Defining police reform
Arizona law enforcers, activists and policy makers share ideas
One look at the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board will tell you much about the policing problems facing the state, according to activist JJ Westgate.
Board members, who certify and train police and corrections officers, are pictured in yearbook-like conformity on the agency’s website: 11 men, two women, all middle-aged, all white.
“This is what in-your-face institutionalized racism looks like,” Westgate said. “If they wanted to represent the state, then the board would be about 48% Latino and 14% Black.”
Westgate, president of the Black Phoenix Institute and a member of the NAACP, said the board’s weight “toward whiteness” needs to be confronted as part of any discussion of police brutality and reform.
Protests and demonstrations over the deaths of unarmed African Americans have raged across the country since May 25, when George Floyd died begging for mercy while a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes,
Floyd’s death crystallized issues of racial injustice, deadly force disparities and high levels of incarceration experienced by minorities at the hands of police — and started a groundswell of people calling for departments to be restructured, defunded or abolished.
Their calls became demands after the June 12 death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, who was shot twice in the back by an officer responding to calls of a man asleep at the wheel of a car in a Wendy’s drive-thru.
City officials reacted.
In Minneapolis, the police department will be dismantled.
In Atlanta, use-of-force policies will be revamped.
In New York City, a controversial plainclothes anti-crime unit was scrapped.
In Los Angeles, police funding was cut by $150 million.
In Phoenix, where police shootings outpaced the country’s biggest departments in 2018, the city council voted this month to spend $3 million on a department oversight board. The council declined to cut the $745 million police budget, ensuring “defunding” efforts will remain taking points, not action items, for now.
But activists, law enforcers and policy makers say policing in Arizona — from unions to police duties to training — will change as part of the new social reckoning.
What that means depends on who you ask.
Many people across the spectrum of viewpoints agree police officers are being asked to do too much when it comes to mental health, homelessness and addiction. Officers have been asked to become social workers on top of law enforcement officers.
Many also agree police unions have swollen with power to the point where getting rid of problem officers is too arduous. They say politicians have abdicated their positions by signing off on generous union contracts year after year.
Consensus is harder to find about the role law enforcement should play in the future. Some argue for severely limiting police power, while others call for better training and use-of-force reforms. Still others want departments shuttered.
Ex-prosecutor: Too many social woes fall to cops
“Change has to be done, but it has to be done smartly,” Former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley said. “We have got to think about, ‘What is public safety?’”
Romley said failures by lawmakers to address social problems have turned cops and courts into bad solutions for community problems that have nothing to do with traditional law enforcement.
“There has been a lack of leadership in our state on so many issues.” he said. “Homelessness, mental illness. Where does it fall? Law enforcement.”
Romley, a highly regarded Republican, frequently consults on issues of legal ethics and has led several independent state and county investigations since leaving the County Attorney’s Office in 2004.
State and city leaders need to to start finding ways to partner police officers with experts on mental health, homelessness and addiction, Romley said. And money needs to be spent on creating solutions that don’t involve locking up people.
He points to diversion programs to decriminalize some drug offenses. When he was county attorney, instead of prosecuting users, his office worked with courts to get them into treatment programs, Romley said.
Officers should be given training and tools to better deal with people who are experiencing mental health crises, who can be the subject of police calls.
Is that defunding? Romley isn’t sure. “Defunding is still being defined.” He is against dismantling departments. Minneapolis, despite the egregious circumstances of Floyd’s death, is an example of reforms going too far, he said.
It illustrates the need to get rid of bad cops, he said. Romley said police chiefs should be able to fire problem officers without pushback from police unions. He said cities and counties rarely stand up to unions and for years have signed contracts that make it very difficult to hold officers accountable.
He recalled a case where a police union targeted an officer who came forward against his partner over a deadly shooting. He said the union not only blacklisted the officer who called out misconduct but held events in support of the officer being prosecuted.
“Good cops vastly outnumber bad cops,” Romley said. “I am 1,000% behind law enforcement, but I am really against bad cops.”
Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams acknowledges the death of George Floyd could change policing in the nation’s fifth-largest city.
