Building trust with your police chief is an ongoing process for a city manager. Part one focused on hiring. It featured suggested actions to take before hiring and discussions that should take place before recruiting. The actions are intended to help city managers gain a better understanding of what type of police chief would be the most effective match for their citizens, department, and situation.

Part two will discuss common conflicts and how to address them. Once a chief is in place, he or she and the city manager have a joint responsibility to serve and protect their citizens. Yet priorities and points of view on the goals of the relationship, department, and community may differ. Strategies and tactics to achieve those goals may be even more difficult to agree upon.

Common Conflicts

Even though the most common conflicts might not have a quick or easy solution, managers and chiefs who identify and acknowledge them together have a better chance at finding resolution.

What are common conflicts and challenges?

Thomas Wieczorek, principal with the Center for Public Safety Management, said common conflicts and challenges include political pressure or conflict over community values, budget, and policing strategies. He said city managers and police chiefs must discuss how resources will be allocated to traditional patrol and community policing to meet the organization’s mission.

Wieczorek said the dynamic of how a city manager does, or does not, get involved is also key. Either extreme of a city manager staying too hands off, abdicating CEO responsibilities of oversight, or too micromanaging, interfering without sufficient knowledge of daily police operations, is not ideal. Instead, managers should set an expectation to regularly communicate with the police chief regarding policies, response times, major crime index reports, and racial profiling reports. Staying informed is important for the city manager to keep a pulse on the department's operational activities as well as the chief's ability to manage resources.

Additional considerations include:

• Community oversight committees both for social justice and racial equity.
• Cooperating with other departments like fire, EMS, finance, human resources, and public works.
• Dealing with other parts of the “system” like other law enforcement entities, dispatch, jails, prosecutors, and nonprofits.
• Social media engagement.
• Adoption of an ethics policy.
• Hiring and promotion policies.
• Community bias or stereotypes (positive or negative) about policing.
• Preparation for crises like protests or natural disasters.
• Setting a standard that protecting all citizens comes before “warrior policing.”

How to Overcome Them

Once there is a baseline agreement on what are the most common challenges or potential disagreements, ideas on how to overcome them can be weighed. Wieczorek shared thoughts on key areas including regular communication, defining expectations, operational consistency, preparedness, cooperation, and community.

Regular communication

• Reporting. What are your officers doing? How long does it take them?
• Have the city manager and police chief agreed on how often reports should be prapared and how much detail the reports will include?

Defining Expectations

• City managers and police chiefs understanding and respecting each other’s role as defined per charter or statute.
• Agreeing on common goals: public trust, safety, justice, equitable treatment for the entire community. Clearly defined performance assessment to evaluate police department.
• How are members of the department, up to and including the chief, held accountable?

Operational Consistency

• Clearly defined written departmental policies and standard operation procedures (SOPs).
• Do department members read and adhere to the policies? How is that process verified or tested?
• Do you enforce policies and SOPs? Do you report on discipline, corrective action, corrective training, and outcomes when violations occur?
• How is consistency among shifts monitored and supported?
• Are discipline reports shared with the city manager regularly, or only when something blows up?
• How will potential conflicts of interest during discipline or the appeal process be acknowledged and avoided?
• Does the city manager look at violations and ensure there is training, education, and follow-up, including discipline and possible termination?
• Require department heads to attend the annual conference of another discipline.

Preparedness

• Putting plans and contingencies in place before crises occur.
• Participating in tabletop emergency management exercise and response scenarios.
• Developing, evaluating, reviewing, and updating strategic management for departments–especially police–to get in front of developing issues.

Cooperation

• Do the police chief and others throughout the department know and build relationships with the fire and EMS, public works, water, code enforcement, and social services departments?
• Interaction to develop team solutions to problems–utilizing not just police but department heads from other disciplines.

Community

• Require an engagement report from the chief and department on how they serve and protect the community–not how they occupy.
• Do they walk the neighborhoods and meet the people where they are assigned? Do they attend neighborhood associations? School board meetings? Sports and recreation?
• Public engagement strategies such as citizen academies or school resource officers.
• Engage with the faith community. Most clergy are excited to participate, and they can intervene during crisis, especially when there are fatalities, suicides, family issues, or other sensitive events.
• Does your department look like the community?
• When events occur, does your command and team quickly engage the community or sit back and wait? Do they have connections to the neighborhoods, populations, and leaders in your community? It’s too late to develop these connections after an event.

Takeaway

Trust and transparency are needed for a city manager and police chief to define the scope of the working relationship to create a unified effort to best serve their community. A first step to build trust is understanding. When each side can speak and listen, common ground can be discovered.

Next Step

ICMA’s August 2020 PM magazine included an article titled Conversations with Your Police Chief Are Crucial for Building Trust cowritten by retired police chief Mike Masterson and Mary Ann Wycoff, formerly of the Police Executive Research Forum. The article goes in-depth about the need for regular conversations and includes suggested discussion points to continue the ongoing process of building and keeping trust.