AP Photo/Jeff Roberson
In 2015, Delrish Moss was scheduled to retire from the Miami police department, and he was just starting to think about the next chapter. He’d always ignored fans who said, “You oughtta be a police chief.” But the unrest in Ferguson struck a chord, and when an opening was announced for a new chief, it was the only job he applied for. Over two and a half years, Moss made dramatic changes in the Ferguson department’s recruitment and approach. Last fall, when his mother became ill and he had to move back to Miami, it was a disappointment to everyone but his mom.
You’d actually been interviewed about Ferguson during the unrest, on a Florida TV station. Why? The comparison was to what had happened in Miami, and, mind you, we had the ’80, ’82, ’84, and ’87 riots. In ’80 and ’82, I lived where the riots occurred. By ’87, I was a young policeman. So I was uniquely positioned to see it from both perspectives. I knew then that the national image the city was going to get would be vastly different than what was actually happening, because what would be missed was all the rich history of the city, all the things that were not riots in the street.
What did you first notice about the Ferguson police force? One of the things that was really glaring was the lack of diversity—in terms of women and in terms of people of color. That said, a couple things to me: Wow, this is probably a police department where the people on the force have been here a long time. I found out the average years of service was 25 years, and both of the captains had been on for 43 years. When you don’t get some turnover, sometimes the policing practices become stagnant. And the other thing it said to me was if I take over, a lot of people are going to leave, because of the nature of what they’ve gone through and the fact that there’s going to be change. I also know a lot of them were tired. As I came to find out, a lot of things had happened during the unrest. Families were threatened. Accounts were hacked.
You started with only a handful of African-American officers. How many were you able to recruit? We got to 16 or 17 African Americans at the height. [The department currently has 39 officers, 18 of whom are African American. Before the Brown shooting, there were 55 officers, only four of whom were African-American.] I sat on the board of directors for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and when one of the chiefs said, “It’s really hard to find qualified minorities,” people who were sitting with me said, “We noticed you got a little irritated. Your foot started to shake.” I said, “When a police chief tells you it’s hard to find qualified anything, the first thing he has to do is change his recruitment tactics—maybe advertise on different radio stations, at churches, at historically black colleges and universities. The second thing is to look at his background process from top to bottom. One police officer had been disqualified from another department in the area because at 16 years old, he was rapping the lyrics to a rap song in front of a mirror, and he posted it online. Now he’s 26, he’s been in the military, he’s gone to college, and he has a stellar record. When this kid applied to Ferguson, that reason came up, and I said, “I need to look at all the files and make that final decision myself.”
You started going back through social media, too. Is that tricky? Social media is the new Wild West for governmental agencies, because technology moves so much faster than we do. I was criticized because one police officer who was hired, on his social media page, there was a discussion about a video that involved a police officer and possibly some aggressive treatment. This policeman was a young Caucasian male. If you look at the thread and his comments up to a certain point, it might suggest to you that he supported heavy-handed policing. But if you continue to read, you will realize that he commented early without full knowledge of what the video was about—he was responding to a comment above. Later on that thread, he actually apologizes. Another individual, there had been some allegations of having kiddie porn. When the question was posed, he had it, but he didn’t remember if he was aroused or not. That and other things told me, We cannot hire this guy.
Can you detect racial bias from past comments? It’s very hard to do. Social media can give you a window into some things, but no matter how well you look, the person who works hard to disguise his biases probably can get away with it. There is no foolproof method.
You did experiment with character-based hiring, though. And we started asking different questions in our interviews. Instead of just, “Why do you want this job?” we’d ask, “When was the last time you did something for a friend—or for anybody, and didn’t expect something in return?” Not that there would be a right or wrong answer, but you can start to gauge what kind of person you are hiring. So many are just totally stumped, but some open up. An officer had left police work for a while because he had a son who was born with certain challenges, and he wanted to learn more so he could help his son and others. Now he wanted to come back. Great hire. He was a guy who had a heart for service; he didn’t just want to kick butt and take names.
Did any of the white officers who stayed on the Ferguson force worry you? Some I worried about whether they were a good fit for law enforcement, and some were either let go or invited to go. But it was issues of judgment that gave me more pause than issues of race. And it would be hard for me to gauge racial animus anyway, because I’m the black chief who signs their paychecks.
