Phoenix police continue work with Black Lives Matter

The Phoenix Police Department has worked to understand the frustrations and concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement in the three years since the movement began. And those efforts won't end after a gunman targeted police officers Thursday night, killing five, at one of the movement's protest marches in Dallas.

This week, Phoenix is scheduled to hold a series of community meetings to discuss changes to police policies proposed by a citizens commission that includes members of the Black Lives Matter movement.

That commission is one of a dozen the police department has implemented since the mid-1990s, when a string of use-of-force incidents provoked community protests and marches. The city created the advisory boards to give those who had been marching outside City Hall an invitation to walk inside and suggest changes. 

Phoenix Police Chief Joe Yahner, who joined the force in 1985 and watched how the city responded to the protests, spoke Friday at a news conference in advance of a protest march that evening. Yahner did not give a full-throated endorsement of the movement — using the term "all lives matter" —  but said he understood its aims.

“We’re working together,” he said. “We’re going to solve this thing together.”

Walking the streets with protesters

Yahner showed up at the march on Friday night, which was organized before the attack in Dallas in response to officer-involved shootings earlier in the week in Baton Rouge, La., and a suburb of St. Paul, Minn. Yahner walked alongside protesters on Washington Street as they chanted, "Hands up, don't shoot." But the march found the limits of his tolerance.

Once the event's organizer, the Rev. Jarrett Maupin, announced his intention to take the march onto Interstate 10, Yahner walked alongside Maupin and tried to convince him otherwise.

Officers in riot gear formed a line along Seventh Street, blocking the marchers from heading toward the freeway. Pepper spray was deployed. There were three arrests.

Phoenix protest: Arrests, pepper spray, and an I-10 bluff

'Keep doing a good job'

Yahner has built other relationships over the past few years.

Earlier in the week, after news of the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, S. Otieno Ogwel joined other members of the Black Lives Matter movement in Phoenix and around the country in taking to social media to vent his sadness and frustration.

He also wrote to Yahner. And Ogwel said the chief wrote him back, saying he grasped that there was deep anger in the community.

Ogwel said he wrote to Yahner again Thursday night, after he saw news of the targeted killing of the officers in Dallas.

“I reached out to him telling him I’m saddened about what happened,” he said. “'Keep doing a good job. I want you to do a good job of taking bad people out.'”

Yahner responded again. The two also spoke on the phone Friday, part of an ongoing conversation that began more than a year and a half ago.

“We don’t go and hang out,” Ogwel said, reached by telephone while on a business trip in Utah. But the two — who traveled together, at Yahner's invitation, to a national police forum in Washington, D.C., in 2015 — communicate frequently. “He’s always gracious,” Ogwel said.

Ogwel was out of town for Friday's march but planned to be back in Phoenix to attend the series of community meetings on police reforms.

The two men come from different backgrounds. Ogwel, a married father of three boys, is a native of Kenya who runs an African import business. Yahner, a native of Phoenix, has spent his career at the Phoenix Police Department. But they have found common ground in working on improving police interactions with citizens.

The interaction started out testy. Ogwel spoke at a Phoenix City Council meeting and took part in protest marches outside police headquarters after the death of Rumain Brisbon, a man an officer killed in December 2014 after he mistakenly thought Brisbon was drawing a weapon.

But Ogwel said he started meeting elements of police leadership and that led him to meet with Yahner. Before the Martin Luther King Day Jr. march this year, Yahner chatted amiably with Ogwel, who was wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.

Months later in another city, the Dallas Police Department posted on its Twitter account a picture of two officers posing with a protester and smiling, not long before the Thursday protest march.

Dallas and Phoenix have been lauded for their evolving policing practices, mainly keeping lines of communication open and aiming to be transparent about incidents where officers use force.

In early June, Yahner and Dallas Chief of Police David Brown appeared on a panel at a Phoenix hotel and spoke about the steps each has taken to reach out to the diverse populations in their communities.

“There’s a lot of similarities between our departments,” Yahner said.

'Everything we can to be safe'

Barely more than a month later, Yahner stood at a podium at Phoenix City Hall expressing his sadness over the deaths of five officers targeted by a gunman who lay in wait at the end of a Black Lives Matter protest march. Yahner was also worried about the march planned that evening through his city’s downtown. It was a march that the chairman of Black Lives Matter Arizona said, in a statement, was not sanctioned by the group, nor endorsed by it.

