Blackwell approach lauded nationally, dismissed at home

When officer-in-training Kevin Falkler heard about his roommate's door-busting, criminal-chasing exploits as an intern with the Cincinnati Police Department, he was so stoked, he applied to join.

Then he got the acceptance call. He wouldn't be tagging along with the vice squad like his roommate. He'd be tutoring kids to read.

"I said, 'What? What?! How is that a thing?" said Falkler, 22, who graduated from the University of Cincinnati as a criminal justice major in May. "I'd never heard of the program. I didn't know officers even did community policing."

Falkler balked and tried to back out. But after his first session working with 7- to 9-year-olds – some of whom struggled to understand simple words like "the" – he was sold.

The Right to Read program, created by Officer Donald Jordan and approved by former Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, was one prong in Blackwell's community-focused approach to crime fighting.

And it helped get him fired, he told reporters.

Blackwell, who was dismissed by City Manager Harry Black on Wednesday, had been in the cross hairs of some at City Hall since his arrival in 2013. His focus on working with kids in the community has been hailed outside of Cincinnati – including the White House – as a model for departments nationwide. But in his own backyard, it was dismissed by some as warm-and-fuzzy nonsense in a city that should be focused on the recent surge in shootings.

"I think it's great having police officers attend community meetings, but it needs to be balanced with real police work," said Pete Witte, a small business owner and West Side activist who's been publicly supportive of Black and Mayor John Cranley. "It doesn't get all the way to the heart of solving crime."

Blackwell had relented somewhat in recent weeks, agreeing to reassign some specialty officers from their community-focused beats to patrol the streets. But he largely held firm, telling The Enquirer in an interview before his firing that he believed wholeheartedly in the approach he was taking – even if others didn't.

"I'm going to walk my truth as a police chief and do the things that I think make this city the best city in the country," he said. "It may take until after I'm gone for people to recognize the good things that we were doing."

Now, in the wake of his firing, it's tough to gauge how much of a role Blackwell's community-policing approach played in his departure. Black and Cranley didn't return phone calls and emails seeking comment.

Black issued a blunt memo Wednesday that highlighted low morale, frequent absences and self-promotion as reasons for the dismissal.

Councilman Wendell Young – a former policeman – told The Enquirer that Blackwell never had the mayor and city manager's support and was doomed to fail from the start. By the end, Young reluctantly said it was in the city's best interest for Blackwell to go.

The criticisms lobbed at Blackwell after his arrival were varied: He was too gruff. He was overly self-promotional. Crime was rising this year on his watch. He was leaving town too often to tout his policing approach in other cities.

One of the most common complaints – at the heart of an upcoming union meeting at which officers were expected to issue a no-confidence vote in the chief – was that Blackwell's focus on community policing was taking officers off the streets where they were needed most.

Union President Kathy Harrell has said that department morale was abysmal and that officers were frustrated with low staffing levels. She told The Enquirer this week that Blackwell has been ignoring officers' needs for months, and on Wednesday she said his firing, while sad, was the city's only choice.

Cincinnati Councilwoman Yvette Simpson said the issues raised by officers were red herrings. Blaming the chief for a crime increase that coincided with a national uptick was ridiculous, she said, and issues of morale and staffing should have been directed at City Council rather than Blackwell.

"It's political," said Simpson, a Blackwell supporter who was vocal in her criticism of his firing. "If you look hard enough and with enough motivation, you can find reasons to undercut anyone."

She said Blackwell was never embraced by officers in part because he was an outsider. Before the 2001 race riots in Cincinnati, police chiefs had been promoted from within the department. City voters approved a charter amendment in 2001 that opened the selection process nationwide rather than limiting it to in-house candidates.

The police union fought that vote to the Ohio Supreme Court, which decided in 2009 to dismiss its appeal. Simpson said that some officers are still bitter about the loss and took it out on Blackwell.

"Change is hard, and this city is very, very hard on outsiders," she said.

In a packet of officer complaints released by the city alongside Black's firing memo, Capt. Michael John wrote this: "I recognize, two of the three assistant chiefs reporting to Chief Blackwell had been in direct competition with him for the position of Chief, and the third had previously competed for the position prior to the appointment of (Blackwell predecessor) James Craig. This caused an obvious climate of discord from the onset."

