ST. LOUIS – It has been a trying year for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. You need look no farther than the seemingly endless slew of headlines.
There was the case of a white officer shooting an off-duty African-American officer. A game of Russian roulette ended the life of a young officer. Dozens were implicated in an investigation of racist social media posts. The city’s prosecutor now refuses to let some officers appear in court. There have been lawsuits over excessive force, and more.
Some are asking if the police department is out of control.
“Well, I think that’s unfair,” Jimmie Edwards, the city’s public safety director, said in an interview. “I think that when you look at the St. Louis police department and you look at its culture, we didn’t get here overnight.”
Where you will find the St. Louis police are is largely a function of whom you ask; and many are likely to answer, in some way, by referring to the events in and around Ferguson five years ago.
“I think certainly prior to Ferguson in 2014, the relationship between police and the community was fragile,” Edwards said. “It continues to be fragile.”
Ferguson comes up again, but in a very different way, when you ask the police union about that fragile relationship.
Of course there has been plenty of discussion about a perceived adversarial relationship between some officers and area residents since the unrest. But Jeff Roorda, business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, said his rank and file had no issue with those they policed.
“No, not toward the community,” he said. “They have an adversarial feel toward some elected officials and some folks in the media who disparage police and do so based on a false narrative that came out of Ferguson and other places.”
But many believe the controversies we’re seeing right now have roots that run far deeper than the unrest of 2014.
SLMPD Sgt. Heather Taylor has a particularly interesting take. She is head of the Ethical Society of Police, the group that advocates for the city’s African-American officers. She said all the headlines were a function of a new accountability. The behavior, she said, has been there – just not the punishment.
“I honestly feel that a lot of these cases wouldn’t see the light of day if we didn’t have the chief that we have, the restructured internal affairs, and a circuit attorney who is willing to prosecute officers who are doing wrong,” she said. “When people say we are out of control, I’m just glad we are bringing some of these cases to light, because some of these people we knew should have been fired long ago. They have been problems. We have presented cases, and it’s, ‘No, nothing. We’re sweeping under the rug.’ And now these things are coming to light.”
One example is a list of officers Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner now keeps of officers she will not allow to testify in court. It’s called an exclusion list. For a variety of reasons, she says the officers on it lack credibility.
The most notable case: 22 city officers whom Gardner “blacklisted” after they were named in an investigation called the Plain View Project, which tied dozens of current and former St. Louis officers to racist social media posts.
“It continues to fuel the mistrust in the criminal justice system, and it makes our jobs harder,” Gardner said in an interview with MetroSTL.com’s Jaco Report in July. “So it hurts that victim who wants to call the police and is afraid already of the process of the criminal justice system. It makes it, when you see an incident you fail to want to call the police and be a witness because you’re afraid of who you may come in contact with.”
For many people it raises another question: Why do the current officers involved in that scandal still have jobs?
Many don’t, in other cities. Several officers in Philadelphia, Pa., who turned up in the same report have already been fired by the department there.
“Some people were fired,” Edwards said when asked about it. He didn’t really answer the question when asked if any St. Louis officers had been dismissed. “We are in a process. Our process is much different than the Philadelphia Police Department. We have a civil service process in the city of St. Louis. It requires steps.”
Read the full story at: http://www.metrostl.com/2019/08/15/more-than-ferguson-st-louis-police-struggle-with-negative-headlines-plenty-of-conflict/
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