Tempe Police Department Refines Policies In Light Of Protests

By Elsa Hortareas and Eliza Johnson

TEMPE, AZ — Police have had a strained relationship with minority communities going back hundreds of years. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked protests across the country, but many people cannot agree on a solution.

The Tempe Police Department experienced a big change this year with the resignation of Police Chief Sylvia Moir. The news was released earlier in September via the city’s website. Moir made history as the first female chief in Tempe back in 2016 and “agreed to leave her role effective Oct. 25,” according to the city’s website.

Jonae Harrison, the Equity and Inclusion Manager for the City of Tempe, said that even though the leadership has changed, the policies and protections for residents, businesses, and visitors will not.

“Policing in this environment is difficult. It does not matter your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexual orientation, being a part of truly understanding what it means to have community trust and police community trust is challenging for all police chiefs and it’s challenging for communities that are trying to speak out about how we want to be involved in how we want to be safe,” said Harrison.

Moir was also Tempe’s first openly gay police chief and has stated her committment to the LGBTQ community.

“The idea of LGBTQ rights, the city of Tempe has an antidiscrimination ordinance, so no one person and no one department is greater than the rights that the city has adopted within their ordinance, which is that everyone is protected regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or sexual identity,” said Harrison.

According to the city’s website, under the Tempe City Code, Chapter 2, Article VIII, it is unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

“It is written within our laws and ordinances that we are not allowed to go backwards,” Harrison said.

Along with Moir’s resignation, Mayor Corey Woods also implemented a new task force earlier this year called the Public Safety Advisory Task Force which is made up of community members from all across Tempe.

“We’re now in the fourth of that session, so it’s running from October through January, and essentially we are looking at communications, we’re looking at data, we’re looking at policies, we’re looking at hiring recruiting and EDI training all of those things are aspects of what the community is looking at, how we can do public safety, we’re looking at mental health not just of residents but also of officers,” Harrison said.

Harrison said that the Public Safety Advisory Task Force is a committee that is dedicated to see the changes that can be made within the city of Tempe.

“Nothing is stagnant, if something isn’t growing it means it’s dud,” said Harrison.

Detective Greg Bacon, Media Relations Unit for the City of Tempe, said that the Tempe Police Department is always looking for ways to improve relationships with community members.

“We do this by connecting with various groups, building relationships by listening to their concerns, remaining transparent with our information, policies and procedures, incidents and events,” said Bacon.

One of those groups includes the City of Tempe Public Safety Task Force.

“During those sessions, we engage with different community members where we all have difficult conversations on how to improve policing and policies pertaining to policing all ethnicities within our extremely diverse city,” said Bacon.

Jessica Vinas-Nelson is a Professor of African American Studies at Arizona State University. She discussed the strained relationship between minority communities, particularly Black communities, and the police.

“The movement far predates the actual formation of an actual movement. This has been a struggle going on since 1619,” Nelson said. “I would even link it to the anti-lynching campaigns of the late ninteenth and early twentieth century. Whereas police today are killing three times as many people a year as were ever lynched in the height of lynching.”

While there have been altercations, struggles, and protests all along, “In the 1960’s especially you have a lot of protests and uprisings in response to police violence against them,” Nelson said.

The roots of the Black Lives Matter movement began with the culmination of the Los Angeles riots, she said.

“Rodney King was kind of the first viral video long before the internet,” Nelson said. In 1992, in Los Angeles the police stopped King and beat him. The encounter was recorded and sparked outrage.

“The officer's account of what happens differs very much from a video someone happened to be taking off of their balcony. Only because of this video were the police charged. The cops were acquitted and after that you have the LA riots,” Nelson said.

Thirteen days after King was beaten, Latasha Harlins was murdered in L.A. This contributed to the Los Angeles riots. The woman who killed Harlins was charged with voluntary manslaughter, but never served jail time.

In the case of the Jena 6 in 2006, white kids hung nooses under a tree in the high school courtyard. It was “technically a hate crime” and a scuffle ensued, Nelson said.

“With the case of the Jena 6, which were six young high school men, who were charged with attempted murder for what amounted to a school yard fight. A white kid got a concussion and was released from the hospital the same day,” Nelson said.

Only through massive protests were the charges reduced. One was originally tried as an adult, but retried as a juvenile.

“The Black Lives Matter movement itself originates in 2013 with the case around Trayvon Martin. Right after his killer was aquitted, the hashtag began being used. It was three Black women who organized it and started the movement,” Nelson said.

Though Martin was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer and not police officers, there were protests to even have Zimmerman tried for the shooting, Nelson said.

