I Worked as the Community-Police Relations Coordinator for a Quintessential American City

Preface

After he returned from his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X seemed to have a clearer understanding of the world in which he lived. He ceased talking about “white people” as inherently evil beings and began to understand that “whiteness” is merely a social construct embodied by citizens of this nation. As it was put in the Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley “it isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic, and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.” When I refer to white people in this essay, I too am talking about the social construct that America has erected. It is important to grapple with the tough fact that America was built by and for aristocratic white men on the stolen land of its indigenous people and on the backs of African slaves. It is as equally important to know that those same subjugated people have most vehemently fought to hold America accountable to the democratic principles on which it was founded; and to recognize that that fight has ultimately made America better for all its residents. Dayton, Ohio is a quintessential American city, our struggles are that of the nation. America finds itself at a crossroad. This is an extremely tumultuous moment, yet one not unprecedented in history. To move forward without repeating the mistakes of the pass, we must engage in a critical examination of where we’ve been. So, I offer up some of my experience as the former City of Dayton Community-Police Relations Coordinator just in case it holds any social value.

An Essay

As the Community Police Relations Coordinator for the City of Dayton, Ohio Human Relations Council (HRC), the Dayton Police Department (DPD) never intentionally showed me the things they did not want the general public to see. My job with the city was mostly a bullshit public relations job that existed merely as a political talking point so higher-ranking city officials could say that they were working on the most prevalent political issue of the decade. Nonetheless, I saw enough to get a clear picture of the way municipal government plays its part in the larger systemic oppression of black and poor people in this country.

A month before I would officially start my job, in September 2016 I was sent to a conference hosted by the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was accompanied by my soon to be boss, the director of the local Urban League, the president of the local NAACP and the black assistant chief of the Dayton Police Department. At a New Mexican steak house, we argued about the murder of Tamir Rice. The assistant chief argued that the killing of Tamir was justified. He conceded that bad tactics were used by the officers involved when they pulled up on the young 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy gun in his own neighborhood, but he blamed the driver of the police cruiser, as opposed to the officer who shot him dead.

I tried my best to plead the case that such state violence was unacceptable, but I was inhibited by the fact that this was, more or less, the first significant conversation in my official capacity. I was trying my best to convince my new colleagues and more fervently, myself, that I could consider the facts without letting my personal feeling get into the way. I convinced myself that objectivity was the key between bridging the gap between community and the police. I genuinely wanted to use my job to make a difference, but in retrospect, I convinced myself of a lot of bullshit to keep it.

While in the role I met with every type of city official and employee within the city government. I met with inquiring citizens and community activists; with members of the clergy and leaders of nonprofits; with curious college students and university professors; with citizens who had specific complaints against the police and those who just did not like the notion of police as it existed. All of these meetings served-in their own way- to accomplish the same goal. As long as we, the government, were meeting we could say we were working on it. This served as an impediment to progress because while the existence of these meetings was enough to placate people, rarely did anything ever discussed in these meetings have any bearing on the way the Dayton police operated.

Nonetheless, there was one meeting that was held in the highest esteem, and that was the Community Police Council (CPC) meeting. The CPC meeting was a monthly meeting of the brightest and most prominent members of the community, along with the Dayton Police Department command staff, high ranking city officials, and whatever city commissioners decided to show up. At the time the letters CPC meant everything to me, but now, as a resident of the city who doesn’t work for the City, those letters mean about as much to me as they do to you as you read this passage. One instinct tells us that these letters-CPC- do not mean anything simply because we know nothing of the process. However, we should trust the other instinct that tells us these letters mean nothing, because they do nothing for us. That is not to be derogatory toward anyone who was or is on the CPC or similar councils or committees across the nation, but, it by all means, is meant to degrade the unimaginative, ill-informed processes that local governments engage in to pretend to care about citizen input.