Yahner said it appeared that the Dallas gunman was acting alone and had “no real connection to the community” that planned the march. It taught him, he said, that even with the strongest community ties, an incident like this could occur.

“This can happen,” Yahner said. “We have to make sure we do everything we can to be safe.”

Yahner, who started with the department in 1985, remembers a string of use-of-force incidents in the mid-1990s that brought out widespread community anger.

One man, Edward Mallet, who walked with artificial legs, was choked to death. Rudy Buchanan, a 22-year-old armed with a rifle, was shot by officers 89 times. Julio Valerio, a 16-year-old armed with a knife, was surrounded by six officers who fired 25 times.

The department responded by creating citizen commissions that examined use-of-force policies. It also worked to strengthen ties with community leaders.

Yahner, in an interview after Friday’s news conference, said the police department has 12 advisory boards, although, he acknowledged, the department has not always enthusiastically taken their advice.

“We’ve ebbed and flowed through this,” Yahner said.

'This is not for the police to fix'

In February 2015, Yahner was named chief of police, following a two-month interim appointment. He will retire in October. The city has narrowed the list of candidates for his replacement to three. Under his command, he said, the department has continued a tradition of courting the community and listening to its concerns.

In 2015, the city created the Community and Police Trust Initiative, a group of 17 citizens that included Ogwel and two other supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. It created a list of 15 recommendations it wanted the department to implement.

Shawn Pearson has been involved with the Trust Initiative commission and others like it for four years. “It’s important for the community to be a part of this,” she said, after attending Friday’s news conference. “This is not for the police to fix.”

Pearson said when she started meeting with city leaders and police, she learned the history of the city’s unrest in the mid-1990s.

“It was very fear-based tactics,” she said. “What (officers) told me was that they realized they couldn’t arrest their way out of the problem.”

Pearson, who helps develop businesses in south Phoenix as managing partner of the Zion Institute, said she believes her voice is welcome at Phoenix City Hall. “I can make a phone call and request a meeting and not have to go through the red tape,” she said.

Marches, like the one Friday night, are the “beginning of the work,” she said. But she said the aim is to help the department make change by meeting with city leaders and officials.

“I’m intentionally working more fervently,” she said, after the shooting in Dallas. “I don’t just want to be here to complain. I want to be part of a solution.”

'That is not the way we operate'

On Thursday night, Pearson was at a meeting at the First Institutional Baptist Church. It was hours before the Dallas officers were killed. The focus was still on the killings of two men at the hands of police in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minn.

Pastor Warren Stewart Sr. said the level of anger at the gathering, held at his church in east-central Phoenix, was palpable. “Ten being the max,” he said, “it was 9.5.”

One or two people, he said, advocated violence. Though he has been involved in the civil-rights movement in Phoenix for decades, it had been years since he had heard someone advocate an armed response.

“I said no,” he said. “That is not the way we operate. To turn on people with violence is suicide. I said (that) Martin Luther King would not support that.”

The next day, following the killings of the officers in Dallas, he called the office of Mayor Greg Stanton and urged him to hold a news conference Friday. He helped organize the speakers.

Stewart said the community was angered in the 1990s, over the incidents with Mallet, Valerio and Buchannan. None of the officers involved was prosecuted over the incidents.

“We were never satisfied with that,” he said. “We don’t believe we got justice.”

Still, he continued to work closely with the police department.

“What is the alternative?” he said.

'Dallas was not justice'

Ogwel said he hoped that the community does not dismiss the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement because of the actions of one man, a lone gunman who did not speak for the group.

But, in the hours after the incident, he said a White friend of his sent him a message through Facebook letting him know he was “unfriending” him on the social network. Ogwel said the man told him that “your movement disgusts me.”

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Ogwel said he hoped the country would see this gunman the same way they saw the gunman who killed nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 in a failed attempt to start a national race riot.

“All that died quickly,” he said. “In the same way, I would want the White community to try and forgive.”

Ogwel said he feared that wearing his Black Lives Matter T-shirt, as he did while marching next to the Phoenix police chief on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, would make him a target for derision, or worse.

“The department, the chief, I believe everybody knows where I stand,” he said. “I stand on the side of justice. Dallas was not justice.”

La Voz reporter Laura Gomez-Rodriguez contributed to this article.