Even those of us who have heard his speeches on the subject more than once find it difficult not to get excited when St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson talks about St. Louis having the very rare opportunity, in a governmental structure fraught with inertia and tarnished with a blemished legacy, to remap its police department. A vital city department, whose chief executive has reported to a board of commissioners appointed by the governor since the Civil War, will now be a city department that reports to the Mayor’s Office. This change in governance opens a brief window of opportunity to make other changes in how the police department is organized. Dotson is a son of the city who evidently loves this place, a career police administrator who knows how the machine works and where the bodies are buried, and an intelligent and energetic person. He is right to be excited about this unprecedented opportunity, and we share his excitement. We even feel that just possibly there is reason for optimism.
The early suggestions for change emerging from Dotson and a transitional board that the mayor appointed are sensible. There is a movement toward streamlining services and reducing costs by bringing police-like personnel – city marshals, city park rangers, emergency managers – into the police department. These are good ideas. We would like to offer Dotson a specific early test of his political courage and suggest that he start making moves in an effort to absorb the Sheriff’s Office into the police department as well. Sheriffs, who currently report to a county office that operates independently of the city, perform duties that most closely resemble police work: they guard and transport criminals and guard officers of the court. They also serve process on civil matters, a function the city could efficiently outsource once sheriffs were brought into the police department.
While offering advice to Dotson and his fellow transitional board members (among them a former editorial writer, Eddie Roth), we must remind them of their responsibility to establish a meaningful civilian review process. Local control may be effective and official as of September 1, but to many people in our community – including the activists who were pushing hard for local control back when the current mayor was still dodging or outright resisting it – local control without civilian review amounts to, at best, a minor administrative change and, at worst, a sham.
Dotson’s candor on this point is commendable. He told us that community activists want civilian review that operates “something like the Spanish Inquisition,” while police officers, he said, want a civilian review process that is “meaningless.” There is inconvenient truth in both characterizations that must be addressed. A community that often feels wronged by police work seeks meaningful input – that means input with teeth – in a police conduct review process that has been pathetic under the outgoing police board (a governing body, mind you, that has included Mayor Francis G. Slay for the past 12 years). And police officers want community input to be “meaningless” if there is going to be any community input at all.
Dotson, Roth and Slay will be hearing more from this community about civilian review. Slay has proven that he can get elected as mayor – repeatedly – without significant support from black voters, but his administration has also showed that you can’t govern the city very effectively without an inclusive leadership approach. This new, unprecedented change that enables a revamping of the police department is an opportunity to demonstrate a willingness to collaborate with our community in executing this vital public service. Granted, there is a level of crime in some areas of the city that requires aggressive policing. That combustible situation makes the community’s consent in police work even more important. And that is why this transition to local control must be dealt with in an inclusive, respectful, creative and transparent way.
