Policing
An interview with Kent Police Chief Nicholas Shearer
We asked Shearer about the police reform movement, body cameras, school resource officers, the budget, workforce diversity and other issues
Kent Police Chief Nicholas Shearer grew up in a family of police officers in Summit County. His father and his uncles were cops, and his older brother is an officer. “This is really kind of all I’ve ever known,” he said.
He could have gone into the Akron Police Department and come up through the ranks behind his relatives. But he decided not to. After graduating from the University of Akron with an associate’s degree in criminal justice and a bachelor’s in emergency management, he decided to look elsewhere.
“While it would be really cool to follow in their footsteps and work where they worked, I also sort of wanted to be able to blaze my own path and not have to follow in their footsteps and not feel like I was getting benefits or perks because of who I was,” Shearer said. “So it was kind of nice to be able to come here, where I didn’t have that name recognition and be able to walk into a department and get a fresh start and be able to feel like I’m doing it on my own.”
I spoke with Shearer for an hour last week about his background, his philosophy on policing, school resource officers (SRO), transparency, the “College Fest Riot” of 2009, workforce diversity, police budgets and body cameras. This is the full transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length.
So did you come up in the Kent Police Department? What’s your story?
So I started here in 2008. I worked patrol for about five and a half years before my first promotion to sergeant, and the majority of that time I spent on midnight shift. I was hired at 22, so I was young. It was a fun time to be able to just go out and get that aspect of the job. I was also fortunate enough, fairly early on in my career, to become a member of our SWAT team. I spent seven years as a member of Metro SWAT. I teach several different things. I teach different tactics, I teach firearms, crowd control. So that’s kind of my background.
I was a sergeant for a short time really — a little less than two years. And most of that was also on midnight shift. And then when I became a lieutenant, interestingly enough, the shift that I always wanted to work early in my career was afternoon shift. I really wanted to work 3 to 11. I just thought that that was a busy shift the entire time and gives you a lot of experience. I never had the opportunity, seniority-wise, to do that as an officer or a sergeant. And I got promoted lieutenant. I spent four years as a lieutenant on afternoon shift. So that’s invaluable experience, just because you have such a variety of calls and a variety of things that you deal with every day. Early on in your shift, you kind of get the experience of dealing with some of the day-shift type things. And by the end, you’re dealing with some of the bar scene and what that presents. It’s really a good shift to work for experience.
Following that, promoted to captain, I spent only about a year and a half as a captain, where I oversaw all uniformed patrol. I was in what we call the Operations Captain position. So I spent about a year and a half in charge of all patrol and then stepping into this role now, this is the completion of my fourth week.
Yeah, you’re fresh in the leadership role. What were your goals going in, both personally and also for the department?
First and foremost, I’ll speak to my goals for the department. I’m blue in the face about this, I feel like I love the topic but, youth engagement. I always say we do a pretty good job of community relations with a lot of people, community leaders and things like that, but where I think we can really do a lot better is getting out into the communities and engaging kids. Where we are nationally right now, in terms of society and community relations with law enforcement, I think this could be avoidable. It sounds very cliche to say, but kids are our future. Let’s be honest, kids are our future. So I think getting involved with kids at a young age. When I say young, I’m talking 5 years old and up.
But one of the things that I’ve implemented now is I’ve designated at least two officers per shift who are now Community Relations Officers. Lieutenant Mike Lewis is in charge of our community relations as a department, and he is working with these new Community Relations Officers in several different entities to develop some more programmatic things for younger kids. So for instance, one of the first things we’ve been able to do in terms of partnerships is partner with the city’s Parks and Rec Department. They have day camp programs all summer long, and they have a block in their daycare program now that they’re going to dedicate for us to be able to go in and interact with kids.
I’ve always said we have an SRO program here at the high school, middle school, high school level, and it’s been really, really beneficial and invaluable in terms of building some relationships with people, but it’s got to start younger than that. Long term, I would really love to see the day where we have more School Resource Officers where they can go into the grade school environments and start interacting with kids there at a younger age. Quite honestly, the Community Relations Officers that are designated now on day shift, once school starts back up, that’s going to be a big part of their role is to get into the schools, work with the school administrators, and the teachers to have programs, you know, go in and read books to kids in classes, be there to interact with kids, meet the parents and things like that.
