Policing in LaGrange : Partnerships, Trust, and Safety for All of Us

"They wouldn't shoot you. You're white." 

The young, Black man spoke these words in my Christian Ethics class at LaGrange College this semester. His face showed resignation, grief, anger, and the authenticity of his belief in this "fact."  

Later, I asked the long-time LaGrange Chief of Police, Lou Dekmar, how he would respond to my student. "Listen to him," the Chief said. "Try to have a dialogue. Then introduce the facts."  

When my student plainly told me my skin color would save me in an altercation with the police, I disagreed with him. "I can promise you," I said, "If I resist an arrest, jump into my vehicle and try to get away, I'm putting myself in a world of danger. For all that officer knows, I could be going for a gun. There's a pretty decent chance I'm getting shot in that scenario."  

"No, you won't," he replied again. "You're white."  

How did we get to this place? The pain of Black Americans like my student is authentic and visceral. In the summer of 2020, the raging grief of 400 years of systemic racial oppression found a flashpoint amid a pandemic as the image of George Floyd's body, pinned to the ground by white police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin's face, full of contempt and rage, assaulted us through all of our screens. Could there ever be a more provocative image of deadly police authority abused and misused?

Every week, it seems, there is yet another story. A Black American killed, a media frenzy, a social media storm, the cycle of protest and willful white forgetting, until we rerun the terrible loop.  

What are the facts Chief Dekmar urged me to introduce into this all-important dialogue, and specifically, what are the facts of policing in our hometown of LaGrange?  

Is my student right? Is he more likely to die at the hands of police because he's black? Am I more likely to survive because I'm white? Whatever the facts, how do his perceptions and experiences shape his understanding of reality? What about me and my experiences? What do we need to learn to have a better, safer, and more just community?  

In July of 2017, Dr. Roland Fryer, the youngest tenured Black professor in the history of Harvard University, published a landmark study called "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force." In it, he says, "...for all the eerie similarities between the current spate of police interactions with African-Americans and the historical injustices which remain unhealed, the current debate is virtually data-free." This work is considered one of the most important statistical studies of racism and policing in America to date. It concluded, "On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account."

In addition, The Washington Post has compiled "Fatal Force: Police fatality shootings database," which attempts to detail and categorize every police-related shooting fatality in the United States since 2015, relying not only on self-reported statistics from agencies, but also media coverage. It finds that more white Americans are killed by police every year, in total, than Black Americans. However, Black Americans do comprise about 30% of all fatal shootings while only making up about 12% of the population. However, this Black fatality percentage is lower than the overall percentage of Blacks relative to all arrests. 

Police kill about 1,000 Americans per year. Of these, approximately 300 are Black, and about 40 are unarmed. America vastly outpaces all other "economically developed" nations globally in terms of police-related use of force and lethal force. There are many reasons for this, chief among them the highly armed American public relative to other developed nations. "Police in America almost have to assume a person may be armed," Chief Dekmar said. Even so, with upward of 12 million arrests per year, only 0.0083 percent of all American arrests end in a fatality.  

"When I get frustrated that these facts don't always come out," Dekmar says, "I have to ask myself, how would I feel if I were similarly situated as your student and looking through that lens? I have to let go of the things I can't control and work to change the things I can."

In LaGrange, our Police Department responds to about 60,000 calls per year, with only about 2,000 of these calls ending in an arrest.  

"Policing is a service to the community." Chief Dekmar says. "97% of the time, we are not making arrests, but we are doing a kind of emergency social intervention. We're dealing with mental health issues, domestic issues, substance abuse. We are often working in communities that have had a lack of educational opportunities and lack of employment. We go into dynamic and chaotic situations where every institution has failed an individual, be it church, schools, social services, non-profits, and the expectation is to solve it safely in five minutes. When things finally erupt into chaos, that's when we are called. We try to effectively maintain order and make sure someone doesn't get hurt and make effective, timely referrals in a way that can create a positive outcome."

The LaGrange Police Department and Chief Dekmar are known throughout the state for doing that work very well. During my time as a Pastor in Douglasville, Georgia, I received training through the Georgia Law Enforcement Chaplains agency. I volunteered my support for the Douglasville Police Department as a Chaplain to its officers. In 2014, when I told the Douglasville Chief that I was moving to LaGrange, he immediately said, "You're going to a city with one of the best departments in the state. And their Chief is the very best."  

