Here is the second half of the question and answer session that followed Chief Thomas’ 12/07/2020 presentation to the APD Community Advisory Board about Use of Force by the police.
Question: The questioner hearkened back to a previous questioner who had expressed the view that some of this data didn’t seem meaningful or align with the experiences of Black community members. What is APD doing to gather data and provide it to the Black community? And what is APD doing to listen to the Black community and understand their concerns?
Chief Thomas: He is open to any suggestions from the Board in that area, particularly about new groups they can reach out to. APD reaches out to a lot of the same groups, and Chief Thomas has done presentations multiple times. He’s reached out to some of the local African American leaders and offered to sit in their business or church lobbies and just be there at a table to answer questions. APD will continue to offer that to anyone who wants to do that. He understands there’s not just one place/group to meet with, but he doesn’t know every place he could go. They need community members to tell them.
Karen Nelson: Noted that things have changed due to Covid, but once things go back to normal there can be more community outreach. Even now, following CDC guidelines, the chief has been meeting with groups–Appleton Sanctuary most recently. She understands Covid has really impeded community outreach to some degree but thought that the community could still call APD for safe, socially distanced events.
Question: The question said that it seems like the news mainly covers instances of excessive use of force, while the instance of the police officer being stabbed in the parking lot only made page 5 of the Post Crescent. She wondered why the other side of the story and the things that happen to police officers isn’t as important and doesn’t make the front page of the news.
Chief Thomas: He did not know. He thought some of it came from the expectation that those sorts of events go with being a police officer. He has sat in meetings where he’s had community members tell him that he gets paid to get shot. His 12 year old daughter doesn’t believe in that.
He also thought that some of it was because we as a society are currently focused–rightfully so–on racial justice issues. Headway has been made, but there is still a ways to go, so he thinks there’s a tendency to make sure the focus remains on that.
He said cops don’t care about the lack of coverage and generally don’t like media attention. He could not answer for the media. He stated that one of the things that he thought was really productive out of the task force that he attended the previous week was the discussion about confirmation bias. People have an understanding of what the media is nowadays and they’re a lot smarter than we give them credit for sometimes. He thought the focus really needed to be one the overarching racial justice issues.
He stated that law enforcement officers were blessed to be in the profession and that most of them wouldn’t do anything else because it’s what they love. The media is what it is.
Question: That officer could have shot that man, but he didn’t. There are instances where police have not used force when they had every right to. The questioner felt like sometimes we only hear one side of the story over and over again, and it gives the department a bad name, and across the country police seem to be held in bad reput and people are calling to defund them. But we don’t hear some of the stories that support the things the police do such as the story of that officer being able to shoot his attacker but not doing so. She thinks there’s just a big communication gap in that area and was concerned that it may be leading people who have thought about becoming police officers no longer wanting to pursue that career.
Chief Thomas: APD tries to put as many positive stories out on their Facebook page as they can. The times when they don’t have to use force aren’t news stories. For them that’s a win. They don’t want to hurt anybody. He knows a lot of officers who have had to use deadly force and he can guarantee that 100% of them and 100% of their spouses and families wish they never would have had to.
Question: Wanted to recognize the progress the APD has made and wondered how they would continue with that progress in terms of hiring. When they are looking to hire an officer from another police department are they looking at things such as an officers number of Use of Force incidents that may indicate they aren’t a good fit for APD? How does APD vet their hires?
Chief Thomas: They do a background investigation. Before they’re hired, candidates have to take a polygraph, have an multi-hour long meeting with a psychologist, and take a couple of written tests. The background investigation is really where they vet out a lot of things. For instance, right now they’re investigating an officer candidate from Montana. He grew up in the Fox Valley, has been a police officer in Montana for the last 10 years, and wants to come back here. APD paid an investigator to go out to Montana and knock on every door in the candidates neighborhood, talk to his coworkers, talk to his bosses, talk to anybody else that may know who he is and make sure there aren’t any skeletons in his closet and that APD is getting the candidate that they want. That includes taking a look at his personnel file and all of his contacts and evaluations and comments from his supervisors. The last thing APD wants to do is hire somebody who has been somebody else’s problem.
Question: Is that typical? Because it seems like we hear alot about officers transferring and their record not following them.
Chief Thomas: He has worked at 5 agencies in Northeast WI. He couldn’t answer for the bigger cities or the Milwaukee/Madison/southern part of the state, but up here all the agencies approach doing backgrounds checks and hiring people as APD does. When he was in charge of hiring for another agency he would frequently talk to his counterparts at other agencies; they all would check in with each other when they were looking at a candidate to find out what others knew about them.
Question: One of the only things that the 10 year Use of Force analysis found was that the majority of Black people that were subject to Use of Force were from out of town. Could the chief elaborate as to why that was an important finding?
Chief Thomas: It was simply the most significant difference that they saw in numbers. The number Use of Force incidents in the Downtown District is also relevant. On a Friday or Saturday night, Appleton gets 20-30k people in our Downtown. They’re definitely not all from Appleton because we’d have a lot of empty houses if they were. Appleton has actually had bus loads of people come from Madison and Milwaukee just to enjoy our Avenue. Chief Thomas thought that might have something to do with the non-resident Use of Force numbers.
Question: How do APD officers approach Undocumented individuals?
Chief Thomas: It depends on what kind of call it is. If they’re making a traffic stop they would just check drivers license status. APD does not enforce immigration rules, and they do not ask if anyone is here legally. They do not have anyone trained with enforcing immigration laws. Somes agencies do, but APD does not. That is not something that they want to be involved in. It’s a federal issue. Some members of the community are upset with that stance and he understands why they feel APD should be involved with enforcing immigration rules. But he believes that it’s more important for APD to have relationships with that community so that they trust the police and call if they need help. They leave the immigration enforcement to the federal government.