Simpson considered Blackwell a visionary, pointing to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch's recent praise. Lynch hailed the department as a nationwide model in April. Soon after, Blackwell was invited to a community policing forum at the White House.

"His policing style is long-term, and it's a model elsewhere," Simpson said. "He believes in not only resolving crime now, but in preventing crime in the future. That takes more work and more time."

Harriett Hubbard, executive director of the St. Louis-based Child Safety Day, invited Blackwell to an event in March called Community Policing: Building a Partnership. He was scheduled to give a similar presentation in January.

Blackwell's influence was so strong that one officer launched a free day camp for local children within six weeks of his presentation, Hubbard said. That officer, Sgt. Peggy Vassallo, was killed late last month in a traffic accident, and Hubbard wrote about Blackwell's influence on the well-liked sergeant in a piece for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"Oh, god, no!" Hubbard said when she learned of Blackwell's Wednesday firing. "Blackwell is one of the top-tier police chiefs in this country, given the negative climate, who is actively working to provide positive service in their community."

Complaints released Wednesday show that not everyone agreed. Some officers and city officials said that Blackwell was condescending, berating and verbally abusive, at times swearing at his subordinates.

In a recent interview with The Enquirer conducted before his firing, Blackwell at first seemed defensive when asked about the recent uptick in citywide shootings. He answered questions succinctly, and at times he appeared offended that they were being asked at all.

But when he began talking about his policing philosophy and his officers' work with youngsters in the city, a different Blackwell emerged. He spoke easily and with passion, and he talked about how important it is for Cincinnati residents to have positive interactions with police officers.

He flashed a photo of Officer Jordan with a smiling little girl. "Who's happier in this picture, my officer or little Mackayla? I can't tell," he said.

In his presentations nationwide, Blackwell would flash other photographs, too: Officers hauling away a black man during Baltimore's 1968 riots. A University of California, Davis lieutenant drenching peaceful protesters in pepper spray at point-blank range. The iconic image of a teenage girl kneeling over the body of a Kent State University student slain by Ohio National Guardsmen.

If police don't interact positively with the community, those are the images that will flash into most residents' minds when they think about cops, Blackwell said.

More than that, those images will stick with their children, too.

"It's a generational thing. It passes down," he said. "Most people who encounter police have rocks in their pockets – not literal rocks, but they're weighed down by the preconceptions they have."

That's why Blackwell had launched several kid-oriented programs in addition to Right to Read. He created the H3 Cincy – Hoops. Heart. Hope, a basketball program aimed at getting teens off the streets. The program so impressed business magnate and hip-hop music legend Russell Simmons that he donated $25,000 to it this summer.

Blackwell also created the Quality of Life Team, a 10-officer unit – dispatched two per district – that zeroes in on hot spots and tasks officers with getting to know the area's children.

Officer Jennett Vaughn is part of that team. A 12-year veteran with the department, the 42-year-old said that her time focusing on community-oriented policing in Avondale has been the toughest and most rewarding of her career.

It's grueling work responding to radio calls, she said, but it's even harder to try to dig in and find the roots of a dispute in hopes of solving the problem for good.

Vaughn and her partner first focused on a building along the 3000 block of Reading Road. It was inside an apartment there that 14-year-old Tyann Adkins had been shot and killed by another teen playing with a gun in March 2014.

Some of the problems Vaughn uncovered in the building wouldn't normally seem like something an officer would tackle: She worked with the building's manager to more clearly label different parts of the building so officers could answer calls there faster. She got to know the kids who lived there by name, and drove several to school when they missed the bus.

"At first, they were very apprehensive," Vaughn said. "But once they got to know us, they would talk to us. They were friendly, they'd come shake our hand and we'd ask them how was school. It showed them that we as police officers are also people and we do really, truly care about what's going on in the neighborhood."

Attitudes shifted. Instead of being greeted by children shouting "the boys!" – an ominous "police are coming" warning to others – Vaughn said she was greeted by name.

"That's the key," said Officer Alisha Stevenson, 32, a member of the Community Liaison Unit. "A lot of kids don't see us as real people. They only go by what they see on TV, and you're really not going to see a glorified cop show where the police are doing community work. You're just going to see us drug busting and locking people up."