“I’m not going to say what policies or rules I want changed. I really want to hear that from the community,” Williams said in a June interview.
Williams declined to comment on reforms for this story. She told The Republic in June the department has made changes.
“We’ve changed our tactics,” she said in the interview. “We’ve changed our training. We’ve become more transparent than this police department has ever been.”
Williams, who was appointed police chief in 2016, said community members asking for change need to contact their elected officials and tell them what they want.
“I would love to be talking to you about anything other than police brutality. I would love to be talking about building a trauma center in south Phoenix. But here we are.” JJ Westgate
Activist: Disband the police
Community activist Viri Hernandez said defunding the police is exactly what she wants, and she began rallying to disband the Phoenix Police Department three years ago.
“More than 69% of taxpayer money goes to a department that has been historically very violent,” she said. “Police are not solving our problems. They escalate and it ends in violence.”
Hernandez is the director of Poder in Action, which vows to “disrupt and dismantle systems of oppression.” She said the police department treats poor, Black and Latino residents in south Phoenix and Maryvale with contempt; an usagainst-them mentality.
During a rally on June 17, she said residents were asked to envision the city without a police department, with resources allocated to services such as transportation, affordable housing for low-income families and job creation.
“They want to move away from the idea that everything needs to be punished,” she said. “In our community, someone with a gun has not helped us.”
Hernandez said Floyd’s death has elevated questions about the usefulness of police into a national discussion. She called it the beginning of a movement.
In her community, the police inspire fear and distrust, Hernandez said. She said for many the police represent a force historically used to punish minorities, from slave patrols in pre-Civil War days to attacks on civil rights marchers in the 1960s.
Race still plays a factor, she said. The police department today doesn’t represent her community, either in its makeup of officers or its mission.
“It doesn’t make sense to us,” she said. “The world has been white a long time.”
Psychiatrist: Unconscious bias and distrust
Headlines and televised coverage aren’t enough to explain how America became divided on police and race, according to Ian Lamoureux, a Phoenix based forensic psychiatrist.
He says distrust is born out of experience on both sides of the badge.
On one side, officers are trained to respond to threats. They have seen and heard about other officers who let their guard down and lost their lives. That leads them to approach people as a threat. Violence they encounter on the job can lead to post-traumatic stress disorders, anger and suspicion.
“They use force to feel less afraid,” said Lamoureux, who has consulted on police training, conducted psychological autopsies and evaluated criminal defendants for mental competency.
On the other side, community members who come into contact with police often see officers as a threat; their contact limited to traumatic situations. They have experienced racism and see the badge as extension of a system that considers them criminals first. Their sense of racism comes from experience, not just with police but authority in general.
“We see it in all professions,” Lamoureux said, adding medicine is no exception. “Blacks with PTSD are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than white men.”
Cutting through the unconscious bias and distrust is going to require reform and reconsideration of what we expect from police officers, Lamoureux said. In his view, it doesn’t mean disbanding police or gutting the criminal justice system.
“You can’t just say police are bad guys who are behaving badly,” he said. “You can’t say, ‘Let’s get rid of the current police and bring in guys who think like us.’ That’s where it falls apart.”
Lamoureux, who taught crisis intervention training classes to law enforcement officers in Cleveland, also worked with police in Rochester, Minnesota, to create a program embedding mental health professionals with law enforcement officers to respond to psychiatric crises.
“A third of the homeless have serious mental illness,” he said.
Lamoureux said police shouldn’t be expected to “act as a salve for society’s ailments.”
Police trainer: ‘Always looking for improvements’
There’s no dispute the agency in charge of minting new police officers in Arizona does not reflect the state’s diversity.
“I don’t think anyone can deny it,” said Matt Giordano, executive director of Arizona POST. “If you look at the board, every member is white.”
The lack of diversity does not mean the board is inherently biased or unaware of the need to represent Black, Latino, Native American and other minority communities in Arizona, he said.
The board is educated, thoughtful and capable of making reasonable decisions independent of individual backgrounds, Giordano said. “We want a police force that represents our communities.”
The board provides services to about 159 law enforcement agencies that employ 14,500 sworn peace officers, 6,500 correctional officers, and 14 police training academies.