Question: Are the cameras automatically turned on at any encounter or only when something triggers it? If they are turned on automatically for encounter are they reviewed randomly as a way to audit an officer’s interactions?
Chief Thomas: They are activated individually/manually, and now they have some systems in place where they will auto activate. Before this last year they had to be manually turned on, which means that in some situations they did not get turned on. For example, there was an incident where an officer had her gun stolen. The suspect shot her and a citizen and then shot himself and committed suicide. That was not recorded because he suddenly assaulted her as soon as she got out of her squad car. [That was a 2016 incident that involved suspect Marcus Felton, police officer Stephanie Wiener, and two good samaritans, one of whom, Andrew Maltbey, was shot.]
The same with the incident where the officer was stabbed in the parking lot. He didn’t turn on his camera because, as soon as he walked out the door, the guy was there acting strange, and he didn’t think to turn on his camera. The system that APD just purchased has autoactivation on it so if an officer draws their firearm or the taser or there’s a gunshot, it will activate the body camera. The system is always recording, so when it autoactivates, it will automatically go back 30 seconds and record the 30 seconds prior to the gunshot or pulling of the firearm that prompted the autoactivation. They hope that will catch the 6% of Use of Force incidents that they didn’t catch last year. So now bodycams are both auto activated and manually activated, but in previous years they had to be manually turned on and off by the officers.
Question: Does this apply to School Resource Officers?
Chief Thomas: Yes, School resource officers all have a camera assigned to them. They probably use them more than anybody else. In that environment it’s extremely important that they have cameras. APD’s SROs and street patrollers have them. Even their investigators use them when they go out and do interviews.
As far as randomly viewing the footage, they can do that. Some supervisors do that if they have an employee who they’ve received some complaints about or is a new employee and they want to check in and see how they’re doing. They can go in and randomly select any video they want to watch. He knows supervisors do this because they talk about it when they do yearly evaluations. The officers know that they randomly sample footage and they’re perfectly fine with it. At the department they’ve talked about how if you’re not proud of what you’re doing why are you doing it?
Question: Have there been issues where you haven’t been able to review an incident because the camera was not on? He gave the example of a police officer struggling with somebody inside a car.
Chief Thomas: There have been incidents where, for example, the camera gets knocked off and ends up in a snowbank. Now they’re attached by a pretty strong magnet, so they’re a lot better than they used to be. In the situation of people wrestling around and the camera not being able to show what’s going on, there is usually video leading up to that where they can see what precipitated that event. He hasn’t seen one yet where you can’t tell at all what’s going on.
Question: They’ve seen situations on the news where the police camera footage would show one part of the story but then you’d see a different story from footage shot by civilians. He wondered if it would be useful to recommend that everyone put a camera in their cars.
Chief Thomas: Some people do already. Police don’t mind and assume there’s cameras everywhere.If you go to College Avenue and there’s some type of disturbance at bar close there may be 150 people standing there while a couple officers walk up to handle the issue. Literally 150 cell phones will come out, even though the cops may just be talking to the guy to find out what he’s getting to order from Sal’s pizza. He did understand the point about how there are times when different camera views show different perspectives [but it sounded like he wasn’t going to recommend that all city of Appleton residents get dashboard cameras].
Question: The questioner expressed concern about how police officers interact with people of color who have concealed carry permits and are legally carrying firearms. He wondered if there was a double standard for how black vs white concealed carry permit holders were treated and what Black people could do in terms of communication to protect themselves.
Chief Thomas: Generally officers will just ask you, and some drivers will simply state right away “Hey, just so you know, I have a ccw and it’s on my left hip”. Beyond concealed carry, APD officers are very used to open carry. People walk down the Avenue carrying rifles pretty regularly. Most CCW carriers are really responsible and they tell the officer they’re interacting with right away. Officers will typically say something along the lines of, “Hey, I appreciate it, just make sure you keep your hands away from it” and they’re all good. They finish up the contact and move on.
Question: The questioner brought that up because Philando Castile had his ccw and was still shot near St. Paul, MN. He was concerned that some people legally carry weapons but still get treated like suspects.
Chief Thomas: Absolutely understood. He reiterated that APD officers are comfortable seeing firearms. There are many people in the area who open carry nowadays, especially over the last year. It doesn’t make officers nervous.
Question: Is there any correlation between an increase in body camera use and a decrease in Use of Force incidents?
Chief Thomas: Because Appleton’s had them for a long time (14 years) it’s hard to say what the impact has been, but there have been national studies on the impact of body cameras on the behavior of both suspects/citizens and officers. The studies have proven that both officers and the people they’re dealing with are much better behaved when they know they’re on camera. It leads to less use of force.
He praised Chief Richard Myers for starting the bodycam program and for being the one who brought in the diversity and inclusion coordinator. He was a chief who was a generation ahead of his time.
Karen Nelson: Stated that she has viewed bodycam footage and it’s very high quality. She had sat down with the chief and an individual to review footage and there was no ambiguity in what happened. It wasn’t cloudy and grainy. She encouraged the people on the advisory board to come in and view some footage first hand.
Chief Thomas: Let everyone know that he was going to find out how many officers hit 5 or more Uses of Force in the year and was also going to follow up on what it would take to add the drawing of a firearm into their Use of Force database and adding it to their statistics going forward. He stated that at the next session they would be talking about APD’s mental health program and how they respond to mental health crisis calls.
You can view the full video of the meeting here: https://youtu.be/fSybteUGAGg
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