Use of Force: Memphis Police Department November 2013 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Barry Bratburd 00:08 Hello and welcome. My name is Barry Bratburd and on behalf of the COPS Office I’d like to introduce you to Director Toney Armstrong from the Memphis Police Department. Director Armstrong is here to discuss Use of Force issues. Director, can you share your department’s concerns around use of force issues? Toney Armstrong 00:24 Yeah, it’s been, you know I’ve been a director now since April of 2011, and although it’s only been two years it seems like a lot longer than that. And in those two years we’ve had about 43 officer-involved shootings. Out of those 43 I think we’ve had maybe 11 or 12 fatalities. We’ve had 11 officers shot in the line of duty, and unfortunately we’ve lost two officers—two officer fatalities. It’s something that’s plagued us, it’s troubling. On one side you have officers involved in these amount of shootings, and on the other side you have officers that are, for lack of a better word, the victims of these shootings. So it’s very very difficult to kinda get a handle on and not make massive sweeps, massive changes, that would kinda make officers second guess themselves. But on the other hand you want to assure the public that we are aware, we are monitoring these situations, and if need be we’re making the changes that we feel like we need to make. Barry 01:26 Well, talking about the public, what concerns do your community members have around this issue? Toney 01:31 You know, I’m out in the community all the time, and certainly I’ll be honest with you, a lot of these shootings have been very high profile shootings. There have been a few of them where the suspect was not armed—officers assumed he was armed, or was led to believe that he was armed and he was not. So certainly you can imagine there have been a certain sect of the community that that concerns, and as a director I understand that. For the most part I’ve met with them and assured them that we are looking at all of our policies, we are looking at all of our training mechanisms, our training programs, I’m willing to tear those down and rebuild them if need be. So I’ve assured them that at the appropriate time I’ll get back, I’ve come back to them, let them know what we’re doing, what our findings are and where we’re headed. Barry 02:24 Along those lines, what have you done with your jurisdiction to address this issue within your department and with the community? Toney 02:31 Just simply understanding and admitting that there are issues relating to our officer-involved shootings and the perception that the public has. When you have so many shootings in such a close proximity of each other, the public tends to think you know, “are our police officers over-reacting?” Or “are they trigger happy because of the amount of officers that they’ve had shot?” as well. So as a police director or police chief you have to 1) come to the realization that this might be bigger than my department— something that we’ve never experienced before, first of all, and 2) we might have to enlist the help of an outside agency to come in to help us get a handle on this, and that’s very very difficult for a chief to convince your staff that “look we might need to get some help in here” because if you have a staff that came up through the ranks, they kind of think they’ve seen everything and been around long enough to be able to make whatever changes that need to be made. But it’s hard, I tell them all the time, it’s very very hard to play in a game and coach the game at the same time. Sometimes you have to send your game film to someone else and let them analyze it for you. So that’s where we are—I think we’re at a point where we need to get a fresh perspective as to what we’re doing and where we need to be heading. Barry 03:54 Now do you think you’ll be able to use the COPS report—the Collaborative Reform Process: A Review of Officer-Involved Shootings in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department—that’s a report that the COPS Office put together working with Las Vegas on very similar issues. Do you think you’ll have the ability to use that report? Toney 04:16 I certainly think so. I hope so. Actually Sherriff Gillespie and I had, we met at Major City Chiefs, and we’ve actually scheduled a meeting for my staff—certain members of my staff—to go out and review some of the things that he’s done and so that we can see how—Our departments are so eerily similar when it comes to the number of officer-involved shootings, so it’ll be—you know sometimes I’ll come to these conferences or I come to these meetings, and I go back and kind of brief my staff on some of the things that I’ve learned or some of the things that I’ve observed, and they’re kind of like “yeah right.” So I think it’ll be beneficial for me to let them go and just get it from a ground view of “Look, there are other agencies out there that have experienced this, but they survived it.” They survived it because they were willing to, I guess, expose themselves and to look at their shortcomings and say that, “as bad as it is right now our intention is to get so much better.” So I certainly think that thhe, I wish that I could have been on the front end of that, and certainly that report would read the Memphis Police Department rather than the Las Vegas Police Department. So I certainly feel like that’s going to be beneficial to us. Barry 05:36 Great. Well, Director Armstrong, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. We really appreciate your perspectives, and for being so candid with us. Toney 05:44 Thank you, for having me. Voiceover: Beat Exit 05:47 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 06:03 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.