Lou Dekmar has achieved a 26-year tenure as Chief in a field where the usual Chief of police tenure averages 3-5 years. He is quick to deflect any praise and point to the community as the reason for his success.  

"I can define 'community policing' in one word," he says. "Partnership."  

"You have to have partners to do this work. Partners in churches and non-profits and schools and with the activists who are leaders in the community."  

He is most proud of how these partnerships have created some innovative work across the community with the police department. "We have learned that we need to be good at making referrals to other helping agencies in the community. We actually turned one of our officer positions into a full-time caseworker who can be an expert in making the referrals that other officers on the street simply don't have time to do."

"We have created a 'cite and release' program that now includes two dozen infractions that don't require us to arrest someone and take them to jail when they are almost certain to be released by a judge on their own recognizance anyway. This is so important to people who are lower-income and working to hold their lives together. If they are arrested on a Friday but can't afford to bond out, they will be in jail until Monday, when the judge releases them. They can lose their job. These are the things that cause people to run and resist arrest at times. Now we can show that we are trying to work with them and that we can cut them loose if they will cooperate and promise to appear."   

"We have done great work with 'record restriction.' Many misdemeanor arrests can be sequestered to not appear in work-related background checks if the person was never convicted. But getting this done takes time and know-how. It means going to a judge and DA. Now we regularly get all the parties together and advertise to the public. To date, we have done over 500 free record restrictions that can help people get and maintain employment without fear of the background check."  

"We have worked with local auto parts stores, and they all now honor a 10% discount coupon that our officers give to anyone pulled over for any vehicle malfunction. And we created a 'handle with care' service that notifies the school superintendent when children's lives have been disrupted during the night because of interactions between their families and LPD. Ultimately the child's teacher is informed only with the need to "handle with care" if the student is disruptive or exhausted and there is a chance for positive intervention rather than discipline." 

Although Chief Dekmar has done so much unheralded work in our local community, his best-known effort at community trust-building was picked up by major media outlets around the country. In fact, I read about him in the New York Times before I ever really got to know him well in person. Chief Dekmar learned of the 1940 extra-judicial execution, another phrase for lynching, of Austin Callaway, a young black citizen of LaGrange. Callaway mysteriously disappeared from the city jail and was found shot to death on a roadside in the black community the next day. With Dekmar's leadership, the police department became the catalyst for bringing this incident to light, memorializing Callaway, and apologizing to the black community, and taking responsibility.  

I asked him why he felt called to this work and what it had achieved. "Well, the white community often asked me why this was relevant to today. It was relevant because a wonderful older black lady stood in our building and looked at a historic photograph of the city's officers from the 1940s. 'They killed our people,' she said. What happened had never been owned or resolved. It was still very much alive and talked about in the community and directly impacted our ability to create trust and partnerships. Anyone in leadership has a responsibility to address the history of an institution if it is impacting contemporary relationships, and it was. We were the catalyst, but the NAACP, the College, the Mayor, a Judge, and many others stepped up and did the work that needed to be done."  

I shared with the Chief that in my work as LaGrange College Chaplain and as a Pastor, I am deeply committed to racial justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and support our local law enforcement officials and their work for our community. Why, I asked, does it seem so hard for people to hold together both these commitments?

"You have to truly be for everybody. 'Black Lives Matter' and support for police fit hand in glove! Since I've been here, we've had 80 homicides, and about all but 10 percent have been African American victims. Suppose black lives truly do matter to the community and this institution. In that case, we need to commit to being circumspect enough to look at what we have done for the last 50 years to make this community better. If we haven't done what's needed, then we need to make another way. I don't think I'm not a "reform" chief, which some in the media have tried to call me. But I do evolve. I see things that aren't working. Trust is what works. Trust doesn't buy you a pass. It buys you time to get the facts so that reasonable people can sit down and at least agree on what we do going forward."

Finally, I asked Chief Dekmar how his faith as a Christian and member of St. Peter's church impacts his work of policing our community. "It gives me faith," he said, "that if you do the right thing, it will be shown in time. The right decisions will be acquitted by time, even if they aren't popular at the moment." 

May we listen to each other. May we try to stand in each others' shoes and see through each other's lenses. And may we dare to trust, find the facts, and build a better community together.