Guns, Crime, Data, Community and Police Relations
The Community-Police Relations (CPR) project has been moving ahead full-steam. Friday, December 7, representatives from the Memphis Police Department (MPD) and the Sheriff’s Department met with CPR leaders for the second time to continue the dialog about issues and problems between Law enforcement and the community.. Deputy Chief Berryhill from MPD and Chief Deputy Cash from the Sheriff’s Department were in attendance, signaling the commitment of both organizations to this important process.
This group of over 50 people broke out into smaller groups in a discussion group/focus group session before returning and bringing the ideas, questions and concerns back to the entire group.
They discussed needs for comprehensive community driven (re)investment in impoverished communities and in law enforcement institutions via police-community programs.Police members present cited barriers they face such as: the prioritization of statistics; the pressure to complete call times as quickly as possible and thus to answer more calls each shift as well as, budget cuts;and reform of current practices of interviewing, hiring, and training of new officers. They also cited the need for diversity and anti-racism training, particularly and more buy-in from elected officials to implement these ideas.
The next meeting of CPR participants will be on Friday, January 25, 2013, where we will focus on developing the format and content for a series of community forums. Where community members will share their views on the issues and will be held in neighborhoods all over the city.
In other news, CPR is encouraged to see signs that the MPD may be exploring a new direction in their law enforcement strategy. This may involve a departure from the Blue CRUSH model of policing, as alluded to in a recent editorial in the Commercial Appeal (January 5, 2013). This “data-driven” approach to crime prevention, implemented in 2005, has in our view proven to be problematic. The aim of Blue CRUSH (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) was to pinpoint concentrations of criminal activity using data gathered from a wide array of sources. Police would then saturate that area with police resources, including license plate scanners, cameras, and facial recognition software.
This coincided with the the dissolution of the prior COACT (Community Action) program, which emphasized police involvement in the communities they patrolled, more direct community input and communication and also included many youth activities such as midnight basketball and in the past boxing activities.This created a situation where, most police officers do not live in the area they patrol and have little contact with community members outside of negative interactions.
As a result since the implementation of the Blue CRUSH program, a large number of young people of color have been stopped, and many arrested and jailed, with an average time to disposition of 9-12 months. Others while not arrested are stopped and feel harassed by simply walking in their own communities. Such reactions are sadly growing far too common in the African America,Latino and LBGTQ communities.
All of these developments have led to feelings of fear, mistrust and frustration on both sides of the community-police relationship. Our Community wants a Law Enforcement strategy one that works to foster relationships between police and members of the community and we will support MPD in this course.
For more information about bringing Community-Police Relations to your community, please contact:
Melissa Miller-Monie
Organizing Coordinator, CPR
Office: 901-725-4990
e-mail: melissa@midsouthpeace.org
