman close to the police department to run against that mayor.
It would be better if the community saw this election in the way a smart political thinker described it the other day—as only secondarily a matter of race and primarily one of generation.
This insightful fellow said the real political divide has, on one side, older establishment white people who behold gun crimes galore and dangerous racing in the street and instinctively believe the answer is more police officers and bigger jails.
On the other side are younger people, Black and white, who believe police work must become more community-sensitive and that voters should have approved one of the real longterm solutions, meaning early childhood education initiatives contained in the mayor’s recently trounced tax package.
The last mayor’s race was an epic battle of three talented people—Scott, Baker Kurrus and Warwick Sabin.
This one likely will be less about admired personalities and more about uncomfortable things.