Not quite three weeks into my job as an official employee, I held my first CPC meeting. It never did become clear what we were to meet about, mostly we met to address whatever “current’’ issue threatened community-police relations. Failing to admit or realize that the only issue was American policing as it currently exists. Some short time before my first meeting, I cannot remember whether it was hours or days, I received a forwarded email that, from what I could gather came from the white assistant chief of police. It should be mentioned that there were two assistant chiefs, a white one, by the name of Matt Carper and the black one that I had debated with at the New Mexican steak house. I was often told that there were two assistant police chiefs because Chief Biehl wanted Carper, but the majority black commission wanted a black assistant chief. Apparently, the hiring of the black assistant chief as an additional assistant chief, was the result of a compromise between Chief Biehl and the Commission. In any case, the email contained a link to a YouTube video made by Prager U, an organization dedicated to promoting conservative propaganda, their most famous employee perhaps is the infamous black conservative, Candace Owens.

The video touted the idea that police violence against black Americans was not actually that big of a problem and that “black on black crime was the bigger problem.” Being overly deferential to Chief Biehl in the beginning, I asked Chief Biehl if he wanted to discuss the video. It would be a while before I would learn that Chief Biehl was too smart to bring such a divisive video into a public forum, he prefers to hide his and his departments racism. In retrospect, it was probably better that I did not unilaterally show that video and expose the department to the fury of the members of the CPC. Chief Biehl and his command staff would have immediately put their guards up and the department would have been impenetrable by me from that point forward. As ridiculous as it sounds to me today, back then my commitment to objectivity would not allow me to fully appreciate the racism I experienced relatively often.

Sanctioned efforts to achieve social justice is almost oxymoronic. The inherent contradiction that lies within relying on establishment institutions to push ideas and policy that would benefit the people but burden the institution was not lost on the founders of the HRC. Dayton is a city manager form of government, meaning that the manager runs the day to day operations and the commissions sets a broad policy from which the manager operates. Dayton was the biggest city to adopt this form when it did and for all intents and purposes all municipalities are run this way today. It is designed to promote efficiency within government. However, the founders of the HRC had the foresight to avoid this conflict of interest by making it so that the HRC reported directly to the city commission as opposed to the city manager. I am not sure how long the HRC actually operated this way in practice. All that I can tell you now is that it would have and will take an extremely interested commission for this dynamic to work in the way it was intended.

For a while, it seemed we did have a commissioner that could muster at least a little bit of interest to ensure things were operating as the HRC suggested at-least with regard to community-police relations. The CPC was to be the legacy of former commissioner Joey Williams and he had an interest in protecting this legacy. Joey and my former boss Katy Crosby were a dynamic team, funding for the programs had not been a problem as long as they were running the show. It helped that the Obama administration committed funds to bring into realization the recommendations outlined in the 21st Century Policing Task Force Report that the administration commissioned. But, just as the Obama administration negotiated with a system of policing rooted in white supremacy, as did Katy and Joey, and by extension as did I. This paired with my commitment to remain “objective”, led me, along with anyone else working on the issue to pursue a ton of fruitless endeavors.

White people love to make black people produce quantifiable data to prove their grievances. It says a lot about our society that we react more emotionally to a set of numbers than we do to people literally yelling and screaming pleading their cases. It is as if we are blind to circumstances around us and they are suddenly made clear once these grievances appear on a sheet of paper in the form of a bunch of numbers. I guess it would make sense that in a capitalist society, the only thing that matters is the “bottom line.” But, then again and more likely, they are well aware of the grievances for they are the ones who have caused them. Nonetheless, following the suggestion of the Obama report, we created a task force of our own to examine the data. There were dozens of meetings that lead to a couple of reports all of which were significant in their own way, none of which were significant in the grander scheme things, except, to teach us that we should quit wasting our time on such endeavors.

Ironically, one of the most intelligent and committed members of the data committee explained why there was no need for her, or any of us to be at the table. As we discussed the data, that of course favored the police (especially when it came to use of force), we discovered that the data itself isn’t “objective.” It could not or would not be impartial because it was entered by police officers who of course were partial to themselves. The committee member, being a black lady explained to the rest of the committee, more so directly to the police officers on the committee, that her black husband was harassed by a police officer. But, because he was harassed without incident, the data would not capture the fact that he was harassed at all. Harassed without incident, meaning that the man was accosted and questioned in a way his white counterpart would not have been. In a way that most black Americans are familiar with. That way which chips away at our esteem, but not worth the paperwork for the officer. The short anecdote proved that no amount of data, which was not accurate anyway, could quantify a value system that leaves a race of people at the mercy of the state with no reasonable expectation of justice. Hence why we should concede that the only data that we need is the consistent grief expressed by the offended parties.

