Diversity and Policing Presentation

02-VIDEO-571e6b82d0464a1d42a7f520 Transcript Speakers: Chief Calvin Williams & Chief Robert White

Police Onboarding, Recruiting, and Civilian Calls Video

MODERATOR: What is the what I would call onboarding requirements? What are you looking for? What is different? Maybe the better question is what is different when you were a young guy from what you're bringing in today? How is the 22 year old Calvin Williams different today? CHIEF CALVIN WILLIAMS: Well I started when I was 22. I think the differences are the officers that we're bringing onboard now want more. They want more as far as technology. They want more training. They want more involvement. We have to -- the only thing we have to do with our younger officers is kind of divorce them a little from the technology part of it so much because everybody is tied to a smart phone. Everybody is tied to a tablet. Everybody is used to text and email and not that face-to-face personal interaction. That's the one thing that I see that we have to kind of improve upon. But we have a young energetic generation here that wants to get out there and wants to serve. We see it in our military. Up until I would say the last year and a half or two years we saw it in our public safety courses. Now we have to turn that back around because I don't know about the rest of the chiefs in the room but we have a difficult time recruiting in Northeast Ohio because of some of the things that are happening around the country and admittedly some of the things that have happened within the Cleveland Division of Police. We have to work harder to recruit better candidates, to recruit more candidates to become police officers. We can't just stop there and say this generation they don't want to be police officers. I mean we have to recruit hard. But from a standpoint of what's different, again I think when I came on almost 30 years ago I just wanted to be a police. I wanted to be an officer out there protecting my community. I think our officers want a little bit more now. They want to protect and serve but they also want advance. They want more training. They want more education. They want things like that and I'm happy to say that the city of Cleveland provides tuition reimbursement for our officers at 100% if you can maintain that A average which is I think unheard of. Sorry. But the difference is we have to give them a little bit more than the officers that came on 30 years ago and 40 years ago when the Chief came on. MODERATOR: Chief, thanks very much. Chief, he's just dissing you. CHIEF ROBERT WHITE: Did I say I had 40 years? I didn't even share that. No, it is 40. I didn't mean to share that though. MODERATOR: Chief, you started a program in your schools. Can you describe that? CHIEF ROBERT WHITE: Yes, I can. Prior to that, can I speak to something that I think is really important to the community and important to us as police chiefs? We just had our elections. We have six out of 13 become Council members. Many of them are hounding us VIDEO TRANSCRIPT © University of Phoenix 2016 Police Onboarding, Recruiting, and Civilian Calls Page 2 about response time. Our position is exactly the same as Chief Williams. We really want officers to go and do quality work versus how fast can you write a report and get back in service. At the same time there's this demand from those above and parallel, you have to get there quick. People don't want to wait. Part of our approach has been trying to explain to the community and to these Council members there are priority calls. If you are a victim of a crime we need to get there as quick as possible. As quick as possible. Then there are calls that I call customer service calls. You go on vacation. You come back. Somebody broke into your garage. What is the real rush for us getting there in two minutes? The crime had already occurred. However you as a citizen still want to have someone there and you don't want to wait on that. Part of it for us has been -- again I'm from the school that if it doesn't require men in badge police shouldn't be doing it. There are types of calls that we hire civilians that work for the Police Department. They take those calls. They address those quality like issues of those customer service type calls. The other thing that we're attempting to do, like many of you, you call your cable person or your petco person. They give you a block of time that they're going to be there. Make an appointment. One of the things we're looking at actually as it relates to response time for those customer service type calls is come make an appointment. Ms. Fritz, we can get somebody there. What is good for you? We can get somebody, if you tell me 2:00 is good for you we'll get somebody there between 1:00 and 2:30 that way they're not sitting there waiting for the police and that way we can manage those calls better. I think it's really important that the community really understands that it’s those priority calls and then the other calls that's just customer service type calls. We still have a responsibility to get there and to do it professionally and do it as expeditiously as possible, it’s incumbent upon us to explain that to the community and it's also incumbent upon us to come up with better ways to do that to address the issues. As it relates to the schools. It was actually December 2014 one of our larger schools in Denver, hundreds of kids walked out. This is after the Ferguson incident and after Officer Wilson was not charged. They were very frustrated. That actually started a movement in Denver. We were led by the kids, not by the adults. I would say at least another 15 schools kids walked out in the middle of the school day exercising their First Amendment rights. It got to be really challenging. This occurred over maybe a two week period every single day, pretty much all the high schools and many of the middle schools kids just walked out. The principals didn't have control over them. The superintendent didn't have control. The teachers didn't have control. The police didn't have control but we obviously had to provide service because the numbers were so large that they were walking in the middle of the street. It became a safety issue. The superintendent of the schools along with the Mayor, the executive director of safety which is equivalent to the city Mayors and I had a meeting. We attended pretty much most of the high schools. Most high schools in Denver I imagine it’s the same in most cities. They have a student body that sort of represents the students at large. We met with, this is the Mayor and the superintendent. In Denver there are about 100,000 kids that go to public schools. We've gone to many of these schools to have a conversation to try to understand from their perspective what was their frustration and obviously the black lives matter was something that was very prominent. What we learned was they wanted demands on the Police Department but at the same time they wanted to understand why we were making the decisions that we were making. From going to several of those schools, listening to these young people, the Mayor decided to create a summit. A couple months ago we had a summit with public school kids. They were bussed in. These were pretty much many of the schools that were really impacted by some of the challenges just through socioeconomics, where they lived. The Mayor had the summit. At that summit we created scenarios. The students actually participated in the scenarios. You get stopped by the police. We made them be the police and kind of schooled them on what they should do and shouldn't do. We had the police officers be the students. It became a little better understanding as it relates to that. In Denver we have what we call the independent monitor. That's the person that has oversight over police, fire and the sheriff’s department and make recommendations. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT © University of Phoenix 2016 Police Onboarding, Recruiting, and Civilian Calls Page 3 They're supposed to be recommendations but sometimes its beyond that. But anyway. We don't exactly have a kumbaya relationship with the independent monitors as you can well imagine. But in light of this movement by these young people, the monitor actually has what he calls a pawn card. It tells the young person -- and it's done in concert with the Police Department by the way. What do you do when you get stopped by the police? How do you act? What should you expect the police officer to do when they stop you? Maybe even more significant than that, there is a program that we are in the process of working with and we've actually done phase one of that process and expanding it where the initial program was we identified through the monitor, and this is those working in collaboration which is unusual, they've identified some kids in an impact area again and mentored to them over the course of three to four weeks just having these conversations. They mentored them with a lot of adults and a lot of police officers who were not in uniform. These kids did not know that these were police officers. This wonderful relationships really was created as a result of this three or four week program meeting on a regular basis. The last day of the program the police officers who were not in uniform were in uniform and the kids were just astonished. You're a police officer? I guess sometimes we seem as something other than being officer and being a regular citizen. That has gone a long ways. The Mayor has played a heavy role in this. Again he has created what we call my Denver card. Every child in Denver, every young person in Denver, can go to the library free and go to the recreation centers for free. They can go to the museums for free. This was really important during the summer months because we were really afraid of what was going to happen during the summer months as it relates to that. Our police officers pretty much, we directed them to adopt a school. We have a lot of schools so all of the command officers and these precincts where these schools are they have a responsibility to adopt, they work with the school administrator and they adopt a school. They do lunch time based on the relationship they have with the counselors in the schools. They go to lunch with certain kids or they read to certain kids. That has been proven to be relatively meaningful also. Then actually in Denver there's a program Grid. Really what Grid is the city has hired former gang members. I did say former. Former gang members. They as you all know sometimes when we're trying to reach out to our kids and give them advice they don't want to hear from us but if they can talk to one of their peers, it’s more meaningful. Some of these former gang members have been very, very helpful because they've reached out to the young people who are at risk of becoming gang members or that are gang members and trying to get them out of that life. It’s actually been a litany of things that the city has done as relates to that. One of the other things we did this summer which I really felt was neat. We have a foundation like many agencies have and they've given us thousands of dollars. As a result of that we're trying to get these kids so they get involved in summer activity we reward them. We reward them either through our relationship with 7-11 where they get Slurpee’s. We reward them through our relationship with Papa John. If we see a young person doing something right we give them a ticket that says you got caught doing something right. They open it up. There's a free pizza. We do that for adults also. Just doing things in I guess what I would call a proactive way where young people are seeing that police officers before they have to respond to something negative I think has served our community relatively well. Then there are other programs that we continue to create. As a matter of fact, next week we're going to have summit number two. The Mayor is going to have another young summit at the end, because it was at the beginning of the school year and I would imagine the superintendent will be there. Again we will call young people in and they will be bussed in or we'll go to their location and we'll talk about how did the summer go. What are some of your challenges? Have any relationships changed? These are some of the individuals that really have issues with the police. They update on progress. I think you asked John a question earlier how do you measure how effective you are. Well, at some point you have to come up with processes to say we're doing all of these things. Okay, are they definitive. I think summit two is going to speak to some of the things the Mayor has actually put in place over the course of last year or actually over the course of the last or three months. MODERATOR: Chief, I have to tell you when I heard you talking about that initiative the definition of protect and serve kind of comes to mind. It was made manifest when you made the comment about police officers then put their uniforms on. I'm trying to get my VIDEO TRANSCRIPT © University of Phoenix 2016 Police Onboarding, Recruiting, and Civilian Calls Page 4 head around what are those behavioral traits that routinely needed to be demonstrated that go to protect, that go to serve. You just described in a number of initiatives that embody that. CHIEF ROBERT WHITE: Earlier I had mentioned that I think policing has changed but the police haven't changed so when you talk about I think we need to really understand what does it mean to protect and serve, protect and serve does not mean when I was a young police officer. I have to be honest. I was a victim of my environment. I was very aggressive. I'd see how many arrests I could make. I thought that was the measure of success in policing but the real measure of success is how many arrests you don't make because you put things in place to prevent those crimes from even occurring. And also understanding that the greatest resource we have as police officers are the very citizens that are paying our taxes. If they trust you, if they know you, if you treat them with dignity and respect regardless of their station in life and if they have a voice in the things that impact their neighborhood that's how you protect and serve. It is not I'm sure all of you have heard this thin blue line. That's something that has been in place for centuries in police officers. I've often said that if I had an eraser I would erase it because originally when it was created it was the police against the bad guys. Now I think sometimes there's some police officers think it's the police against everybody. That thin blue line I mean it really is the police being part of the community and the community has to be part of the police. That thin blue line has to incorporate all of us. It’s that kind of thinking and that kind of philosophy that we just have to be vigilant about implementing. And change is tough. I am here to tell you change agencies and changing mindsets and changing adults to try to think and do things different is very challenging but I think if you put processes in place and if you stay the course and if you reward those values that are really important and you deal with those issues that are not important you can eventually get there. It’s like moving a big ship but you can move it.

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