So I guess my logic behind a lot of that is that kids are very influential at that young of an age and to allow them to see the human side, the non-enforcement-oriented side of us when they’re that young I think can help shape their perceptions of police. I can speak a little bit to it as a parent; I have two daughters. I find it almost impossible as a parent to not like and respect someone who really treats your children well. So that aspect of it is a two-for-one. You impact the children, but through the children you connect with parents.
Are those SROs inevitably called in for disciplinary issues that could be handled by teachers or counselors or mental health professionals? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, that’s the criticism of SROs.
Right, not necessarily. The way we have designed our program here is our SRO is not necessarily called in for disciplinary reasons. Now, if it rises to the level of a criminal issue, then our SRO will be asked to get involved. But as long as it’s just something that normally, in the absence of an SRO, the school would handle on their own, then they still do. And that’s been very clear. We work very closely with the schools to design this program and that was one of the concerns. We really want this SRO to be there to provide a.) protection to the school and b.) just to build relationships with the kids. We don’t want it to be a strict enforcement type of a position and quite honestly, if I walk out in uniform through the city right now, I will have about every other person I see ask me how our SRO is doing by name. Our SRO at the middle school and high school, the community loves them. It’s a really nice program, I think. So I have seen a lot of that concern, and I fully agree. If you have an SRO that’s solely there to take an enforcement role, it’s not a productive program.
When you came in, George Floyd had just been killed. So you came in right as the entire conversation about police was changing. Have your goals changed in light of those conversations? Have you had conversations internally about whether the Kent Police Department will respond to these sorts of calls for reform and if so, what?
I don’t know that it’s changed my goals necessarily. I think my goals line up with a lot of what’s going on right now. A big push right now in terms of reforms is not just internal policies and things, but community engagement’s a huge part of it. So, has it changed? Absolutely, in terms of the early stages of what I thought I would be doing and how quickly some of this other stuff gets up and running. I’ll be just frank about it. It’s made me look at some of our policies that relate to some of these things and say, “Is this what it should say? Is this how it should be?”
Can you give an example?
Sure. Use of force I think is the easiest, most common example to find with that. It’s definitely made me look at our use-of-force policy. There will likely be some minor edits coming out, and I don’t mind speaking to exactly what that is. It’s a language cleanup thing. At the Kent Police Department, we’ve always banned chokeholds. It’s been banned my entire career here. I didn’t like the wording. It was kind of old wording and it said “sleeper holds.” It’s what they called them. In the ’90s it was common to call a chokehold a “sleeper hold.” So I just changed the wording and made it more explicitly stated that it’s chokehold. Let’s not back down from that word.
Above and beyond that, another big goal I have is just openness and transparency. I’ve always said, growing up in a law enforcement environment, that we, as a profession, are feeling the wrath of those who came before us, to an extent. And what I mean by that is if you look back, you and I wouldn’t probably be having this conversation in the ’70s or ’80s, or even even into the ’90s, because we were a profession of “this is our knowledge and we’re not going to talk about it.” We were very closed off, and it’s done us a huge disservice today. Now trying to make up ground where there’s been so little information-sharing or relationship-building over the course of time.
I think you mentioned the transparency point last night [at Wednesday’s Kent City Council safety committee meeting] with regard to the investigations of personnel complaints. Are those public record? Is there a way for me or anyone in the community to see if there are officers with a history of complaints and how those were resolved?
Yeah, it would be very simple. It’s just a public records request for disciplinary history. It would give you all of that.
Are there things that are not public record? Is there anything that you have in your building that just isn’t for public eyes?
There are going to be certain things like, for instance, employee medical files aren’t public record. There are certain policies that would have to be redacted to a certain degree. And that’s not so much for a lack of transparency, that’s about if, for instance, I tell the public how we’re going to respond to a bank alarm, it could jeopardize the safety of the public and the officers in their response. So there are certain things that would have to be redacted. Obviously, we have a lot of files in the department that have social security numbers and protected information like that on them. So those would be redacted as well. But still available. It would just be redacted. Also videos, for instance. There was a law passed in Ohio last year as it pertains to public records when it comes to videos, and there’s a lot of stuff that has to be redacted out of videos and I don’t know every single thing off the top of my head, but a good example would be juveniles who aren’t the direct suspect of an investigation. If they’re depicted in a video, we have to redact that.
