The Austin Police Department could have a new chief of police as soon as next week, should City Manager T.C. Broadnax appoint a lone finalist on July 26, as anticipated. That would tee up City Council to confirm the finalist at a special called meeting July 30.
The new chief will either be Lisa Davis or Jeffrey Norman, whom Broadnax identified as the top two candidates among the pool of 35 people who applied for the job. Both hail from Midwestern cities with considerably smaller populations than Austin, where we are approaching 1 million (Davis: Cincinnati, Ohio, population 309,000; Norman: Milwaukuee, Wis., population 564,000). However, both have executive leadership at their current departments: Davis is an assistant chief over the Cincinnati PD’s Investigations Bureau and Norman is Milwaukee PD’s chief, a position he has held for nearly four years.
Patrol officer staffing remains an issue for department leadership; the Office of Police Oversight, after years of struggle, is nearing a place where it can begin performing its job of investigating officers accused of misconduct; the future of a years-long effort to transform the Austin Police Academy, which remains incomplete, hangs in the balance; and the department’s rank-and-file officers continue to work without a long-term labor contract, which the Austin Police Association has said is key to addressing APD’s recruitment and retention challenges.
Earlier this week, the candidates addressed reporters at press conferences and members of the community at a town hall, to make the case for their candidacy – and to lay out how they would address many of the challenges facing APD.
Davis, who has spent her entire 32-year career in law enforcement at Cincinnati PD, referred to policing as a “noble profession” and said that the best way APD can improve retention and recruitment is by making current personnel feel that way about their job. “You boost [department] morale by listening to the officers and the professional staff,” Davis said. “When you start doing that, morale starts getting raised, and there is no better recruiter for a police department than those that work there.”
Norman pointed out that Austin isn’t alone in struggling to fill officer vacancies – most major American cities are having the same problem. The city, as a whole, should show support to police officers as a way of boosting morale, he said, because “in any civilized community you need police officers.” He also cracked open the door to exploring alternative response models – wherein some other kind of enforcement agent other than a sworn police officer responds to less urgent and dangerous 911 calls. “There are other opportunities to explore to help lighten the load of what we are responding to, and why,” Norman said.
“There’s nothing that we do in regard to law enforcement that we cannot talk to the public about.” – Jeffrey Norman, Milwaukee Police Chief
Improving patrol staffing has been a top goal for the past three APD chiefs – and, ostensibly, transforming the department’s training academy has been, too. But the final report issued by Kroll, the consulting firm hired by City Council four years ago to help APD achieve that Council priority, indicates that APD leadership has not been fully committed to that work. The Kroll contract has ended, so now more than ever, APD’s chief must step up if Council’s “reimagined academy blueprint” is to be fully implemented and sustained.
Maintaining a culture within the department that supports the underlying goals of reform is key, Norman said. That kind of continuity “is not maintained by [standard operating procedures]” or training materials, Norman added. APD needs a chief who will “maintain a present and consistent stance” in support of reform that will set the tone for the rest of the department.
Davis acknowledged the important role the chief plays in ensuring the rest of the department’s chain of command embraces the kind of culture change envisioned by academy reform efforts. That’s partly because police departments are paramilitary organizations, she said. But that doesn’t mean she wants to fully revert to the kind of “stress-oriented paramilitary” training that placed APD’s training academy under public scrutiny in 2017.
Instead, Davis said, she would strive to find the balance between that approach and the “adult learning-based training” that the reimagined blueprint prioritizes. Doing so would produce patrol officers that are “guardian-centric, but warrior-based,” Davis added, using the academic language typically used to describe officers who see the role of police as guarding a community versus going to war with its criminal elements.
Ensuring APD’s internal misconduct investigation process is as transparent as possible and leads to accountability for officers proven to have broken department rules has been a top priority for Council and the broader Austin community. But balancing the public’s desire for transparency and accountability alongside the due-process rights of police officers has, historically, been a difficult tightrope for Austin’s police chiefs to walk.
Davis said transparency is “how you can build trust with a community” and that sharing as much data about how officers are performing – like around use-of-force incidents (though, perhaps without names of officers attached) could do that. Investigating community complaints thoroughly is critical, Davis said, but it must be done in a way that “balances being transparent with the officer’s right” to claim “that a complaint was totally unjustified and not sustained.”
Norman, who has worked in law enforcement for 28 years (all at Milwaukee PD), said transparency is core to how he views his role as chief. Police officers are public employees, after all, and thus accountable to the public. “There’s nothing that we do in regard to law enforcement that we cannot talk to the public about,” Norman said. “We are responsible to the public.” He said he would be as transparent as possible with misconduct investigations under the city’s oversight system.
This article appears in July 26 • 2024.