With “Black Lives Matter” protests occurring locally and throughout the nation, the Gainesville City Commission on Thursday discussed how to improve relationships between local police and minorities, and commissioners said they will pursue advisory-council recommendations on the issue. In January 2014, City Manager Russ Blackburn asked the Gainesville Police Department Advisory Council to conduct a comprehensive review of GPD’s interactions with black males. Chair Norbert Dunkel presented the council’s recommendations Thursday night. The City Commission ultimately referred those recommendations to a committee on which all commissioners sit for further discussion. “The timing was almost uncanny,” Dunkel said of Blackburn’s January request. Now the council has almost a year’s work behind it and is offering recommendations at a time when many communities around the country are still figuring out how to start this conversation, Dunkel said. Police interactions with African-Americans in particular have come under scrutiny in recent months due to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Recent grand jury decisions not to indict the police officers involved have led to an outcry among citizens locally and across the U.S. The police advisory council’s report was meant to focus on disproportionate minority contact, which pertains to how minority youth come into contact with the juvenile justice system in disproportionate numbers compared with the general population. Dunkel told the commission this problem doesn’t just involve black males. This is about all minorities and all contact any law enforcement agency has with those individuals. Dunkel told The Sun that disproportionate minority contact is transitioning to being called racial and ethnic disparities, or RED. “There is no one answer to this national problem,” he told the commission. “This is something that takes years. It in some cases might take a generation to change …” The council offered several recommendations to the city, including adding in-car and body cameras for police officers. Having these cameras helps citizens and officers alike when dealing with questionable interactions and also provides evidence regarding arrests and high-profile incidents. Officers work a little differently when they know a camera is taping them, Dunkel said, which is something they heard from both officers and citizens. Right now, 50 percent of GPD cruisers have in-car cameras, but the council recommends all vehicles, as well as all officers, have cameras on them. GPD Chief Tony Jones told The Sun the agency is in the early stages of developing its own policy for body cameras. The council also recommended increasing or stabilizing funding for Gainesville youth programs, especially summer programs that allow at-risk youth to take part in structured activities during those school-less months. Dunkel said the council recommended having enhanced training and expectations for GPD officers as well. The council wants to see officers out of their cruisers, walking the neighborhoods and building relationships with residents. “When a police officer establishes a relationship, then there’s an understanding,” Dunkel said. There are communities that try to arrest themselves out of problems, he told the commission. But community policing takes a different approach. The council also recommended supporting GPD grant initiatives related to this issue and suggested looking into developing a reporting center where people on probation can go to socialize and get educational information in the evenings. Commissioner Lauren Poe said there isn’t anything in the council’s report that he doesn’t think is a great idea and should be pursued with haste. He pointed out, however, that it’s hard for white people to know what it’s like to be a minority in this community because they haven’t lived it. That lack of understanding is a more difficult problem to solve, he said. Although it isn’t done consciously, it’s difficult to be honest with oneself about that and to admit that this lack of understanding exists. After hearing her fellow commissioners talk about the need to address the problem of disproportionate minority contact in the community, Commissioner Yvonne Hinson-Rawls said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It seems everyone sees the light now, even though she has faced resistance on similar issues in the past, she said. “It is the elephant in the room,” she said of the issue of race. She said she tried this past summer to get the disproportionate minority contact issue put into the city’s strategic plan and wasn’t able to do it. It was overlooked and overruled, she said. Hinson-Rawls told advisory council members they had given everyone a new view and said how the revelation could create an easier life for her on the dais. When Mayor Ed Braddy weighed in, he pointed out that in this critical area, if GPD personnel get 99 things right but one thing wrong, it wipes out everything. “We’re not only back to square one, we’re behind square one,” he said. Because of that, it’s important that the city train — and keep — high-quality personnel at GPD. “We have got to make sure that this pool of city employees has whatever it takes, whether it’s training but also a competitive salary and benefits package, so that they stay and get better and better and better,” Braddy said. (-g)
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:17:42 +0000
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