You mentioned that you have an interest in crowd control and you worked on the SWAT team. I thought you guys handled the Black Lives Matter protests extremely well. Looking at some of these other cities where you had a row of police in SWAT gear basically just standing off against their community struck me as a recipe for disaster. Whereas you had, like, two cops that were even visible, and I think they were there to protect the protesters. Could you talk about your strategy on that and the decisions you made and why?
First and foremost, I’m a very strong believer in the Constitution. People have a First Amendment right to peacefully protest. If you’re protesting me, that’s your right. If you’re protesting the police, that’s your right. All we ask is that people remain peaceful and we asked all the crowds we had to not block roads. We asked them to remain peaceful. We told them that we support their right to be there, told them that if they needed anything to let us know. I have a very strong belief that whether we agree with a message or not, whether those people are protesting us or not, they have a right to do that.
I’m not gonna hide from the fact that what happened in Minneapolis that really sparked a lot of this, it’s terrible. That cop was charged criminally, and he absolutely deserves to be charged criminally. I’m not going to sit here and try to defend any action there. In large part, the law enforcement community is really in agreement with the community as a whole about this issue. So, that really made it very easy for us. And like I said, it just comes back to: people have rights. I took an oath and in that oath I swore to protect the rights of everyone in the U.S. Constitution, and I absolutely will do that.
You started in 2008. You were on the SWAT team, so I think you may remember this. I was a journalism student at Kent State when the “College Fest Riot” happened. I think it was 2009. Were you there? And 10 years later, looking back on that, do you guys view that as a success or an inflection point? Were there any changes made afterwards? What are your thoughts?
I actually was not there initially; I worked the midnight shift at the time and we all got called in early that night. So as soon as everything started I got called in, but by the time I got there, a large portion of that crowd had already dispersed. What I’ll talk a little bit about is, what is our goal under those circumstances? When people start throwing rocks, bricks, bottles, what is our goal? It’s not so much to arrest every person who is behaving in that manner. Our goal is really to get the behavior to stop and to disperse the crowd.
So, in terms of use of force on that with the different munitions that were used, it probably was much less than it seemed. I don’t know that there were more than four or five of the gas rounds used. There may have been more than four or five of the pepper ball rounds, but I’m speaking specifically about the actual gas rounds. There was not a lot used. And quite honestly, that’s one of those things that’s a very difficult decision to make, in my opinion, because it’s airborne. It can affect more than just the people who are the problem.
There was a large gathering at Plum Creek Park about two weeks ago, on June 19. It was a Juneteenth party. There were somewhere between 800 and 1,500 — depends on the source — but between 800 and 1,500 people there. It wasn’t out of control, but there was illegal behavior. There was marijuana smoking, there were open containers of alcohol, loud music, vulgar language, the park was getting ready to close. In addition, there was a little kids baseball game going on at the baseball field in the park. It got to the point where we had to go in — and this was kind of my approach, whenever possible — where we had to go in and say, “This needs to stop.” But what I told our guys to do is to go in, figure out who’s organized the event. We actually were not able to figure out who organized it, but we were able to speak with someone who was willing to work with us and help us resolve everything. So what we did is we said, “Look, we’re going to give you plenty of time. We just need to see progress.” And that was kind of my approach. If we see nothing’s turning violent, and we’re seeing progress towards dispersal, we’ll let it take as long as it needs to take to accomplish it peacefully. And then that’s what we did and it ended up peacefully dispersing. That’s the approach I’d like to take as much as possible.
They talked a lot last night about diversity hiring, and from what I can gather, ther are basically three main reasons that it’s difficult to hire more non-white officers. First of all, you need to increase the pool of applicants, which you’ve seen some progress on. But then after that, the candidates need to meet a certain state mandated threshold, if I understand correctly, to even be considered. And then further, there’s a background check that the Kent Police Department has to do. And so far, no people of color have really passed all those obstacles. Have I characterized that right?
