Is Chief Rick Smith up to the task of reinventing policing in KC post-George Floyd?
Ask any restaurant that made it through the coronavirus lockdown: Self-reinvention isn’t an extravagance. It’s a requisite for survival.
After the brutal killing of George Floyd, the same can now be said for the age-old art of policing. It will simply have to be reimagined across the nation.
“Policing will never be the same as it was before,” a chastened Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best acknowledged Sunday in an astonishing act of self-examination.
The extent to which Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith understands and embraces that — and can adapt himself and his department to new ways of policing — will determine whether he survives and whether the local chasm between the police and the policed can be bridged.
That test begins in earnest Tuesday, with Smith taking a package of reforms to the Board of Police Commissioners’ meeting amid heavy pressure to change policies and procedures — especially in cases of use of force and how they’re investigated and reported.
In an interview Monday, Smith, who was a 29-year department veteran when he took the top job in 2017, promised an in-depth conversation about changes, including the eight policing reform proposals pushed for by the web-based grassroots group “8CantWait.” He said an officer’s duty to intervene, and not just report on incidents of another officer’s misconduct, will be written into policy. Chokeholds are already banned, but the department’s use of “lateral vascular neck restraint,” which restricts blood flow to the brain, will be reviewed.
“We will have a thorough discussion on all eight points at the board,” Smith said.
That’s just the start, and I think the chief knows that.
I hope he realizes, though, that this goes beyond badly needed reforms all the way to reinvention. It goes beyond policy and procedure to posture. Imagine, for instance, if the white Atlanta officers who ended up killing Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, Friday night had asked themselves what the goal was: making the streets and even Brooks safer after they found him asleep and under the influence in a fast-food drive-thru by getting him home somehow — or scoring an arrest and showing him who’s in charge?
They had every right to arrest him. But they easily could have avoided it, too.
This is not to excuse Brooks’ behavior, only to examine the police potential for de-escalation.
“We are looking into all possibilities of what can be done. Tune in to the board meetings and see if we’re not facing this head-on,” Smith says, while noting that law-abiding citizens and officers themselves still need protection. “I think most people in this city want to know that the police are working on making this a safe city.”
When told his critics consider his past approach overly militaristic, Smith points to his emphasis on social workers and community intervention officers, the latter of whom drive community engagement through interfacing with neighborhoods, businesses and individuals, planning and attending community events and promoting crime prevention.
“I’m the guy who added social workers to every patrol division. I’ve tried to implement many other alternatives to enforcement-style policing,” he says. On community intervention officers: “When I became chief, the first thing I did was I reinstituted that program.” Then, he says, he doubled it.
About the perception he can be overly protective of officers involved in controversial uses of force, Smith candidly says, “Yeah, I can see how people could say that.” But he says in many such cases, “There’s no black and white. There’s some gray area in-between. And in that, we’re going to have some differences of opinion. I get that.”
It’s precisely that treacherous twilight between good cop and bad cop that Smith most needs to navigate deftly and ever-more transparently and collaboratively — both to reassure an edgy and wary minority community, and to weather his profession’s most turbulent time in decades, if ever.
Smith’s ability to adapt to the sudden, yet belated evolution in law enforcement has a lot more to do with community and public relations than what he learned as a student of criminal justice. The job of police chief in America has changed. A chief must change with it or be stampeded by the thundering herd of the disadvantaged, disillusioned and dismayed.
Rick Smith is a good cop and a good guy who nonetheless needs to rise above himself to reinvent policing here. Moreover, he’s going to have to do it in front of a very skeptical and discerning audience.
And while you’re accused of being tone deaf today if you sing the first note of praise for law enforcement, I for one hope he can pull it off.
