Can you tell me a little bit about how you became chief of police and why you were specifically chosen to take over?
“Why me? That's kind of a hard question to answer. I would just say, you know, selfishly, this is 27 years of my body of work. I've worked very hard, albeit within the sheriff's office, within our legislative and government affairs, within council, within the Washoe County Commission, to make a name for myself, to be a student of the game, to continue to research, to continue to evolve and not be satisfied with the status quo.”
During the transition, under former Chief Nance, it seemed like a lot of public trust had eroded. Can you explain the tangible steps that you and the department will take and are taking to regain public trust?
“If we don't treat the officer at the line-level, individuals doing the job day in and day out, and recognize what's happening in their space, bad things happen. So, if something bad is happening at home and that causes them to over or underreact at work, those have huge consequences, right? So, we want to make sure that our officers are in a good headspace when they go out to the street. We want to make sure that we're monitoring them, their conduct, whether on and off duty.”
“So, we've deployed early warning tracking systems with respect to pursuits and uses of force and citizen complaints to manage what's happening in that space when we're not always watching our officers.”
“So, how do we do it? How do we bring it back? I think we continue doing what we're doing. The men and women are out there, they've answered the call, they continue to go to the public when they need them. We continue to do community service events; we continue to let them see behind the scenes and what we're doing. Currently, we're revamping our policies. We're going to be posting those on our web page soon, so everybody can see what the policies, the general orders of the Reno Police Department are. The more press conferences that we do, the mayor and the city manager instituted the public safety brief, because we're out in that community talking about what we're doing behind the scenes.”
How do you go about building trust within the department as new leadership comes in?
“100 percent you have to take care of your people, and I don't mean that by shoving something under the carpet or not holding people accountable. You have to, we talked about wellness, we talked about making sure that our officers are equipped, trained, or mentally prepared to go out to those shifts, so we have to have a certain degree of empathy and understanding for what they're going through in the workload and managing that stress of our people.”
Can you tell me, as a new chief, what your priorities are going in, and how you're going to address them?
“I think the priorities specifically are establishing the leadership team. We've got Assistant Chief Garlock on; he's finished his background investigation, he's appointed by counsel. The second piece is finding the next Assistant Chief to bring in, and talking about our culture. We've talked to you earlier about policies, getting back to basics. It's difficult to hold police officers accountable to a 600 to 1000-page policy manual, and expecting them to know everything. So, understanding your core transaction, understanding your legal authority, understanding our policies and procedures is very important to me, because again, that legitimacy piece you just spoke about is about selling what we're doing to the public. They shouldn't have to write a FOIA request to see what our policy is in respect to working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We're not hiding anything. We want to put all those policies forward-facing, so the public can see it.”
Under Chief Nance, she made a statement that RPD does not work with ICE unless there is a big public safety issue, for example, a shooting. What is your stance on working with immigration enforcement?
“It's not a stance, it's what our legal authority is. We don't do immigration enforcement. I've worked both as an undersheriff and now as a chief with Tu Casa Latina, with Maria Davis, with Claudia Castañeda, with a lot of our Latinx community, just to make sure that, again, we talked about it earlier, right? If a crime doesn't happen in front of us, or we're not called, I can't take any action on that. If somebody's worried about their immigration status, and they're a victim of a crime, or they're being held hostage, or something's happening to them, they're being extorted, and they don't feel like they can call, that's a problem. So, they are a law enforcement partner, so we do have to collaborate [with] them for access to federal grants and everything else, but we don't go out actively doing immigration enforcement.”