To a certain degree, yes. We do have one Black officer right now. So he’s gotten through it, obviously, but so to kind of speak to that, how it works is we’re a civil service agency. So essentially, there is state law that pertains to civil service and how you can hire based on that. So for instance, let’s say we give a civil service test to hire police officers, and we have an African American candidate that finishes number 15. Depending on how many candidates we have on the list, we may not even be allowed to get his name to look into him from civil service. Does that make sense?
So they’re graded against their peers? Is that how it works?
Yeah, so when we give a test there’s essentially a list that comes out, and it’s just a percentage score a person gets that says where they rank on the list in relation to everyone else who takes the test. So for simplicity purposes, let’s say we have 100 people pass a test. We have what’s called the rule of 10. Say 100 people pass our test, so then we have a civil service test list with 100 people on it, then we would have access to the top 10. So if you have a minority candidate who does fairly well, but doesn’t land in the top 10, we don’t have access to even look into that person until we get through several other people. And in order to get through people they have to either be disqualified in a background investigation or willingly remove themselves from the list. We can’t just skip people to get to a minority candidate; the people have to be lawfully able to be skipped.
How do you get the lists?
We give a test. We have a company, generally, we don’t make our own tests here. We have a company that comes in and writes a civil service test. The service tests are general knowledge tests. They’re not law-enforcement-specific knowledge on the test. And that’s a state civil service law that requires that. We cannot give a law-enforcement-knowledge specific test.
So what does it cover?
Like I said, it’s very general knowledge. Different tests are different, but a lot of times you’ll see a math section, a reading comprehension section, a memory section, logic, things like that.
So with the background investigation, what are you looking for and what would disqualify someone?
So, any recent drug use as an immediate disqualifier for the most part for us. Lying to us at any point in the background investigation is an immediate disqualifier. And that’s just an integrity thing. We have to be able to maintain credibility in court. So if you hire someone who has already shown integrity issues you’re really starting behind the eight ball. So those are the two things that stand out most pronounced. It would be recent drug use. Obviously you can’t be a convicted felon, you can’t be convicted of certain misdemeanor offenses. And what that would come back to is just simply, you can’t possess a firearm if you’re convicted of certain offenses. And obviously, you have to be able to possess a firearm to do the job. Above and beyond that, it’s going to be very specific to the circumstances of a person. I mean, to actually be disqualified though, those would be the things that stick out the most. It’d be a lot easier if you and I could sit and look at a couple of the applicant packets and and say, “OK, this is why this person was disqualified,” because there could be a combination of circumstances, even. But the hiring packets are confidential.
Do you know how many minority candidates you’ve had in the last few years? Is that data known?
Sure, I actually had that in my notes for the council meeting last night and they didn’t ask. So the last test that we gave, in 2019, we had 12 non-white applicants and 15 female applicants out of a total of 102 applicants. Generally, every two years we give the test. Because the prior test in 2017, we had a total of 103 applicants, we had 15 non-white applicants and 19 female applicants.
And where did they fall? Did any of those in 2017 or 2019 land in that 90th percentile?
I don’t have that information in front of me. I apologize. I will say that, off the 2017 test, we did do a background investigation on a minority candidate who was not able to make it through the background investigation.
So hiring minority officers, community trust and civilian oversight — those are three areas where you were not complying [with recommendations from a federal task force on community policing]. Those also seem to be the central three talking points from the police reform advocates protesting in the streets. Are these a top priority for you? Do you think that they will make an impact in terms of building community trust to start measuring that and having diversity that reflects the diversity of the community, etc.?
So I’ll speak specifically about each issue. The community oversight thing is an interesting issue. If you look into community oversight, generally speaking, it’s fairly common in large cities. And it’s very uncommon in smaller cities, similar to us. What it comes down to sometimes is just resources. You look at how much the city would have to pay somebody to come in and be independent of the police department and have some sort of an oversight. It’s going to require somebody who has knowledge of law enforcement practices, whether that be someone who used to work in law enforcement or whether that be an attorney. It can be a fairly costly venture. And I don’t mean to make it sound like that should be a barrier, but it certainly is a consideration. It’s one of those things that’s going to be largely community-dictated. That’s one of the things where if the community said, “We need to have this and let’s fund it,” you know, sure. So I would say that one to me is a little different than the other two.
