It’s been two months since the Department of Justice released a scathing report into the Phoenix Police Department — finding systemic discrimination against people of color, people experiencing homelessness and those with serious mental illness, as well as a pattern of excessive use of force and lack of accountability for officers.
It was a bombshell for the city and the department. But, city leaders have been reticent to enter into an agreement with the DOJ to fix it. It’s called a consent decree, and it’d essentially mean the police department would be under the eye of the feds until it met agreed-upon requirements to improve.
In the immediate aftermath of the report, most city officials said they could not comment on it until they had read the entire thing — they got it when the rest of the public and press did. Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego gave one interview at the time and declined to come on The Show then to talk about it.
But, this week, she offered to come into our studios to tell us what’s happened in the months since the report’s release — and what’s next for the city and its police department.
Full conversation
KATE GALLEGO: We’ve had a lot of activity since then. I’ve had a variety of great and very useful conversations from stakeholders that include our dispatchers — who were mentioned extensively in the report — to just this morning, I sat down with two tribal police chiefs and a leader of a tribal community to talk about some of the components in the reports that mentioned Native American community.
Several of my Council colleagues have had listening sessions with their constituents in districts. So we’re really trying to get out there and hear firsthand from the stakeholders who are mentioned in the report.
LAUREN GILGER: So it sounds like a lot of conversations going on right now and the months following this. What was your personal reaction to this as mayor of this city when this came out?
GALLEGO: It was a hard report to read. My challenge is to make sure we take this and use it to make the best department possible. We have been working to build the strongest department since I was elected to the City of Phoenix. It is important work, but it feels like work where we’re going to have to keep evolving and keep pushing ourselves to do better.
GILGER: So city staff has been reviewing things, it sounds like looking to verify specific incidents that were cited by the DOJ. Why go about it that way? Are you concerned that there are findings in here that are not accurate?
GALLEGO: We want to have the best possible information. They refer to many incidents that are very well known in our community, but also some where we’re not quite sure what they’re referring to. We can make better decisions if we have all of the information possible.
For example, if there’s video, we’d like to watch it before we act. That seems like the responsible decision to make. Sometimes there’s context that adds important information, and sometimes we just got to do better.
GILGER: What do you make of the process here? Do you feel like the DOJ was transparent enough with the city throughout this? Would there have been moments in which you wish you were involved? There have been a lot of critiques of this. Do you have critiques?
GALLEGO: They spent more than 1,000 days studying us without giving us feedback, when they must have known things that they would recommend as early as the first year of the investigation. We would have benefited. We would have started working earlier, and maybe we could have had better outcomes. I would love to have more of a conversational process where we explain why we did certain things and can get back and forth.
GILGER: So overall, these major findings from the DOJ of systemic discrimination against people of color, those with mental health problems, the people experiencing homelessness — do you agree with the findings of this report?
GALLEGO: We know we have a lot of work to do. There was a lot of recommendations in the report where they wanted us to move more quickly in what we are already doing. We are very motivated to do that. Some of these projects are enormous changes in what we’ve been doing. For example, they really pushed us to do more on training and data collection, and we’re going to step up and do that faster.
I’m trying to use this to push some of our private-sector vendors on the technology side. There’s a real urgency. We sometimes feel they don’t — the vendors don’t feel the urgency we do. And this is a tool for me to try to get results faster.
GILGER: So I wonder what kinds of conversations you’ve had with the communities who are really impacted here. Like the ones who are probably sounding the alarm that led to this: people of color, people experiencing homelessness, these mental health incidents and advocates there. Do you think that this is enough for them? This response from the city?
GALLEGO: There are a lot of people in our community who want an immediate response. We feel the urgency they do and are trying to go as quickly as possible. I mentioned I had met with the dispatchers. The DOJ really pushed us. We need to do better training for our dispatchers. We agree, and our dispatchers would like more training.
Just this week, we’ve launched an effort to hire more dispatchers because if we’re taking people off the phones, we need other people on the phones because you expect us to still respond to your 911 calls while we’re doing all of this training.
So we are working quickly to make those changes. If I could snap my hands and have dispatchers trained instantly, I would do it. But the truth is, it’s going to take time to hire folks and train them to meet our community standards. But we get the message loudly and clearly: Do it as efficiently as possible.
GILGER: What about when it comes to discrimination, though, like in those communities? Do you think there’s a real distrust of the police that needs to be rebuilt?
GALLEGO: We know we need to work harder to build trust with our community. And long before DOJ came to the City of Phoenix, we’ve been putting policies in place. One of the first things I worked on as an elected official was body-worn cameras, so that there’d be a real recording of what happened. We could learn, we could improve.
It’s not enough. We have put in place what we call an Office of Accountability and Transparency — which is non-police, what we call civilians — who will look at cases where people are frustrated and feel we didn’t meet the standards. That office has been putting out reports that provide very helpful recommendations about how we can do better and point out where we have fallen short.
We also began long before DOJ came here and committed to create a civilian review board. That is, people who don’t have a police background, who will look at the policies of our police department and help us improve.
GILGER: Let me ask you about that, because there’s been a lot of criticism there as well. Many have said that because of new restrictions on who can apply — like you cannot have litigated a claim against the police involving use of force now and other changes that were imposed by the state Legislature — that this board is essentially toothless. Do you think that will be true? Do you think it will have power, investigative power?
GALLEGO: The requirement is that you can’t have an active litigation involving the city of Phoenix, or done so in the last 10 years. So it’s not a ban on people who have had rough experiences with the police department. But if it’s still ongoing, we want to get through that so that people can have a little more perspective and look. Citywide it was a real balance, and we think we’re going to have a board that will help us make great recommendations.
There’s not one policy that’s going to fix this, but the Civilian Review Board is nationwide known as a best practice, and we think it’ll make a valuable contribution alongside the many other changes that we’re making.
GILGER: Let’s talk about what’s next year based on these DOJ findings. There’s a lot of debate whether or not the city should enter into a consent decree. It seems likely that is what the DOJ is after here. It would mean, essentially, that the department would be under oversight of the feds. City officials before have said they are very against this idea. Many have said they do not want that to happen. Where do you stand?
GALLEGO: I have spoken to a lot of my fellow mayors who’ve been involved with this. In particular, I have looked at what’s happened at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Just this week, another front page story saying they’d spent $250 million, and the reporter couldn’t find a single stakeholder who thought things were going well. A lot of frustration on both sides.
It’s my job as mayor to learn from everyone else’s experience and try to do the best to keep Phoenix safe. What I’ve decided is we need to go full speed ahead with reform and recommendations. We will learn everything we can from DOJ, but these processes have been very costly and in many cases have not come out with great outcomes.
I’ve talked to some of the mayors in Maricopa County for whom the sheriff is the law enforcement authority. Good, progressive Democratic mayors who’ve said “This is a really frustrating process. We go to the sheriff, we want a change made, and we have to wait for a court monitor and a federal judge. It doesn’t serve anyone well.” So I think the best is to really take those recommendations that we can implement, but also let our existing accountability mechanisms work.
GILGER: Are you willing to go to court against the DOJ for this? That’s basically the only other alternative, yeah?
GALLEGO: We’ve had some conversations where there may be other alternatives. Many people have pointed us to Austin, Texas, where they were able to make very significant changes and improvements without having court oversight. We want results soon. I don’t want to spend $250 million and have the result that the county sheriffs have. It would be malpractice on my part to not learn from what’s already happening in our community and try to do better.
We are very much committed to building trust with our entire community. The Phoenix Police Department goes out on so many calls, and the vast, vast majority of them are successful. But that’s not good enough. And so we will keep working.
