The Columbia City Council approved a resolution on Feb. 19 declaring its support for a community-oriented policing program.

The declaration follows the 2014 Mayor’s Task Force on Community Violence final report and recommendations, which called for the development and implementation of a community-oriented policing model.

According to the council resolution, the program would include expanded “community involvement, police training in communications and social issues, long-term patrol assignments in designated neighborhoods, officer time dedicated to building community relationships, the use of warnings in responding to minor crimes, and an internal Police Department culture of mentorship, personal coaching, and positive reinforcement.”

Columbia City Manager Mike Matthes has been directed to design a community-oriented policing program for the city. The council set a deadline of Aug. 31 for the plan to be presented.

According to a press release from Feb. 18, Matthes selected Sgt. Robert Fox to lead the project. He hopes to develop a plan that would satisfy the Police Department, the NAACP and residents at large.

The new policing strategy is designed to foster better relationships between the Columbia Police Department and Columbia residents.

While the strategy would be new to Columbia, Steven Sapp, community relations director for the City of Columbia, sees the new policy as a return to a more traditional policing strategy.

“In the mid 1800s, the first formal police department was formed in London and they were traditionally unarmed,” Sapp said. “They were all in neighborhoods, they knew residents, they knew the kids, they knew the shop owners. Everybody knew everybody.”

Sapp said once police officers began using cars, community engagement was reduced and relationships between officers and the public were weakened.

“It’s interesting [that] now, almost 150 years later, it’s coming back full circle that you’re trying to get officers out of cars and back into neighborhoods,” Sapp said.

This new policing strategy would create the need for a significant addition to the existing police force. Sapp said Chief of Police Ken Burton anticipates needing an additional 50 officers in order for CPD to fulfill the requirements of community-oriented policing.

Aspects of the community-oriented strategy were incorporated into the Community Outreach Unit in 2016, which served as a pilot program for future community policing efforts. Geographic policing within the city originated in 2009 and was then expanded, resulting in the current COU.

The first such unit, consisting of two officers, was assigned to Douglass Park, a known crime “hotspot” within the city.

The COU now consists of six officers patrolling geographically determined areas.

“The Columbia Outreach Unit has been well-received by residents of these [COU patrolled] neighborhoods, which have experienced dramatic reductions in emergency calls for service and all categories of crime during the first year of the pilot program,” the City Council resolution declaring support for Community-Oriented Policing reads.

The council resolution also cites the “racial disproportions in CPD’s traffic stops and searches” as a reason for implementing the new strategy. The City Council called for increased anti-racism training that will “challenge implicit biases” of officers.

The new policies are intended to combat the racial disparities that plague CPD’s traffic stops and searches, chronicled by the 2016 Vehicle Stops Report. The report is compiled annually by the office of the Missouri Attorney General. The 2016 report is the most recent available at this time.

The report details racial profiling that exists within CPD, as well as departments around the state. Despite accounting for just 9.96 percent of Columbia’s population, stops of African-American residents by CPD officers accounted for just over 31 percent of traffic stops in 2016. This gap resulted in a disparity index of 3.13. A value of one represents no disparity.

In comparison, the disparity index for African Americans in Independence, the Missouri city most similar to Columbia in population, is 3.67. Thirty miles down the road in Jefferson City, the disparity index for African Americans is 1.88. The statewide disparity index for stops of African Americans is 1.65.

“The police chief, and other police chiefs and sheriffs, will tell you that they don’t think the attorney general is collecting enough data and they’re not taking a deep enough dive into the data to understand why the disparities exist,” Sapp said. “But certainly, from a community point of view, you can … understand if … the reports were out that I was three times, four times more likely to be stopped than somebody of a different skin color, I would want to know why too.”

CPD was unavailable for comment.

_Edited by Skyler Rossi | srossi@themaneater.com_