In terms of minority hiring and gauging citizen satisfaction with our police department — and “trust” I guess it’s better word there — those are definitely a priority. In fact, we are currently, as an administration, working on developing a survey. Our goal is to just randomly select somewhere between 10 and 20 people that each officer interacts with on a monthly basis, just randomly. I don’t want it to ever look like we’re just picking people that we think are going to give us good ratings. That’s not the goal. That’s not what we’re trying to do. So it’ll be a random thing. We’ll be able to pull up a list of people the officer had contact with, and just select 10 or 20 of those people on a monthly basis and send out a survey. When we do start this program, we’re going to send it out with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. So the people can send it back with some sort of confidence that it is confidential.
Why not have a third party manage this? I mean, can you imagine sending these things to people and saying, “Hey, send your feedback on this officer, who may hold your fate in his hands.” Why not have it be confidentially sent to a third-party pollster or something like that? Have you considered that?
I understand your point. Quite honestly, I hadn’t really thought about that much. I’ll be fairly frank about it right now — and again, I don’t want this to be the driver of everything — but because of Covid and what’s happened around here in terms of economy, some of that stuff’s gonna be very difficult to accomplish this year, at least. Just from a budget standpoint. So that’s the difficult part. It’s kind of been the perfect storm of needing to focus on some of this stuff, but in this current time, we just got the two things back-to-back. Covid took the toll on the budget city-wide, really, and then you look at what we’re trying to do here and what we’re trying to overcome. We’re looking at updating things and looking at new ways of doing things. And it’s making it difficult.
In light of that, what I want to do is make it fully anonymous. And I understand that concern. There might even be some programs out there where it is more cost effective, maybe. Like Survey Monkey, I think is one of them out there. Maybe even something like that, where it is completely anonymous for the person to give some feedback and it’s partially managed by a third party. We would get data fairly quickly and it’d probably be more cost effective. Quite honestly, it’s still very rare. You don’t hear about satisfaction surveys in policing very much. But like I said, I do value the idea and understand the importance, and for sure, we are going to get something up and running in response to that.
Speaking of the budget, there are a lot of people who think there should be fewer police, and that could potentially be accomplished by diverting funding to other services. For example, if you have to make a mental health crisis call, why is the police department doing that necessarily. Could the number of personnel be reduced and diverted? And that might answer the question of how do you afford civilian oversight. Maybe you replace an officer with a civilian ombudsman. Do you think that that’s an option for the Kent Police Department?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve thought a lot about stuff like this. First and foremost, when you start to look at diverting funds to different places — for instance, you brought up the the mental health example — I think you’re going to be very hard-pressed to find very many mental health practitioners that are willing to go out into the community and deal with people in crisis. Now, do I think that they would do house calls on some of their clients who maybe are not in crisis? Yes, I do. But do I think that very many mental health practitioners, without the protection of the police, are going to go out into the community and deal with that? I don’t think they will.
And I think the best way I can illustrate that is this: one of the processes we have is if we have to do an emergency commitment — which means that we’ve determined that they are a risk of physical harm to themselves or someone else based on a psychological reason — we can force them to go seek treatment. Obviously, the goal is to do that peacefully. Coleman Professional Services does not have their own security. So we’re not allowed to take people to Coleman Professional Services under those circumstances, we have to go to UH Portage, where they have a police department. That’s what Coleman Professional Services requires. So to think that they would be willing to go out into the community and deal with it, without police officers there — they don’t do that in their own office without police officers there. So that’s a very difficult question. Again, it goes back to the fact that part of the answer to that question is something for a different profession that I don’t want to speak for.
It sounds like the purse strings are ultimately not totally controlled by you. So we’ve left that kind of decision making up to elected officials in a lot of ways.
Correct. But obviously, there’s a platform for me to speak on that, though. I mean, if we were to have more serious conversations about those issues here in Kent, at least, I would have some sort of voice with the council to at least make my case on that.
