Shawn Vestal: Committee’s goals for hiring a new police chief sound familiar

A group of eight Spokane residents has put together a 33-page document laying out the qualities we want in a new police chief.

Now if we can just find someone who wants us.

“A citizen asked us,” the group wrote in its report to Mayor David Condon, “ ‘What person in their right mind would seek this job?’ ”

We’ll find out. Now that we are again on the threshold of trying to find a police chief who will carry community-minded reforms forward – a difficult and sometimes thankless slog – the citizens’ report to the mayor is a reminder that change is a long, long road. Today’s high hopes sound a lot like yesterday’s, and yesterday’s hard work can’t be an excuse to avoid today’s.

The goals for a new chief are familiar: Restore public trust. Repair the breached relationship between the community and the department. Create transparency and accountability. Combat racial disparities in enforcement. Operate with a community policing model that emphasizes connections and relationships over a detached, militaristic attitude. Welcome and encourage citizen oversight and an audit of the culture within the department.

Worthy goals, all. But if the past several years have shown us anything, it is that worthy goals are the easiest part of the equation. That’s why the next stage of the process, outlining the way the city will search for candidates and evaluate them – perhaps checking to make sure they’re in their right mind – will be so important.

It can sometimes feel as if, when it comes to police reform, the rock has rolled all the way back to the bottom of the hill. The past 12 months have been a time of high-speed backsliding – following a period of significant progress.

The City Hall management disaster born of efforts to try to smooth over former Chief Frank Straub’s management style and an allegation of sexual harassment have left the city searching for a chief for the third time in 10 years and facing the prospect of expensive lawsuits from every direction. A series of recent allegations against officers – the most serious of which include criminal charges against the head of the powerful Police Guild for obstructing an investigation into an allegation that an officer raped a fellow officer – have renewed the sense of mistrust of officers and the seemingly fluid attitude among some of them toward their responsibilities to follow the law.

And there is every reason to believe that, whatever his problems as a leader, Straub was correct when he asserted – much as former Chief Anne Kirkpatrick has – that the “old guard” inside the department has been an obstacle to reform.

All of this has occurred in the wake of the collapse of the city’s ombudsman system, which is only now making it back onto its feet.

In other words, the stakes for Mayor David Condon’s next choice as the chief of police are as high as they were four years ago when he was hiring his first chief. The challenges facing the next chief will be similar to the challenges that faced Straub when he took over in 2012. And what the community needs from the mayor now is the same thing we needed then: a vigorous, open effort to find the best chief, a resistance to inertia and self-satisfaction, and a newcomer’s dedication to principle.

If you’re a supporter of police reform, reading the report of the Police Leadership Advisory Committee is a reminder of the sometimes glacial pace of change. It is also a reminder that just because glacial change can be hard to notice, it doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring.

“Clearly, the Spokane news is not exclusively discouraging,” the report said. “Current local efforts and recent accomplishments illustrate further progress toward trust.”

The list of such accomplishments is long and familiar: the drop in crime according to city statistics, the implementation of many laudable training programs as well as the introduction of body cameras, the expansion of community policing efforts, fewer reports that officers are using force.

The report was produced by a panel of volunteers and led by Mary Ann Murphy, the former executive director of Partners with Families and Children. It includes retired U.S. Attorney Jim McDevitt, NAACP President Naima Quarles-Burnley, Kennewick police Chief Ken Hohenberg, federal defense investigator Gabe Caballero, Native Project CEO Toni Lodge, community volunteer Jackson Andrews, and Blaine Stum of the Human Rights Commission.

The report outlines the major characteristics its members believe are needed in the next chief. It also performs a little diagnostic work on the department and comes to a familiar conclusion: that too many police officers, in attitude and in practice, stand apart from the community they are supposed to serve.

“We note the extent to which some SPD members hold themselves apart from citizens, not just while on duty but also when off duty,” the report said. “This emotional separation is not conducive to the premise of community-building.”

What the report does not do is outline a specific process for hiring the chief. That piece of the puzzle – which one might have thought would be prepared by now – is still to come. The city’s human resources department is developing a plan to use an outside firm to search for candidates and possibly even winnow them down to finalists, but the PLAC will have to review and approve of the plan next week. The goal is to hire a new chief by next spring.

Can we attract – or promote – a chief in his or her right mind? The citizens report thinks we can. “We think it’s a person of integrity, whose personal experience will provide the vision and skill necessary to solve problems that thus far have appeared to be intractable. Wisdom and persistence will surely be required to help police co-exist ‘safely and constructively’ with citizens. That’s the kind of challenge that attracts powerful leaders. The stakes are very high.”

Sounds perfect. But sounding perfect is the easy part. It only gets harder from here.

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.