Did you form any opinion about what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson? I worked very, very hard not to relitigate that. That issue so divided the community—along racial lines, along socioeconomic lines—that I made it a point to stay away from that so I wouldn’t have a judgment, and we could move forward. I spent a lot of my time in Miami as a homicide investigator, and I solved a lot of cases, not because I was a genius hotshot but because people trusted me to talk to me. I’ve made it a point to help people understand that communication is the biggest tool in your arsenal.
How’d you convey that? One of the first things I did was go door to door talking to people and taking other police officers along with me. You are a human being talking to human beings. I told them about an incident years ago that I’ve never forgotten: An older lady called us up to her apartment and sat us down. The heat was sweltering. We just kind of sat there, being polite, trying to figure out what she wants. Finally, she suggested we step out onto the balcony. She said, “Is it cooler out here?” We said, “Yes ma’am.” She said, “Good. I want you to understand that when you guys are working, I sit out here. When you are not working, I sit inside.”
When did you know you were making headway in that community? I had to arrest this guy one day, big guy, every muscle had a muscle. He could’ve cleaned my clock. He gets combative. But because I’m in a neighborhood where everybody knows me, the crowd swarmed around us and said, “Dude, you are going with the policeman, or you gotta fight us all.” When everybody’s invested in what you’re doing, you don’t have to look for allies.
You didn’t get a warm welcome in Ferguson, as I recall. The day I arrived, they protested—in large part not protesting me but the city attorney, but still the community wanted to show me what they were capable of. A large group came to welcome me, and a large group came to say, “We’ll be watching you.” The day I was sworn in, I walked out of the police station, and behind me was a group of Miami officers in uniform who’d come up for the ceremony. I had them stand back, and the first thing I did was walk out into the crowd and start talking to people. Some were welcoming; some were yelling. I gave everybody as much time as I could.
Is it ever justified to hassle kids just on the off-chance they might be guilty of something? No, never. What happens often is we’re responding to a call that says there’s suspicious activity—they are wearing this. An interesting call came into Ferguson one day: A lady said, “There is a black man running up Elizabeth, and I don’t know why he’s running.” The dispatcher said, “Does he look like this?” and gave a description. “Yeah.” “That’s Mr. So-and-so. He jogs every day.” “Oh. OK.”
Good thing nobody responded and stopped him. But what about the times you can’t be sure? If I approach people in a manner that suggests, “Look, I haven’t formed any judgments about you, but this is why we were called,” you can leave a situation understanding that every encounter doesn’t have to be hostile. You do everything you can to restore the dignity of the person you have had to confront. When I was a kid walking home one day, a police officer got out of his car, pushed me against his car, and started to frisk me. Never said anything to me. Got back in his car and left. You can walk away from one encounter like that, but when you have 50? And when you have a police officer who’s been dealing with situation after situation and he gets this other person who has feelings about the police, a lot of what happens in that encounter was set up long before they ever met. What we are starting to do now is teach police officers to use the tools they need most, their mind and their mouth.
The Department of Justice report noted that Ferguson police used canines, and every dog-bite incident reported, the person bitten was African-American—just as everyone arrested for “resisting arrest” between October 2012 and October 2014 was African-American, and 95 percent of people arrested for “manner of walking along roadway” from 2011 to 2013 was African-American. How did you tackle those stats? Some things were very simple: You change the policy. I don’t recall us having a single bite while I was there. There are police departments that chase on misdemeanors; that’s not necessary. But there are two things in the report that people don’t think about. The Ferguson population is predominantly African-American. The surrounding cities—Dellwood, Jennings, Berkeley—are also predominantly African-American. So if the Justice Department comes in and says, “You have written this amount of tickets and most of them were to African-Americans,” well, chances are, most of the stops will be African-Americans. You have to look a little deeper, compare similar situations to similar situations. If I stopped 10 white people and they all got warnings, and I stopped 20 black people and they all got tickets, now there is where you see something. If in similar situations there was a different bite ratio, there is where you look. What’s happening after the traffic stops? And are you biting bank robbers or kids who are playing tiddlywinks? The Justice Department is going to look at it from the surface, but you have to go deeper.
How was it dealing with the Justice Department on the consent decree? When I arrived, you could have cut the tension with a knife. The Justice Department didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them, but the relationship they had with my predecessor had been tense. I said, “Look, all of us have an interest in the success of this department. I’m not going to fight with you.” We were being pelted with bad press: “You are missing deadlines in the consent decree.” But the initial deadlines were set up so we would miss them. Not on purpose, but look, we have 180 days to develop a policy on X and 180 days to implement a policy on X. We develop the policy, the Justice Department looks at it, they send it back with revisions, it goes back and forth, then it goes to the independent monitor, who kicks it back with more changes, then we have to publish the policy, maybe have a public forum. So there’s no way you can develop and implement in 180 days. Now, the chief and the Justice Department sit in a room and together fashion a policy, in peace and harmony. You notice those bad headlines about missing deadlines went away? We stopped yelling at each other.