They brought up body cameras. This is a top priority for the Portage County NAACP. I think a lot of the public supports body cameras. I think a lot of police departments actually support them. Why have you guys not pulled the trigger on that?
Money, honestly. I’ve long said I would welcome body cameras with open arms. Our officers would welcome body cameras with open arms. It’s a very expensive project. And quite honestly, we’ve left it up to the community. We’ve put it out there to our city council and the community and said, “If this is something you want us to have, we’re willing to do it, and this is how much it’s going to cost.”
And what’s that number?
So the last time we actually put together full figures of everything, it was going to be just shy, I think of $300,000.
Per year or is that the startup?
That’s the startup cost. I believe that’s about a five-year rotating plan. So that’s like a five-year contract for the equipment and the maintenance and the storage. So again, it’s one of those things where about every five years, you have to look at that cost.
I mean, I’ll be honest with you, I love cameras. When somebody complains, or we get something where we want to look a little further, they’re a great tool. They’re a great tool for us as well internally to look at just officer conduct. That is something with cruiser cameras, our supervisors are all required to watch random videos of their officers to gauge officer conduct. So to extend that to more situations than just things that kind of happened in front of a cruiser would be phenomenal, I think.
But above and beyond the conduct things it also allows us to gauge tactics and officer safety skills. It’s really a training point for us a lot of the time to be able to watch the cameras and see how the officers are performing. So there’s really mutual benefit for everybody. For the community, for the police department, for everybody.
That being said, it’s kind of a cost-benefit analysis, for the community to consider. Like I said, we certainly don’t ever want to come across as if we don’t want body cameras, because we would welcome them with open arms. But I think it is important that the community have some say over the process and have all the facts and be able to make an educated decision on whether or not they think we should have them or not.
Do you think now is the time to have that conversation?
I think it’s very difficult. Just the time is so difficult right now, because, like I said, we know that the budgets have taken such a hit right now because of Covid. And to have a conversation about something that’s probably going to cost us somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 is a very difficult thing, I think to go to the city and say we need this money right now. Yeah, so it’s difficult and like I said, it’s really a decision for the community.
Is there anything I didn’t ask that you thought you’d have to talk about or that you want to talk about? What else is relevant here?
I think that it’s just important to kind of speak to some of the points we’ve already discussed. Like I said, I have a very genuine goal to make us a much more transparent department. I really want to continue the partnerships we’ve already created and work to build more. And I really have a passion for youth engagement. I think that’s really the key to our future. That’s a way to start some bigger conversations into some of this stuff.
Myself and Lt. Mike Lewis have engaged in some difficult conversations with different community members already. I think we need to hear what the community has to say, we need to engage in a dialogue and we can’t hide from some of the past. We can’t hide from some of the things that have happened. And I don’t specifically mean here in Kent. I think we have enjoyed quite a bit of community support here. But in general, I just think we need to be very open and transparent and willing to have these difficult conversations.
it sounds like you’re speaking for police officers generally. Kent does seem like a special place where it hasn’t been like some of the bigger cities where you’re asked to come in on a lot of difficult calls where you’ve had to deal with a lot of big city issues.
Yeah. It’s a unique town. It’s a very unique town in that we do have a large university in the middle of it. It presents sometimes what feels like maybe a big city environment in a small city. And looking back into the past — not so much in my career — but looking back into the past I think we’re known worldwide for demonstrations and protests at times. We’ve experienced that. So it is kind of a unique small town.
But I think that over the last 10 years or so we’ve really come a long way in terms of our community engagement. Last night, councilperson Tracy Wallach brought that up, how far we’ve come over the last seven or eight years. And really and truly I like to say it this way: Chief [Michelle] Lee did a wonderful job of really taking the reins off. Like I said, 10 years ago, I don’t know that we would have been having this conversation. The police department’s message 10 years ago was always “no comment.” And Chief Lee said, “No, that’s not the way to do this.” And she really kind of took the reins off and allowed Lt. Mike Lewis to start to really engage the community and really work well with the media. I want that to continue.
I like to say that I think Chief Lee did a lot of work and put the ball at the 50-yard line for me, and I’d like to get the touchdown now. So I’ve got to pick the ball up and run with it from where she left off.
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