Diversity and Policing Presentation

02-VIDEO-571e6bfad0464a1d42a7f523 Transcript Speakers: Assistant Chief Perry Tarrant

Cultural Diversity in Policing

MODERATOR: Chief Tarrant, when I think of Seattle, I feel like I'm kind of in that corner, I see a picture of a very vibrant, ethnically diverse, really an international city, not dissimilar from many big cities but there's a uniqueness to Seattle. We chatted about that. You have a unique challenge around that. You have an international district. You've created some programs that really kind of help you get a better sense, a pulse of what's happening in that district. Could you address those please? ASSISTANT CHIEF PERRY TARRANT: Sure, absolutely. Let me begin by first saying that I'm kind of wearing two hats today. I'm representing the city of Seattle as well as NOBLEE which is the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. NOBLEE has had a very long relationship with the University of Phoenix so I want to thank the University of Phoenix for that and its continued support as well as being our host this morning. Also I would like to thank the city of Phoenix as well for their hospitality that's been extended and the opportunity to be with you guys this morning. Spider mentioned it during my intervention that my original plan of being in law enforcement was five years. How that came about was a lot of the contacts I had initially or had with the law enforcement when I was going to the university wasn't really positive. I went home kind of in a battle with my roommate. I had a discussion and the conversation kind of went along the lines of you can continue to vent about it or you can do something about it. A passing conversation I had just very shortly after that with my father and he says well if you're going to do something about it the only way you're going to change the organization is from the inside. That's how I got into law enforcement. There was never a plan. It was never part of my overall goal and it was only going to take me five years to change all of law enforcement. (Laughter) Thirty-five years later. Let me kind of talk about the city and how I got there. Seattle is absolutely an international city. Not only is it known for its tourism but you have Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, Yahoo, Starbucks all drawing a very international and very diverse population to that city. On top of that you have a Department of Justice investigation which found a series of patterns and facts occurring within the Seattle Police Department and the Seattle Police Department is now under federal monitoring which means the Police Chief and the Mayor report to a federal judge as far as policing goes in the city of Seattle. The challenge that presents is when your department is first hit with that consent decree from the federal court saying you shall do certain things the tradition of how policing historically occurred stops. Now you have an instance where you have a very large police force and a very large metropolitan city deciding not to have contact with the public. That is a huge challenge. My boss gets to the city of Seattle and taking a page out of Chief White's book immediately addresses her command staff. What occurs in that process is she eliminates all of her command staff and then hand picks her new team. That's how I got to Seattle. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT © University of Phoenix 2016 Cultural Diversity in Policing Page 2 Hitting the ground in Seattle under those circumstances number one at the federal monitoring and number two coming from the outside into an organization that has been somewhat demotivated about doing policing and on top of that having to work with her leadership team to change the overall culture of that organization and kind of reinvent community policing. We started off with looking at how we were doing everything. Everything from recruiting. When I started and you looked at the recruitment materials it was really guys driving fast, shooting guns and rolling around grabbing. We changed the format of our recruiting materials and started addressing the kind of folks we wanted coming in particularly during this time in our community. We showed that video internally and it was not very well received because it wasn't what folks who grew up doing police work thought police work should be. We showed that same video externally to the community and it was a lot of footage that already existed and they did not know those were things that were already going on in the city of Seattle. It was very positively received externally. We kind of had that mixed bag initially but that's still the video that we push out there as part of our recruiting materials. Because Seattle is such a very diverse community we have a very large Chinatown and a continuously growing Asian population. Chinatown is now surrounded by what's called the International District which has an even greater diverse population. Just outside of the International District is another neighborhood and everybody in Seattle is very proud of their neighborhoods but that neighborhood is called Columbia City where there are over 70 different languages spoken. You try and mix that into an effort toward moving down the line on community policing and it absolutely presents a series of challenges. Every precinct has a community policing team assigned to it which basically reports directly to that policing commander in a decentralized fashion on all of our different community policing initiatives. On top of that to reach some of those more difficult, some of those other market areas what we did was the city of Seattle brought in internally several liaisons. We specifically hired liaisons to work with the East African community, with the Asian community, with the Norwegian community that all make up the city of Seattle. The sole intent there was, and you hear Cerelyn say a few minutes ago, and that was to have those conversations and to continuously engage the community on what they expected from their police. The cops are now getting back out and engaging with that whole new framework and surrounding that by an understanding of what the community wants and more importantly what the community expects. The larger part of that on the international district portion of that is trying to blend folks outside of their neighborhood where there is a very, very tight cultural pride in being defined as a neighborhood. The challenge doing police work in that environment really isn't that great. The larger part of our challenge is having that conversation and kind of moving those along. We've taken community policing and we actually call it micro community policing specific to those neighborhoods and those communities. The officers that are assigned to those specific communities either work through the liaison or an interpreter on a regular basis where we have very specific programs for those very specific neighborhoods all intended to build the relationships and improve the relationships with the Seattle Police Department. All of this is going on and being reported back to the federal judge on a quarterly basis because that is the requirement. Seattle is about two and a half years into almost three years into an incent decree which requires the city of Seattle's Police Department to do several things on a list that the federal judge approves and then after the last item is signed off we have a federal mantra team that still lives with us for the next two years to make sure we don't backslide. I will tell you right now within the organization at the speed at which change is happening within Seattle, the folks who were initially kind of stepping back and depolicing are back out there on the front lines having those conversations. The conversations that I have on a routine basis when I attend role calls and briefings with our troops are every single contact is a transaction. You're either making a deposit or you're making a withdrawal. I'll go back to the example that Chief Williams of Cleveland mentioned earlier and that is when we have events and there are events virtually every day in the city of Seattle, we don't let the officers stand around. We have the expectation that they will engage and have those conversations because that is absolutely the opportunity to make those deposits. Ultimately there will be a time where we have to make a withdrawal and those withdrawals when they occur are sometimes pretty significant. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT © University of Phoenix 2016 Cultural Diversity in Policing Page 3 Some of the other things we have internally are the most vocal bloggers and folks who are doing a lot of posting kind of on the opposition side of Seattle PD. We hired them and brought them inside. As Cerelyn mentioned, sometimes what you have to do is make that concerted effort to demystify policing for the community so they understand. I will tell you that since we've hired those folks those are absolutely some of our greatest proponents of what we do and they're also the most vocal. What we get is we actually have taken our Media Relations Department and kind of bolstered that with civilians that we brought from the community to respond to and anticipate questions that we were most likely to get from the community. We've all been on this side of policing for a very long time and don't necessarily always anticipate the questions that folks have out in the community. The intent was to bring some folks in on a pretty regular basis and this is in addition to all of our advisory committees but bring them in on staff using the mechanisms that they were using previously to communicate to a much broader platform but doing that on our behalf, helping us get our message out there. It’s working very, very well.

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