If black city, county, state, or federal officials are not careful, they become tools of oppression against their own people. More often than not they indeed become so. It is almost inevitable and almost never intentional. Overtime, it became abundantly clear that a big part of my job was to protect the police department and the city from the “unreasonable” scorn of the people. That as an “objective” facilitator, I was failing if I let the people get too angry or come too close to the powers that be. Katy (my former boss) understood this role a lot better than I did. In my early days I had a tendency to freely offer seats to people to sit on the CPC. When I did this in front of Katy, I was promptly checked. She explained to me that I need to be more careful about who I invite to the table. Indeed, the process of getting people onto the CPC was far from democratic. The director of the HRC and the community-police relations coordinator were to make recommendations to the commission and those recommendations had to be vetted and approved by a majority of the commission. I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with this process, but in practice what it meant was only “well-polished” citizens made it to the table. This ensured that any rage expressed would still be elegant. From what I can gather, this process worked tremendously and frankly, I feel as though Katy was rewarded for it, though she may disagree. The CPC, when I arrived, was a relatively calm group of citizens who were proud of the public relations work that had achieved. It seemed to me that their biggest gripe was that more people did not know who the CPC was or about the good deeds they had done on behalf of the community. What they failed to realize is that they hadn’t really done much for the community at all.

Again, this is not to be overly critical. The general consensus at the time was that community-police relations was more so an interpersonal problem as opposed to a structural issue. President Obama himself had been guilty of advancing that narrative. When a white police officer arrested a black Harvard professor for trying to get into his own house, Obama’s solution was to invite the arresting officer and the professor to the White House to have a beer. As if the problem was just an inconvenient misunderstanding that could be resolved by a conversation over a drink. Generally speaking, the Obama administration failed to address the structural racism underlying American institutions of law enforcement. Obama’s task force on 21st Century Policing was a gallant effort, but it failed to hit the big pink elephant in the middle of the room. In an effort to be fair, I’ll surmise that the City of Dayton, the HRC, and the CPC was just following the lead of the president. However, Donald Trump’s presidency had changed everything. While the Obama election and presidency were a convenient and very effective cloak that covered America’s racism, President Trump’s election and presidency laid it bare.

I think America’s tolerance for hopeful and polite conversations had been exhausted, including my own. By 2018, I could clearly see how I had become just another black public official used as a tool of placation. I quietly and internally reckoned with that fact. From there I began to divorce the idea of being “objective” and from that moment forward, I knew things would be much different than before.

The entire year of 2018 was pretty much wasted devising a strategic plan that I had a nagging suspicion would never come to fruition. The HRC did that thing that the government does which is use their funds to hire someone else to do something on its behalf. In this case we hired a competent professor from Wright State University to help the CPC create the three-year strategic plan. In the planning process he helped the CPC develop a plan to address what we agreed to call a “critical incident” which was any incident that could be subjectively deemed high profile. It should be noted, if it is not already obvious, that the police department expected the CPC to merely be its cheerleaders and outreach arm. Thus, the only response the police department expected from the CPC in the event that a “critical incident” would occur, is to show support for the police department. That expectation proved to be irreconcilable with the desire of some members of the CPC who wanted to address the underlying issues that led to the occurrence of the incident.