The women who started the hashtag emphasized its lack of solid leadership on purpose “to make it a powerful organization that could spread as wide as it has,” Nelson said.

“It really culminated in 2014 with the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in Fergusen and New York. That’s when you really see a lot of the mass protests forming,” Nelson said.

In January of 2020, 14-year-old Antonio Arce was shot in the back and killed by a police officer in Tempe.

The protests this past summer have been the largest in history.

“Black Lives Matter is really the tip of the Iceberg. It's against state violence against Black people,” Nelson said. “Of course this (BLM) is the most manifested, visible, visceral form of violence against Black people, but it is representing a far larger body.”

Nelson says that the current movement is a continuation of the work Martin Luther King did.

“BLM’s analogous would be closer to the Black Panthers, who started in the late 1960’s. One of the first things they were doing was monitoring the police,” Nelson said.

In response to the killing of George Floyd in May of this year, the city of Tempe proposed a plan called 'The Right to Breathe' after discussions involving the Strategic Management and Diversity Office, along with the Human Relations Commission, African American Advisory Committee and the East Valley NAACP.

Harrison said the department went out to community members and asked how the residents felt the city should respond. “Those community members said to us, ‘you know we have our own instance of Geoge Floyd here in Tempe,’ which was the killing of 14-year-old Antonio Arce by one of our Tempe police officers,” said Harrison.

According to Harrison, the community wanted to look at what the city was doing and how they can address the challenges within their own community.

“That was the genesis of ‘The Right to Breathe,’ and what that is, is a three part program and it’s geared towards youth of color and youth from vulnerable communities,” said Harrison.

“The Tempe Police Department is wholly committed to the 'Right to Breathe' committee that is currently looking at ways in which we can better invest in juveniles, especially minority juveniles,” said Bacon.

The three part program consists of a failure analysis, creation of data sharing partnerships, and partnerships to provide financial support and education for communities of color and low-income populations.

“It’s considered like a pipeline," Harrison said. "On the front end of the pipeline, what are we doing on workforce development, what are we doing at job fairs, what are we doing on partnering with our nonprofit agencies to make sure that youth of color and their families even have access to suits and access to resume classes, and not just that, but banking. Making sure that families are bankable, not under banked or unbanked."

“The other end of the pipeline is how do we work with employers as partners to give quality jobs that have career development?” he continued.

Jennifer Liewer, communications director for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said that their office is committed to reviewing each case individually and assessing the facts and evidence that apply to that case.

“The philosophy of the county attorney is that we must employ smart justice to ensure the most dangerous offenders are held accountable but those who want to "do better and be better" are given the opportunity and provided the resources necessary to do so regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic status,” Liewer said.

What happens in the future is yet to be determined. “What happens in the future is going to depend in large measure what white people are doing and how willing they are to support this through genuine change and support,” Nelson said.

There is a movement to defund the police but Nelson said it's much more complex than most people realize.

“I think you need to fundamentally rethink the police. ‘Defund the police’ is such an expansive concept, and it is purposefully misunderstood, ” Nelson said.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, lethal force by police disproportionately affects Black Americans with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher than whites. In all cases where lethal force was used by the police, 22 percent were mental health related.

“You need more training and different units to be responding to situations like that,” Nelson said. “We are asking the police to do too much. Things they are not qualified or equipped to do.”

According to the National Police Foundation, all 17 of Arizona’s municipal departments had at least one officer involved shooting. Phoenix Police department had a fatality rate of 1.44 out of every 100,000.

Out of all shootings, 20.5 percent of the subjects were Black, who make up only seven percent of the population.

According to Detective Greg Bacon, Media Relations Unit for the City of Tempe, half of Tempe police officers within the department have completed de-escalation training led by Arizona State University.

“Now, based on the information, research, data and feedback from the officers who have already completed the training, the remaining officers will be required to attend de-escalation training from the curriculum developed through the study,” said Bacon.

But Nelson said the concept of policing needs to be retooled to fit our current climate.

“Historically we have gone most of human history without police and done fine. I think it's just a creative rethinking of what we need. If I get robbed and I arrive home hours later, I don't need someone armed showing up,” Nelson said.

A lot of work is expected to come from within the police departments as well.

“The police have a lot of work to do to hold themselves accountable and rebuild trust,” Nelson said. “Black communities are over-policed but underprotected.”

While Maricopa County and communities across the country are focused on ensuring the equal treatment for all, there is still a lot of work to be done.

“I think you’re going to solve a lot of problems if you do some genuine reform to make the police what they should be. To make the police what they are for people like you and I, but are not for non-white communities,” Nelson said.