Criminal justice
Kent Police chief details hiring diversity, community policing efforts at council meeting
Kent Police Department complies with 25 of 28 community policing recommendations but falls short on diversity, community trust and civilian oversight
By Gina Butkovich
News Lab
The Kent Police Department employs 65 people — 63 of them are white.
Of the 41 police officers, 40 are white.
Hiring diversity was just one of the issues Chief Nicholas Shearer talked about when he appeared before Kent City Council’s Health and Safety Committee Wednesday night.
“A total of about 3 percent of the police department’s workforce is non-white and we know our community as a whole is about 20 percent non-white,” Shearer said during the meeting.
In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The task force produced a series of recommendations for local police departments to follow in an effort to build the public’s trust at the same time they were reducing crime. Of the 28 recommendations they made for local police departments, Shearer said, the Kent police are in full compliance with 25 of them.
The recommendations are organized around six pillars: Building Trust and Legitimacy, Policy and Oversight, Technology and Social Media, Officer Wellness and Safety, Community Policing and Crime Reduction, and Training and Education. For instance, the department prohibits choke holds, provides a variety of training programs and prioritizes youth engagement, according to a report Shearer compiled for the committee hearing.
Hiring diversity
One of the three areas where the department is not compliant involves workforce diversity.
“Although we’re not achieving that, we have undertaken a lot of measures to try and achieve that,” Shearer said. “It’s something that I think we have been frustrated citywide about: the lack of diversity in the workforce.”
Shearer said one of the things done to address the issue is heavy recruiting efforts throughout the community, including at Kent State, the University of Akron, Cuyahoga Community College, Youngstown State and universities throughout Northeast Ohio.
“Generally speaking, there is a decent amount of diversity within the [university] programs,” Shearer said. “Lt. (Mike) Lewis and I have both done some speaking, just to some classes at Kent State University, and they are fairly diverse classes.”
Shearer said there is “significant diversity” at the University of Akron as well, but they have generally only spoken in front of police academies there. At Kent State, he said, they have had blocks put aside for them in some classes to teach for a day.
Shearer points to a recent increase in the diversity of the applicants tested by the department as something to be pleased about.
“Over our last two tests we’ve seen about a 10 percent non-white diversity rate in our applicant pool, so that is an increase from the past,” Shearer said.
Asked by a council member whether non-white applicants were not testing well enough, Shearer said it was a mixture of factors.
“One of the things we certainly don’t want to do is jeopardize our hiring practices,” Shearer said. “I think we have very high standards, I’m proud of that and I feel we should continue to have very high standards. We’re bound by civil service law, is going to be part of it, so where people score on the test, that’s how we get the names and list of people that we go by.”
Community trust
The other two recommendations not fulfilled by the Kent police are to track and analyze the level of community trust and to have civilian oversight.
When it comes to a civilian oversight board, Shearer said despite not having one, the department does a good job of handling personnel complaints internally.
“One of the things we talk about internally when it comes to that is we have a very strict and comprehensive policy on personnel complaints and the personnel complaint procedure that we follow,” Shearer said. “Sometimes it’s so comprehensive that we sometimes get questions from our employees internally about how rigorously we investigate things that sometimes seem very minor, but we believe in transparency.”
Council member Tracy Wallach pressed Shearer on the protocol the department follows when an officer has multiple complaints against them.
“We’ve been finding out, with these incidents that we see in the news, that these officers that are involved in them, it seems like every officer that’s been involved in them has had many complaints filed against them,” Wallach said. “I wondered what kinds of actions does our police department take if there is an officer that has multiple complaints. How do we deal with them?”
Shearer said the department has a record system to keep track of the number of complaints made against each officer. The most important thing to look at, he said, is if the conduct is similar in all of the complaints.
“Obviously, if you start to see very similar conduct related to multiple complaints on one officer, it’s time to first and foremost look into some training aspects,” Shearer said. “Can we correct this behavior in some shape or form? Obviously we are not going to allow inappropriate or disrespectful behavior to continue, so our first step is going to be to look into it, see if there is a pattern and see if there is some sort of training we can provide.”
When pressed again by Wallach on when and if an officer would be fired, Shearer said department policy involves increasingly severe measures if an employee failed to correct a problem.
“It’s spelled out in our policies and obviously we have the union contracts and that element of things to deal with as well, but we do have a progessive discipline system,” he said. “So generally speaking, if we provide some sort of remedial training to someone and it proves to not be effective we are going to move forward into the progressive discipline process.”
Shearer also said the seriousness of the accusation can increase when the department enters the progressive discipline process, and some conduct is subject to termination on the first offense.
Body cameras and statewide reforms
In mid-June, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine laid out a wide number of proposed law enforcement reforms, including licensing police officers in the same way lawyers and teachers are licensed.
“On the surface, it sounds like a great idea,” Shearer said. “I would like to see what it looks like in practice and what some of the measures are with the licensing and what would cause you to be sanctioned and what wouldn’t.”
DeWine asked the state General Assembly to pass a law that forbids a police department from investigating its own fatal uses of force and requested the banning of choke holds, both recommendations Shearer said are already in place for the Kent Police Department.
DeWine also called for every officer in the state to wear a body camera. The Portage County NAACP has also made mandatory body cameras a top priority in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minnesota.
“We started looking at body cameras back in 2015,” Lewis said. “I did some research and even created a presentation. I made the rounds around the city because I wanted a lot of input and feedback from our residents about how they felt about body cameras. So I created a presentation, and it wasn’t biased in any way; I didn’t say whether we wanted cameras or not. I just presented the facts, the good and the bad, that everyone has to know when looking at body cameras.”
Lewis said he went to the Rotary Club of Kent, the Kent Lions Club and the Kent Area Chamber of Commerce to ask if people wanted police to wear body cameras.
“Ultimately, we’re not paying for them,” Lewis said. “It’s tax dollars.”
While Lewis said he believes most of the officers in the department would welcome body cameras, they come with a cost to the residents.
“What we can see in summary, with the calls for reform we are seeing, whether it be nationally or on the state level or even on the local level, we are very proud to say we are already in compliance with so many of these,” Lewis said. “Like the chief mentioned, 25 of 28 already. That’s tremendous. Understanding that we can always improve. And we are always looking to improve.”
This article was produced through a reporting partnership with the Collaborative News Lab @ Kent State University.
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