The first “critical incident” occurred in February of 2019 when a cameraman captured a video of a woman by the name of Quinshayla Necole Kelley intervening when she perceived officers using excessive force against a man she believed was in grave danger, like the officers in Minneapolis should have as they witnessed officer Derick Chauvin strangle George Floyd with his knee for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Ms. Kelley was subsequently arrested. The video of that incident went viral, it was shared thousands of times and viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Per the plan, the CPC was called in for an emergency meeting to discuss the incident in question. Many members of the CPC called the use of force used to arrest Ms. Kelley excessive, further, and more importantly many members of the CPC, including myself, called for Chief Biehl to recommend “restorative justice” to the prosecuting city attorney, a concept he championed, as opposed to criminal justice, a system that is broken. Restorative justice, in this case, would have resulted in an opportunity for Ms. Kelley and the involved officers to sit down with the City of Dayton Mediation Center and resolve the issue. Instead, Ms. Kelley eventually plead to one charge of disorderly conduct and now has that conviction on her record indefinitely.

I do not believe that the terms liberal or progressive apply to Chief Biehl, although I used to believe they did. His peers and colleagues would describe him as an egghead (a person who is highly academic or studious; an intellectual.), which I believe is a generous, but a more accurate description. I use to conflate his ability and willingness to think deeply about concepts concerning social justice with progressiveness. I do, however, still believe that he believes that he is indeed progressive in his own mind, but the problem is that his progressiveness only exists in his mind. His willingness to think deeply about issues concerning social justice are merely an intellectual exercise. When the necessity arrives to implement justice, he is unable to deliver, nor did I believe he feels it necessary to do so. He is perfectly content with merely thinking about it. He is just as committed as any other white man to upholding white supremacy within the criminal justice system.

After the CPC meeting regarding the video and Mr. Kelley’s role in the incident, I took to Facebook to express my concerns about the video and the circumstances surrounding it. I shared the already viral video with some commentary of my own. I captioned it with facts that would seem obvious to the critical observer, enlightening to the casual observer, and offensive to a spectator who views police conduct through the lens of white supremacy i.e. my employer. Thus, I had earned my first write-up form the City. The second would come behind another Facebook post. A black man by the name of Kwasi Casey had been missing for months when a news outlet had reported the remains of his burned body had been discovered in a burnt down garage. A police officer commented on the news article stating “Karma finally got Kwasi! When you live the life he did and are a career criminal it comes back to get them.” The comments were captured and posted on social media. Needless to say, members of the community were outraged. I was tagged in several posts and thus was compelled to respond. I posted on Facebook a status of my own that read

“Officer Timothy Liddy stated that “Karma finally caught up to Kwasi!” in reference to the death of Kwasi Casey. Indicating that death was an appropriate punishment for the life he lived. Officers do not get to choose what activity is punishable by death. That can only be decided through the due process of law. However, it seems that officers make that decision too often and this comment seems to be indicative of the mind state that they possess when it does. As a fellow City of Dayton employee, I know for a fact that we are held accountable to a very high professional standard and I can only have faith that those standards will be upheld. Prayers of peace and comfort to the family.”

A few days later I saw an email that I was not supposed to see. It was sent by Chief Biehl and was addressed to the city manager and the lead city attorney. It conveyed Chief Biehl’s disappointment that I did not notify him first before I posted on my Facebook page, he thought it important to mention that he became aware of the post because a sergeant’s wife saw it. He alleged that the post threatened the “positive relationship” the HRC had built between the community and the police. He clearly expressed that he thought that we were supposed to be on the same team. To some extent he was not wrong in that assertion, we were supposed to work together to do what we could to improve community police relations. However, Chief Biehl had done what white men have always done, which is assert that we can work together as long as we did it his way.

Chief Biehl especially took exception to the part of my Facebook post that stated “it seems that officers make that decision too often and this comment seems to be indicative of the mind state that they possess when it does.” He felt that my statement was too broad. This is a rhetorical defense tactic that American police often use. When an officer is guilty of some wrongdoing it is always the rogue actions of that one particular officer. This tactic allows police departments to avoid responsibility highlighting the personal indiscretion of the officer instead of taking responsibility for the culture of policing which gave rise to the indiscretions of the officers who embody the culture. It is a cruel method; it has been used to invalidate the experience of black Americans for years. It works far too often and may have worked on me, yet again, had I not heard it so many times prior to.