A study at Indiana University suggested that increasing the percentage of Africa-American officers by less than 25 percent can backfire, because the officers are overdoing it in their quest for legitimacy. At 25 percent, there’s a tipping point, and once a force is 40 percent African-American, the chance of a fatal encounter with an African-American begins to drop. There were very few African-American officers in Ferguson when I got there. I can only imagine what it must have been like for those few officers in a department that already has a view of things. It’s kind of difficult when there are just a few of you to have a different opinion. While I agree with that study, though, a lot of that also has to do with leadership. In Miami, there was a federal investigation. There had been nine fatal shootings of African-Americans. A new chief comes in and rewrites the deadly force policy—instead of shooting at the car and saying it was coming at you, get out of the way!—and they go 12 months without a shooting. Then there’s a shooting of a dog, and then they go 24months without a shooting. I’m thinking, wow, he’s a genius. But later, another chief comes in. The policy doesn’t change, but the attitude from the top changes, and suddenly you have all these shootings again.
Do we need to rethink the “shoot to kill” strategy? We are not teaching shoot to kill; we’re giving you the most likely area to stop a threat. In an active shooting situation, the hit ratio is about 30 percent. So they teach you to go for the largest stopping part of the body, the center mass. People always say, “Oh, you could have shot him in the leg.” Impossible, especially when adrenaline’s going and you have tunnel vision. But what happened before the shooting? Did the police officer unnecessarily put himself in harm’s way? What other tools were we giving him? Did he have the benefit of distance and cover? It has to be stressed that shooting is the absolute last resort. One of the things we were looking at in Ferguson just before I left was BolaWrap. People made fun of it: “What is this, some Batman technology?” But I’m willing to look at anything that gives us options. It’s a device a little bigger and a lot thicker than a cell phone, and when you fire it, a wire comes out that’s made of Kevlar, the plastic used in bulletproof vests, and it ensnares the person. It’s a remote restraint, and I could imagine it working, especially for people who have mental issues. Now you can’t give officers too many options, because you can’t have them hesitate in the situation and think, “Which of the 999 tools should I use?” But you have to stress that our job is to save life, not take it.
Why did Ferguson become such a supercharged international symbol of police violence and racial injustice? The specter of Ferguson is so much bigger than the city. I challenge people to tell me the last time there was a police shooting in Ferguson before Michael Brown. But it only takes one. A lot of it had to do with social media. That situation for any city was going to be a bad one. The county investigated, and during that wait time, Michael Brown lay in the street. It had a lot to do with that.
Could Ferguson happen again? I think Ferguson could happen again, not so much because of what Ferguson is doing, but because the police story is not unique to any one department. With us coming up on a hot summer, the shooting in Texas is being told all over the place. In the country right now, videos are everywhere. People are telling stories. There’s a lot of yelling but not enough discussion.
If you had a magic wand, what one change would you make? We would be able to reconcile all the historical challenges and issues that inform what’s happening today, to give us a fresh start. A couple years ago, the president of the IACP apologized for historical misdeeds by police to communities of color. In law enforcement, that became a debate. Some people thought, “Oh, he’s an apologist for those people who criticize us.” No. At a board meeting, we started having that discussion, and I stood up and explained to them how it feels to be a black man, a police officer, and a person who understands the history of what policing has been to my community. And some of the critics then apologized for thinking ill of the president. If we could have a dialogue where everybody sits down and we can understand each other’s point of view, that is what my magic wand would make happen.
5 things to know about incoming Police Chief Jason Armstrong
1. In late June, the Ferguson City Council voted to hire Jason Armstrong, a captain from the Forest Park Police Department near Atlanta.
2. Armstrong has been an officer of that department for 18 years and has experience as an interim police chief there.
3. Frank McCall had been serving as the interim police chief. After city officials gathered input from town halls and other area chiefs, interim city manager Jeffrey Blume recommended hiring Armstrong.
4. Third Ward Councilwoman Fran Griffin was the only council member to vote against hiring Armstrong.
5. A release from Mayor James Knowles III’s office stated Armstrong's task is “to not only reduce crime but to foster positive community relations through a variety of community initiatives and partnerships.”
