Published on Nov. 20, 2018	In the Columbia Missourian
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Mayor Brian Treece wanted answers late Monday night.

After more than a week of news that the number of officers allocated to community policing would be reduced and their distribution changed, Treece grilled City Manager Mike Matthes and Police Chief Ken Burton about the changes at the end of a packed city council agenda.

Columbia City Council members hadn’t been a part of the decision to change the department’s community policing efforts, and they put a stop to the process until the public could receive more information.

Treece suggested a vote to ask Matthes and Burton “to put on hold any change in staffing pattern, any change in assignments, any change in the (Community Outreach Unit), its rebranding, any change at all until we get the community policing report and plan of action that we asked for.”

Council members agreed and seemed confused by the decision to alter the department’s community policing efforts.

“It seems like we’ve had such a good response with the four strategic areas that we’ve concentrated police officers in,” Sixth Ward councilwoman Betsy Peters said. “It seems like a serious step backwards to try and do what you feel the city council asked, which is to go to the citywide policing.”

Matthes said he expected to present the community policing report to the council in December.

On Thursday, he announced that he would be bringing a proposal to the council to alter the Community Outreach Unit. The proposed changes would reduce the number of officers in the unit from 14 to eight, spread members of the unit across the city’s eight police beats and decrease the amount of time each officer would spend in each area.

“COU is not being dismantled,” Matthes said Monday night. “Community policing is not being abandoned.”

In the meeting, Matthes and Burton argued that the proposed changes were made to fulfill the recommendations laid out in the community policing report.

“It’s what the public said in the report,” Burton said. “They wanted this concept to be spread across the city, so we made an effort to do it. Obviously, it blew up in our face, and that’s where we are tonight.”

Much of the confusion arose when an internal police department email written by Deputy Chief Jill Schlude was leaked early last week, detailing proposed changes to the unit, which is called the Community Outreach Unit.

In the email, Schlude said the name for the unit would be the Community Response Unit, something Matthes later walked back.

Many of the decisions around the new community policing structure happened in private meetings between Matthes and Burton, the two said. It was unclear to Treece when decisions were made, and he pressed the two on their timeline.

“When did you talk about it?” Treece asked about changing the name. “Before or after Deputy Schlude’s email came out?”

“That would have been after,” Burton said. “It would have been after all of the media stuff started coming out — .”

“The city manager said before; you said after,” Treece said, interrupting, “so was it before or after Deputy Schlude’s email came out?”

Matthes said that, when initially pitched on the new plan, he said the name should not change but that somehow it didn’t take. Burton said the decision had been made after backlash from Schlude’s email.

‘Fair to rest of the city?’

Through the meeting, Burton maintained the current plan was unsustainable.

“We were putting an awful lot of money into four very small areas of the city,” he said. “Is that fair to the rest of the city? In our estimation, what we heard from the public is that they wanted this concept to go citywide, so we had to find a way as management to try to do it.”

Existing members of the outreach unit were not to be automatically folded into the new outreach unit. Instead, recruitment was open to any officer with a year and a half of experience.

“We had to figure out a way to get patrol to be exposed to the COU officers and the way they do their business out there,” Burton said. “And the only way we could think of to do it was this model we came up with.” 

By spreading those community policing officers across the department’s beat structure, they said, it would allow for more flexible community policing that could respond to needs across the city.

“If you think of it now, 100 percent of our community policing efforts (covered) about 10 percent of the city,” Matthes said, “and this concept would spread 100 percent of it over 100 percent of the city.”

Burton acknowledged that the changes to the community policing unit could result in less effective outreach in the areas targeted before.

‘Shame on you’

Also, members of Race Matters, Friends took Matthes to task during the meeting over the changes.

“Shame on you,” Lynn Maloney, a member of Race Matters, Friends, said, pointing directly at Matthes. “Shame on you.”

She was one of several members of the social equity group that criticized city management over the changes to its community policing program. In general, they called for the removal of Matthes, and the members said the changes were a step in the wrong direction.

“It will engage in problem-oriented responses but not community-oriented preventative policing,” she said.

Another member echoed the sentiment.

“On its face,” Andrew Twaddle said, “the CPD action seems to me to be a bright, giant step backward from a good-faith effort to change the philosophy of the Columbia Police Department in the direction of a guardian mentality in its interaction with the community.”

At one point during Monday’s meeting, Jill Lucht, another Race Matters, Friends member, asked those present in support of community policing to stand, and more than two dozen people did so.

During the meeting, a promotional video for the city’s strategic plan was shown, and it touted the outreach unit’s efforts as having reduced crime and increased trust.

The city’s strategic plan annual report touted 10,014 positive interactions between community outreach officers and citizens since 2016.

Race Matters, Friends called for Matthes’ resignation Monday morning. It argued there was a lack of consideration of community input in a report on community policing that was issued in August and that the “veil of darkness” theory forwarded by the police department was racist. It also critiqued the proposed reduction in staffing for the Community Outreach Unit.

Race Matters, Friends has long wanted Burton to resign, calling for it in June 2017 when data released by the state attorney general’s office showed that black drivers were four times more likely to be pulled over than white drivers in Columbia in 2016. Burton has maintained that these racial disparities do not mean officers engage in racial profiling.

Community outreach officers would also work downtown part time, and officers would also be able to work across beats when needed.

The alterations to community policing efforts came after Matthes and Police Sgt. Robert Fox worked for several months on a report about community policing in Columbia. According to the report, lack of staffing and pay made community policing near impossible to implement.

That report also recommended increasing the size of the Community Outreach Unit by hiring more than 60 officers and several supervisors.

On Wednesday, Burton said cuts to the unit were due to officers’ lack of interest in community policing.

“You’re not doing any kind of enforcement action and things like that,” he said, “so people tend to get bored with it.”