Sacramento Police know they lost the community’s trust. Can they earn it back? | Opinion
There was a time when I had a great relationship with the leadership of the Sacramento Police Department. That time is long gone.
I don’t trust them. To my eyes and ears, they are neither transparent nor sincere. They talk a good game, but talk doesn’t cut it anymore. Not after they killed Joseph Mann in 2016 and Stephon Clark in 2018 when they didn’t have to. Not after they rounded up protesters in East Sacramento like cattle in 2019 and then circled the wagons. The repercussions of those incidents are still felt today, and I would argue that they set the stage for the mayhem we saw in 2020 when Downtown Sacramento was besieged by violence after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police.
There were obviously a handful of dangerous people on the streets of Sacramento that summer who were not motivated by anything other than criminality. But there were many more young people who were fed up and who vented their rage at law enforcement officers trying to keep the peace in those horrible, early days of the pandemic.
It pained me to see young people raging at officers whose jobs are dangerous and necessary to keep the peace. But the Mann and Clark killings by Sacramento Police officers were never resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Unlike the Floyd case, not a single cop was prosecuted. And only one of the cops who killed Mann was fired.
Sacramento has never been the same since then.
Sacramentans don’t trust their own police department the way they used to. Last Saturday, I attended a dinner honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. where Police Chief Kathy Lester acknowledged in public comments that some communities don’t trust her officers.
There are many reasons for this, but here are mine: Police officers are endowed with the awesome power to arrest or even kill us. When they abuse those powers, as Sacramento Police have done, public trust is broken. This trust is only restored with a level of candor and transparency that has been lacking in the leadership ranks of Sacramento Police for years.
The old platitudes don’t work anymore. The benefit of the doubt has been used up. So when an item appears on the agenda for the Sacramento City Council that calls for the purchase of a militarized armored vehicle for Sacramento Police, at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars, a jaded public has every right to ask why.
There is no doubt that Sacramento Police has many fine officers. There is no doubt that the duties they perform are dangerous and often thankless. But there is also no doubt that leaders of the department have not adequately responded to the damage their department has caused in the last decade.
As with many departments, the leadership of Sacramento Police has long exhibited an us-against-them mentality. You’re either with them, or you’re not. And if you criticize them or question them, then you’re not with them. Period.
That attitude doesn’t work any longer in Sacramento, nor should it. There has been too much death and too much damage done by the people sworn to protect the public.
The relationship between Sacramento and its police department can be improved, but the hard work needs to be done by the people whose actions damaged the relationship in the first place.