State law mandates who sits on the board. Some positions are awarded by title. The governor appoints the others.
Giordano said the requirements can pose “a hurdle on creating a fully diverse” group.
The 13 members include: The Arizona attorney general; the Department of Public Safety director; the Arizona Department of Corrections director; an administrator of a county or municipal correctional facility; two sheriffs, one from a county with less than 200,000 people; two police chiefs; a patrol officer or sergeant, one from a city police department and the other from a sheriff’s office; a college faculty member; and two public members.
The board sets the training curriculum to become a peace officer, which requires a high school diploma or equivalency degree and 585 hours of basic academy training.
“Policing in Arizona is always evolving. We’re always looking for improvements,” Giordano said.
Giordano, who is a retired Phoenix police commander, said he understands the community’s frustration over misconduct. Officers today deal with far more than they did 20 years ago, he said.
He said police officers are asked to address a lot of society’s challenges, including mental health, addiction and homelessness issues that could be better dealt with by health care and social service professionals.
“You’ll get no pushback from law enforcement,” he said. “We recognize that ... it’s not conducive to a good (community) relationship.”
That’s not to say police officers are out of touch with the communities they serve, Giordano said. Arizona officers are well trained for the job, particularly on use-of-force tactics and deescalation techniques, he said.
“We police to the expectations of our community.” Giodano said. “If the community is telling us we need to change, then we need to listen,” he said.
Criminal justice executive: A few bad apples
POST member Andrew LeFevre said police training is getting better, but many officers are using techniques carried over from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
“That doesn’t reflect modern training,” he said. “Clearly there is a cry from the public is that deescalation should be the primary method used.”
LeFevre is the executive director of the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission, which monitors various law enforcement programs, analyzes legislation and collects statistical data on issues such as arrests, incarceration and in-custody deaths.
Police have become “de facto mental health and health care workers,” LeFevre said. People in crisis come into conflict with law enforcement “because the is the only place they can get help.”
LeFevre wouldn’t talk specifically about defunding demands. He said the protests in the wake of in-custody deaths have led cities and counties to consider where they spend money.
That doesn’t mean taking away money from police departments, he said. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
“You are never going to arrest your way out of this or treat your way out of this,” he said. “There is a realization that you have to invest money now to save problems later.”
LeFevre agrees that police unions, which have “a very real place in a very dangerous job,” have become a roadblock to reforms and to getting rid of bad officers.
“The entire profession should not be colored by a few bad apples,” he said.
President, Black Phoenix Institute
Activist: Take a second look at the mission
Westgate, the Black Phoenix Institute president, said nothing is going to change his mind about defunding police. Departments need to focus on the mission of catching criminals, he said.
“I submit to you there is no reason we should need police officers at a traffic accident,” he said. “I submit to you that we never needed to put someone in jail for misdemeanors.”
Until the coronavirus pandemic led to a reevaluation of arrests and incarcerations, police booked hundreds if not thousands of people into jail on petty charges, including shoplifting, trespassing and other minor offenses, he said.
After the virus, Phoenix police decided to decrease enforcement. Westgate asked if there was there a massive influx of crime. No. Instead there was money in the budget to fund the office of accountability.
He said money spent on the police could be paying for important community needs, such as a new medical center in south Phoenix.
Westgate said much of officers’ dayto-day work could be performed by police assistants, similar to those who ride light rail and call for officers if they see a crime committed. He said the same is true for departments across the state.
He said the police response to community members often leads to unnecessary violence with terrible consequences.
“It is galling for me to see Jeri Williams crying crocodile tears over George Floyd when 10 Phoenix police officers did the same thing to Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin on January 14, 2017.”
Muhaymin tried to take his dog into a city community center bathroom in west Phoenix. The police were called, discovered he had a warrant for his arrest, and decided to detain him.
At least four officers got on top of him and held him down. Some put their knees on his neck and head. He died after saying he couldn’t breathe. None of the 10 officers connected to Muhaymin’s death have been charged. They still work for the Phoenix Police Department.
“I would love to be talking to you about anything other than police brutality,” Westgate said. “I would love to be talking about building a trauma center in south Phoenix. But here we are.”