Ferguson Police Chief Delrish Moss vividly remembers arriving at the department on May 9, 2016 for his first day of work.
“There were protests on one side of the street to let me know they mean business,” Moss said, “and there were people on the other side of the street welcoming me.
It’s funny because over the course of the two years, who welcomes me and who protests me have sort of shifted back and forth. For the most part, I’ve made inroads on both sides.”
At a press conference on October 12 at the police department, Moss announced that he would be going back to Miami, Florida to be with his family – especially with his mother who is ill. His last day will be November 16. He has received a number of offers for positions in Florida, he said, but he won’t “weigh his options” until the end of the year.
Moss replaced former police chief Thomas Jackson, who resigned after the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report about the department in March 2015 following the Ferguson unrest.
Assistant Chief Frank McCall will become interim chief, and Moss said that he feels that McCall should be the department’s permanent chief.
“When we did the national search in 2016, I came in number one and Frank came in number 2,” Moss said. “I went to Frank and brought him in.”
McCall was previously Berkeley’s police chief. The police department signed the consent decree with the justice department in March 2016, and McCall has been in charge of the process since he came on with the department.
“I’ve come to trust him, and he’s intricately familiar with the consent decree,” Moss said. “He knows the community, he has the skill set and he has proven to be a tremendous help. A lot of the police officers have come to trust him and will stay if his leadership is there, especially some of those ones who were considering jumping ship because they found out I was leaving. I think it’s in the best interest of the city to make Frank McCall its chief.”
Moss also said that another national search would be expensive, and a new chief is going to have a learning curve coming in.
“We are well within the consent decree process,” Moss said. “If we want to get out of it in time, we need to be consistent.”
The consent decree process is supposed to last about five years, he said, but it can take longer if there are interruptions. However, John Chasnoff, a community organizer who has been participating in the consent decree process for the past two years, said that it could be hard for someone to take over McCall’s role in leading the consent decree process.
“I have a concern that if McCall becomes chief, we’ll lose continuity with the implementation of the consent decree,” Chasnoff said.
McCall believes that Moss has helped the department set a lot of “firsts.”
“We’ve improved vastly when it comes to community engagement,” McCall said. “The department is more diverse than it has ever been. We need to water the seeds that the chief has planted.”
Tommie Pierson, pastor at Greater St. Mark Family Church, said Moss has helped ease the animosity between police and the community. Greater St. Mark has been the setting of many community discussions after the Ferguson unrest and considered a safe space for protestors.
“He’s probably the only chief – or one of the only chiefs of a handful – that I’ve ever had a good relationship with,” said Pierson, who attended the press conference. “A good man puts family over everything, so we’ll miss him, but we’ll find someone new.”
After hearing that Moss was leaving, some suspected that the Ferguson “old guard” had pushed the chief out. The American asked Moss about this suspicion.
“I have not gotten pushed out,” Moss said. “When I started talking about my desire to go back home, the city manager and I had a lot of discussions and hoping that he would change my mind.”
When asked about his relationship with city leaders, he said, “It’s no secret that we’ve differed on opinions about some things, but it was never to a point where, ‘we want you to leave.’ It’s not been contentious. I never once felt like they wanted me to leave.”
Going forward, there are still “things on the plate to happen” at the police department, Moss said. McCall is going to be working on getting the department accredited, he said. The city will receive a $50,000 grant to complete the application process in December, he said. Many things need to be “modernized” in how police nationwide address policing, he said.
And how officers relate to the community is one of them.
“The job is to protect and serve,” Moss said. “And a lot of times it’s big ‘protect,’ little ‘serve.’ It’s actually got to be the other way around. It’s a lot more about service. Working with the community is always the best route.”
City Manager De’Carlon Seewood said the city will make sure to involve citizens in the selection process for the permanent police chief.
“We want to hear from everyone,” Seewood said, “to make sure that the person who steps into those shoes is the right person for the city.”
