GAINESVILLE – Law enforcement in Gainesville is responding to recent cries for reform.
Gainesville Police Chief Jay Parrish appeared before the Gainesville City Council Tuesday evening and said, “We wanted to redo our values system. We wanted to look at the things we valued and where we wanted our values to be in an idealistic agency.”
City Manager Bryan Lackey told the city council as he welcomed Parrish to the podium, “We thought it was time to follow up with you after some of the events in our town over the past few months and the community conversations that we have had, and give you what we have learned from those conversations and those events.”
Parrish told council members that as the result of the discussions between concerned residents and public safety officials a long list of values or ideals was assembled.
Six of those values, Parrish explained, were then repeatedly selected as core values following an extensive survey within his agency. Those six he listed for the city council and was able to create from them the acronym of PILLAR.
“This isn’t something that ‘Jay” came up with, or any of my staff. This came from the rank and file officers on the ground. They came up with this, and the six values are: professionalism, integrity, loyalty, leadership, accountability and respect,” Parrish stated.
“So we’re going to deliver the highest quality of police services by being a PILLAR. It’s pretty simple,” the chief said.
And while being community “PILLAR”s would be the bottom-line goal, Parrish said emphasis would continue to be placed on some policies currently in place, among them the use of body and patrol car cameras.
Parrish gave credit for the origins of that policy to his predecessor, Carol Martin. “Back in 2014, shortly after Ferguson (Missouri), Chief Martin knew that body cams were the way of the future. We went to them; all of our operational people had them,” he said.
“But in 2020 they were six years old and we were starting to see problems…so this April…we made a huge jump to a new body cam system.” Parrish thanked the city council for its financial investment in the upgraded technology.
Parrish then turned to another theme he will implement in his department: “the duty to act”, as he described it. It would be a cornerstone in police policy going forward, he vowed.
“I think as we watched George Floyd be murdered, as ugly as the event was itself, we were just as disturbed by the officers that stood by and watched,” Parrish said grimly.
“We’re changing our policy to require officers to act. Anytime that they see another officer, regardless of rank, using excessive force, undue force, or acts in any manner that may violate the citizen’s civil rights, that they have a duty to step in and act, and stop that from occurring.”
Parrish said another item asked for frequently during community discussions was what he termed: “…a duty to identify…when a police officer engages a citizen, that they identity who they are, their badge number, and their reason for the encounter.”
Also, arising often during community discussions according to Parrish, was present-day police training. “One of the things the community brought up was the number of hours that we spend on ‘force options’, whether it be a Taser, pepper spray, firearms, ASP baton…compared to what we do in de-escalation.”
“We’re going to flip that model starting this year,” Parrish said. He explained that the new training protocol will include a lot of role-playing and situational simulation. “And the officer has to try to de-escalate the situation before using force of any kind.”
“We’re going to increase our de-escalation training somewhere around 300%,” Parrish said.
As part of that, Parrish said, a redirection in current enforcement policy would begin immediately. Parrish called it: “Non-custodial arrest for some minor offenses.”
He said after conferring with the Solicitors’ offices for both the City of Gainesville and Hall County, “We’re not arresting for misdemeanor marijuana, shop lifting, driving while unlicensed and city ordinances. That’s kind of in line with Governor Deal’s reforms that he put in place before he left office.”
Parrish’s next topic was what he termed “developing a CAP committee”, short for community and police committee.
“We’re going to bring in about ten to fifteen citizens that are a diverse group of men, women - all races - that are invested in the City of Gainesville, and write a strategic plan for police/citizen relations and what they think we need to see and do.”
Then Parrish explained to council his desire to diversify the department’s work force: “We can only work with the applicants that we get. I beg for more minority applicants; we just don’t get a lot.”
“I think our force has to match the demographics of our city; we’re working really hard to do that both in recruitment and selection.”
In conclusion Parrish said, “For law enforcement we stand in the gap of justice and injustice, civilization and anarchy, but we also have to breech the gap between us and the community and listen.”