Kids paying even the slightest attention to the news are inundated with stories of us versus them – stories centering around urban police officers' questionable treatment of suspects such as Freddie Gray in Maryland and Sandra Bland in Texas.

Then there was the Cincinnati shooting death in July of Sam DuBose, an unarmed man pulled over because he didn't have a front license plate. The University of Cincinnati Police Department officer in that case, Ray Tensing, awaits trial on a murder charge.

Some kids have had real-life interactions with officers, but those are rarely pleasant, Stevenson said.

"Maybe we had to arrest one of their parents. Now we're the bad guys because we took your family member away," she said. "We have to go out of our way to consciously make sure they see us differently."

Some of her peers see things differently. Stevenson, who has a master's degree in criminal justice, said she's been ignored and disrespected by fellow officers who dismiss her as a lesser cop because she doesn't do typical patrol work. Some of the officers' complaints released Wednesday also describe several instances of head-butting between Blackwell and other command officers over the Quality of Life Enhancement Team, including allegations that the chief halted a lieutenant's attempt to audit its overtime.

Stevenson said that, no matter her colleagues' resistance, she believes that the work she does is as at least as important as patrol work.

"I don't think a lot of them appreciate that patrol work is primarily reactive and that community policing focuses on building relationships and problem solving. It's proactive," she said. "Some of them don't see that big picture. I feel strongly in my heart that the way we interact with these kids will save some of them."

Robert Chapman is deputy director for community policing advancement for the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program under the Department of Justice. He was careful not to opine on Blackwell's firing – it's the prerogative of city officials to hire and fire whom they please, he said – but he applauded the city's community work and said it's generally a mistake to walk away from community policing in response to surges in crime.

"Police aren't going to arrest their way out of crime," he said. "The time in which you need to be establishing those relationships and building trust is in times of crisis. You don't want to step away from those investments because you're having other challenges. ... It's not an either-or proposition. Good policing is community policing."

Kelli Prather, a 43-year-old Price Hill resident, said Blackwell's approach had started to heal long-festering wounds between the African-American community and police. She was disheartened to hear of his firing and said Thursday that his supporters were reeling.

"He brought a totally different police style that showed he was courageous enough to reach the public," she said. "If you can reach the public, you can make a difference in the public."

Falkler, the UC graduate who interned with the department, said he went on eight ride-alongs as an officer-in-training. He was surprised how few knew of the reading program for which he was interning.

He was surprised, too, when he learned that some in Cincinnati dismiss such programs as being a waste of officers' time and taxpayers' money, especially in light of the current tension between so many communities and police departments nationwide.

"This only helps the police," said Falkler, who is training to join the Anne Arundel County Police Department in Maryland. "It keeps kids on the right track so that they can pass their reading tests and go on to middle school, go to high school, possibly go to college. That's another person the police don't have to worry about becoming a criminal. I don't understand how it can be criticized."

The program had measurable success. In Ohio, kids who can't pass a reading test are automatically forced to repeat the third grade. Schools with the Right to Read program increased their passing percentages by more than 25 points, from 52 percent to 77.5 percent.

Falkler said that watching kids learn to read was reward enough, but the connection he had with his students was even more important. One girl in particular struck a chord when she told him that she wished he could be her full-time teacher.

"It was so sweet, when I drove away, I just thought, 'Wow.' That kind of made my day," Falkler said. "When I interviewed for jobs, they were always blown away when I described the program. They said we need more of that in this country."

Jordan, who pitched the Right to Read program, agreed. He grew up in Avondale and said too many kids are raised to hate the police. Community-oriented policing changes that dynamic, he said.

"It's about trust," said Jordan, who added that he took initiative to do this kind of policing under other chiefs during his 15-year career, with mixed response.

"It hasn't always been appreciated," Jordan said. "I felt like I had to fight to do this stuff before Chief Blackwell came along. But it makes sense to build relationships with people. I think the trend around the country is moving toward this type of policing."

Young said he hopes that many of the programs started under Blackwell will continue.

"I suspect that some of the units he created, like the Quality of Life Enhancement Team, might be disbanded, but I think the work will be done another way," Young said. "Much of the traction the chief felt he couldn't get with the mayor and Harry Black, his programs might get now."