Police Bias, Reform: Why Annapolis Chief Wants Community Policing

ANNAPOLIS, MD — Edward Jackson leaned into the camera to show the pin he adorned on his uniform. It was a pride flag, standing still and resolute, much like the Maryland and American flags centered behind him.

As June’s Pride Month draws to a close, protests against systemic racism continue and the patriotic fervor of Independence Day rolls around, reconciling these three values is trickier now than ever. Jackson, nonetheless, believes he knows the path toward unity.

“For me, that is a value,” said Jackson, Annapolis’ chief of police. “I value the LGBTQ community just as much as I do any other community. It’s a civil rights issue.”

With Americans questioning the role of police, Jackson sees the Annapolis Police Department not as a heavy-handed enforcement agency, but as one that serves and builds the community. He calls this community-policing. Jackson described this value to local Bishop Craig Coates during a Facebook Live interview on Thursday.

Jackson and Coates are both Black men in positions of power, grappling with how they can lead positive change while also serving their communities. Coates uses his platform as a preacher at Fresh Start Church in Glen Burnie to support local pride groups. Jackson looks to address systemic concerns while also enforcing the law.

That’s a tall task for Jackson, especially as divisiveness continues to grow between people chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “All lives matter,” “Defund the police” and “Back the blue.” He knows that it is impossible and unjust to ignore race-related problems in the criminal justice system. He instead wants to confront them head-on.

Checking Biases, Breaking Stereotypes

That problem starts with checking police biases. Jackson told the story of one of his white colleagues who grew up in rural Pennsylvania. The officer never knew a Black person outside of TV portrayals until he moved to Maryland to become a Baltimore City cop in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Jackson said. That position forced the officer to learn about race on the job, meaning he had to break many stereotypes built by media representations.

People grow up with different backgrounds. That doesn’t become a problem until someone cannot openly acknowledge how their socialization affects their biases, Jackson said. He believes that only after officers check these biases will police be able to break the school-to-prison pipeline that funnels people of color into jail.

“The only time you leave the community is to go to the jail house,” the chief of police said of the pipeline he witnessed during his decades working for the Baltimore Police Department. “They leave west Baltimore and they go to prison or jail and they come back. It’s like volleyball, going back and forth, back and forth.”

Jackson thinks that getting into the community can help break stereotypes against both people of color and the police. He wants his officers to understand the community they work in. He wants them to know the history of those neighborhoods.

That’s where the department’s community policing programs come in. These initiatives aim to engage community members in their neighborhoods.

Hispanic and LGBTQ liaisons help break the barriers between police and minorities. A kids police club and summer camp help socialize youth with the department and its mission. A program called Coffee with a Cop gives locals a chance to discuss pressing issues with law enforcement. The Citizens Police Academy gives Annapolitans a chance to see how officers are trained and what their job entails. And the city recently started a citizens review board to evaluate complaints of police misconduct.

Police Partners Needed

As protests against systemic racism sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis continue, activists are urging politicians to “Defund the police.” This movement’s supporters argue that police often respond to non-emergency calls where a social worker may be more helpful and appropriate than an officer with a gun.

They say police are trained to tackle crime, not mental health issues or drug abuse. Instead, they would rather redistribute a portion of police funding to clinical resources, which are frequently underfunded.

Jackson hears them, and he wants to involve more clinicians in these types of non-emergency calls. He hopes these partnerships will help create a collaborative, community-based approach to public safety. Jackson does not, however, want to replace police involvement in the community, like many protestors are calling for.

Clinicians and police have different obligations. While clinicians pledge to do no harm, police take an oath to defend the constitution, Jackson said. He noted that this is where collaboration between social workers and police can face trouble. Sometimes laws are not fair, but police must enforce them all the same, Jackson said.

“You take an oath to uphold the constitution, not the parts of the constitution you like, the entire constitution,” he said.

Enforcing the state and nation’s laws can sometimes create an obsession with how many arrests police make, but that is not what Jackson wants his officers to focus on.

“My value is not how many tickets my officers gave, how many arrests they made, how many search warrants they executed,” Jackson said. “Real community policing is how many people I’ve served, how many organizations have I partnered with.”

Annapolis Force Focuses On Community

While this mantra sounds attractive, it is still in its infancy. Jackson took office 11 months ago. He replaced Scott Baker, who Mayor Gavin Buckley fired in March of 2019.

The Annapolis Police Department reports its community policing efforts online, but the most recent report is from 2017. Between 2018 and 2019, crime rates rose for five of the department's seven reported categories. Last year saw 51 more cases of crime, a spike of 5%, according to the department’s annual crime report.

“I think that the biggest problem with policing is that we draw from the human race,” Jackson said. “It’s almost irrational to think that because you put on a uniform and pin a badge on your chest that you’re discarding your family history, you’re discarding your socialization process, you’re discarding all of the biases that you’ve had based on media portrayals.”

Jackson’s community-policing discussion was the third installment of a virtual interview series moderated by Coates. The talks have focused on the intersection of race, community and police accountability.

The final session was scheduled for Monday at 3 p.m. on Facebook Live, but Jackson announced three minutes before it started that the discussion was postponed. Jackson said he and Coates would reschedule, but they have not yet announced a new date.

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