Police Oversight Commission Hears Presentation on Biases in Emergency Calls
The history of bias in policing plays a huge role in how some residents feel about law enforcement, and it is up to current municipal leaders to improve the way police respond to calls and the way officers treat people of color, Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton told the East Lansing Independent Police Oversight Commission Wednesday.
For more than 90 minutes, Clayton walked the commission and about 15 audience members through the historical origins of U.S. law enforcement and the racial bias inherent in creation of the 911 national emergency number system. The 911 system came out of the Kerner Report to President Lyndon B. Johnson as a way to both dissuade and quickly disperse “race riots” in the 1960s.
“Historically, society has elected to use police to enforce discriminatory practices. Then they blamed the police who are being used as tools,” Clayton said during the March 1 meeting. “Having a universal [emergency] number in this country is a wonderful thing but it is really important for us to understand where it came from so we don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.”
During the meeting, Clayton discussed the concerns of “bias-influenced calls” to the 911 system, which come from people who call police because they are “uncomfortable” with the presence of a person, often from a racial or ethnic minority. This practice can lead to trauma to the person who is subjected to questioning, detention or harm due to the biased call, especially when the experience becomes cyclical.
Aside from the individual harm, bias-influenced calls “promote fear and distrust in law enforcement, place police officers in difficult situations and damage police/ community relationships,” he said.
Instead, Clayton hopes there is a time when people can agree it is appropriate to refuse to send a police officer to a bias-influenced call. He believes this is possible with comprehensive and ongoing training for 911 dispatchers who can be taught to determine if a situation warrants an armed officer or if it is simply a nuisance call.
“We manage suspected bias-influenced calls in a manner that minimizes the impact on the subject of the call. In extreme cases, they will not dispatch police personnel to calls for service that are clearly the result of caller bias,” he said. “Currently, the default policy is ‘when in doubt, send them out.’ What we are saying here is that there might be situations where we don’t send the police.”
City Councilmember Noel Garcia Jr., a former Lansing police officer, pushed back, saying the liability issue would be too great for a municipality to have an officer response to a 911 call. Garcia serves as the City Council’s liaison to the commission.
But Clayton – as well as an audience member who asked to remain anonymous – responded that the trauma suffered by the subject of the call should be considered a heavy liability as well.
“There is liability on both sides. It’s not an easy fix. It requires community education, you have to lean into the people and have that community discussion,” Clayton said. ”It can get long and messy and that’s part of democracy and why it works most of the time.”
Clayton, serving his fourth term as sheriff, said Washtenaw County now has a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week Community Mental Health team that responds instead of police or together with officers as situations warrant. Extensive training with dispatchers allows them to determine situations where an armed officer response is not appropriate. It is funded through a public safety mental health millage.
Commissioner Robin Etchinson agreed that training has to be in place before any police department or dispatching authority can move to a different structure.
“It takes a lot of courage for a community to say they are not going to send [armed officers] strictly based on liability,” Etchinson said. “If they lack certain training and show up in a biased call situation, it can escalate it into a situation it never should have.”
The remaining portion of the Police Oversight Commission meeting, held at the Hannah Community Center, was spent reviewing the group’s annual report. The draft report has become a source of contention, with Commissioner Shawn Farzam expressing the view that it includes opinion and fails to include “positive” information in the section on officers’ use of force and Commissioner Chris Root, who is drafting the section, strongly disagreeing.
Commissioners also formalized plans to hold a special meeting and public hearing on March 29 on the “Best Practices in Police Use of Force Policy.”
The special meeting will be held in the Castle Board Room at Michigan State University (MSU) College of Law and feature the following speakers: Dr. Angie Weis Gammell, Policy Director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University; Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of Police Executive Research Forum; Dr. Trevor Bechtel, Student Engagement & Strategic Projects Manager, University of Michigan Poverty Solutions and co-author of “Evidence on Measures to Reduce Excessive Use of Force by the Police”; and Pastor Sean Holland, Lansing activist with One Love Global and Black Lives Matter.
This will be the first of two public hearings on use of force.