By Matthew Kredell
With the viewpoint that improved relations between police and the communities they serve start at the top, an Executive Master of Leadership (EML) class at the USC Price School of Public Policy hosted a timely discussion on race and police from a leadership perspective.
The diverse panel featured a mix of high-ranking law enforcement professionals, community leaders and faculty experts.
Jorge Villegas is the assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of Operations and boasts 27 years of experience with the LAPD. John Thomas spent 21 years with the LAPD prior to taking his current position as chief for the USC Department of Public Safety. Both of whom are current EML students.
Joining them on the panel were: John Mack, who brought the historical perspective from his 55 years as a civic leader and USC Dornsife Associate Professor Ange-Marie Hancock, a renowned scholar on the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality politics and their impact on public policy.
“We are very fortunate to get together such an incredible group of people to be a part of this panel, including our two class members who at the same time are important leaders in the community in the area of police management,” said USC Price Professor and EML Director Robert Denhardt, who moderated the discussion.
Thomas explained that when he came up through the ranks in the mid-80s, his generation of officers was taught a warrior mentality of officer survival.
“It took the current reality of cell phone technology that is now capable to capture in real time the actions of law enforcement and make them public to the world for us to move away from that mentality,” Thomas said. “It’s a shame it took that, because the community had been saying for years that it wasn’t working for them.”
Though the warrior mentality has changed, Thomas expressed his concern that police departments still recruit toward a sense of adventure, rather than service.
“As law enforcement leaders, we have a responsibility to demand and change recruitment advertisements and that we consistently train over the course of officers’ careers those values that the communities we serve demand of us,” Thomas said. “We don’t talk enough about law enforcement ethics. We don’t talk enough about those things that may be culturally insensitive that officers need to be consistently reminded of and trained on.”
Villegas proposed a hypothetical scenario in which five officers attempt to detain a suspect who pulls out a gun. Those officers can legally fire their weapon to stop the suspect, but should they?
“That’s a very tough issue to address internally within any law enforcement organization,” Villegas said. “As we move forward and address issues of policy and force, ‘the could’ versus ‘the should’ is what’s really going to help us in terms of gaining trust, developing legitimacy and instilling confidence in what law enforcement does and how we serve.”
Mack recounted that, for more than 20 years as president of the Los Angeles Urban League, he was at odds with the LAPD, perceiving it to be a racist, oppressive institution that he didn’t believe was capable of change. He saw a dramatic transformation after being appointed as president of the Board of Police Commissioners for the LAPD in 2005.
Part of that transformation was a change in personnel to better reflect the community they serve. Of the nearly 10,000 officers in the LAPD, minorities now constitute the majority.
“Today and over the past decade, I’m confident that the LAPD is no longer a racist institution or one that engages in excessive force all over the place,” Mack said. “However, that doesn’t mean that there are not individuals who may hold these prejudices. In law enforcement, no matter how much progress you make, all you need is one incident to set things back.”