Garcia should apologize for that T-shirt
If he wants to reform the police, he can’t send the message ‘I hate your guts’
It’s not often I agree with Sal DiCiccio, the hand that throws the most grenades at Phoenix City Hall, but this time Sal is right.
It’s political correctness in the absurd for Phoenix City Council members Michael Nowakowski and Betty Guardado to feel forced to apologize for their lighthearted teasing of Councilman Carlos Garcia.
If anything, Garcia owes his city and his police department an apology for the bombastic T-shirt he wears to council meetings.
My colleague Elvia Díaz writes “Who cares” if Garcia wears that T-shirt?
Phoenix citizens should care. I imagine many police officers do.
Garcia isn’t a street activist anymore. He’s a city councilman — a leader in this community with entrée to the executive offices at City Hall. He’s got real power. If the police in Phoenix are brutes, it’s his responsibility to straighten them up, as it is the duty of every other member of the City Council.
It’s one thing as a council member to say you’re going to end police brutality. It’s another to wear a loud, insulting Tshirt that screams, “End police brutality.”
Garcia certainly has the right to wear whatever the hell he wants, to be “authentic,” but he’s also choosing simultaneously to be something else – “destructive.”
Why?
Because there’s nothing constructive about a member of the city’s legislative branch traipsing about City Hall in a shirt that smirks with contempt for his city’s police officers.
Those are police officers.
He’s accountable for their conduct. And a leader does not change the behavior of the people who serve his institution by berating and demoralizing them in public.
It wasn’t an accident that Nowakowski and Guardado teased Garcia with a Tshirt that reads “I love Phoenix P.D.”
They perceived that message as the opposite Garcia projects on his chest: “End Police Brutality,” which no doubt translates to Phoenix cops as “I hate your guts.”
Garcia is no longer a street activist because he now has something activists don’t have – responsibility. As a leader in a city whose principal obligation is to protect its citizens, he needs to support his police officers even as he works to reform them.
There’s nothing wrong with Garcia watchdogging the cops and improving their behavior. But real reform requires understanding the problem, talking often and frankly with your police officers, their supervisors, their chief. You can’t understand them without a relationship with them.
What police officers are going to share their deeply felt concerns with someone whose opening message to them is that he thinks they’re jerks?
Some in this city are criticizing Nowakowski and Guardado for making light of police brutality, because there was a spike in police shootings in 2018. Officers fired their weapons at suspects 44 times. An historic high.
In 2015, they had only done so 17 times, though there had been an earlier spike in 2013 of 31 shootings.
As my colleague Robert Robb has pointed out time and again, it strains credibility to believe the Phoenix Police Department turned violent in 2013, reformed themselves in 2015 and then turned really violent in 2018.
More likely those numbers are just “statistical noise,” Robb explains. “The difference between 17 instances of fired shots and 44 looks large considered in isolation. But put into any context of police activity becomes statistically indiscernible. In 2018, the Phoenix Police Department made more than 50,000 arrests. In that context the difference between 17 and 44 is hundredths of a percent.”
Carlos Garcia must hold police accountable. That’s part of his job as a city councilman. But to signal he’s anti-cop when he’s a leader in this city is not just insulting, it’s beneath contempt.
Now that he’s an authority figure at City Hall, Garcia needs to ask himself, why did I run for office? Why did I want to lead?
He should also decide if he’s going to conduct himself in a professional manner.
Or is that only something he expects of his police officers?