Days later after Chief Biehl had sent that email to the city manager and city attorney, I had received a call from a couple of siblings of Kwasi Casey. As one could imagine they were extremely upset with Officer Liddy’s comments about their brother. However, they did not want to make a public spectacle as to not jeopardize the investigation into their brother’s murder. That is the conundrum black Americans find themselves in often. We rely on the same state that perpetrates violence against us to deliver justice for us. In any case, I was able to direct them to the appropriate place to file an official complaint against officer Liddy, where they received an off the record apology from the sergeant in charge of internal investigations. I was also able to set up and facilitate a meeting between the siblings of Mr. Casey and Chief Biehl where they received yet another apology and the reassurance that their brother’s case would be investigated thoroughly. A day later another email was sent from Chief Biehl, this time it was addressed to me directly. He thanked me for facilitating the conversation and commended me for being courageous. I suppose that I was to be flattered by this email, but it only served as further proof that white people love when black people can use our skills for their benefit. My courage was a problem when it was used to be critical of police, however it was commendable when it was used to bring people to the table so that the police could plead their case. What Chief Biehl failed to realize is that my criticism of the police and me bringing people to the table so that they can plead their case was simply different means to the same end.

Police officers wholeheartedly believe that the reason for strained community police relations is that the community simply does not understand how difficult of a job the police have. Americans are conditioned to have a bias in favor of their country and by extension the men and women who protect it, including law enforcement; and so, we entertain this tremendously flawed reasoning. Flawed because it presupposes at least two assumptions, one, lay people (people who aren’t cops) are not intelligent enough to wrap their minds around the intricacies of policing and two, if they did understand how difficult the job was, they would happily give them the a pass for all of their transgressions. To this end the Dayton Police Department invited citizens to get a taste of what they go through. They have a program called the Citizens Police Academy. The initiative was total propaganda designed to gain further support from people who are already inclined to support law enforcement. I engaged begrudgingly and halfheartedly once I pegged it for what it was. It would have been a complete waste of time had it not been for the “scenario-based training.” This was a four-hour session at the end of the academy in which participants got a “glimpse” of what it was really like in the field. I did not believe that it held any productive social value, however it incidentally taught me one valuable thing. Officers are trained to be scared, literally, to the death of the communities that they serve.

The fear is that everyone they pull over or engage with has a gun and wants to kill them. They fear either one or two partially fictitious American archetypes. The first is the entitled white American who has every right to own a gun who devoutly believes in the American myth of individual freedom and in the notion that they have the right to use their gun against anyone trying to impede their liberties, including the state that the officer represents. The second is the [more fictitious] ex-slave eager for revenge against the state that has perpetuated physical, psychological, legal and spiritual violence against them for centuries. Of course, most officers would not agree with this analysis, they’d deem it too dramatic. They do not think in these terms, they are not historians or sociologists, nor have most even taken a history or sociology course beyond high school. Policing in America is more or less considered blue collar work and thus we have failed to make them understand the context in which they do their job.

In conclusion, the local municipal government can hardly insulate itself from the value system of the country in which it sits. Dayton, Ohio has a rich history as one of America’s pioneers at its best, and a mere reflection of it on most occasions. When it comes to race, we have only ever been a reflection. When it comes to policing, we’ve yet to do anything particularly brave or innovative. Instead, we have elected to convince ourselves we were being courageous by engaging in a disingenuous political conversation. To be fair to us as Daytonians, we have only been following the lead of the nation, maybe slightly ahead for even being willing to have the conversation, as ineffective as it is. Hopefully, moving forward we will return to our pioneering roots. It would be extremely nostalgic to think that Dayton has ever been socially progressive, however an extraordinary opportunity presents itself here. Other cities have taken the lead by responding to calls of its citizens to reconsider the city’s budget with regard to policing. The call to defund the police is as much as a call to reconsider and re-imagine the way policing is done as it is about merely taking away money from the departments. It is also a call to consider the underlying social conditions that makes Americans think that the type of policing implemented is necessary to contain crime and disorder. Currently, we have only proven brave enough to talk about slight reforms to our police department as it exists. This lack of courage will only lead to more pain and despair for the communities most affected.