SPOKANE, Wash. – NonStop Local sat down and interviewed newly appointed Spokane police Chief Kevin Hall and talked about his plans for the department.
Here is the transcript of the interview:
NonStop Local: It’s been ten days since you were sworn at this point. At that moment, you addressed some of the biggest problems in this community, some biggest problems in the entire western United States: dealing with homelessness and fentanyl.
You don’t have a magic bullet, but what are some of the things that you hope that you could implement to address those.
Chief Kevin Hall: A lot of my initial sort of observations seem to be holding true.
I actually just came from a homeless collaboration meeting down the road here and I was impressed with the number of people who showed up. You had folks from (Spokane) County, folks from the city, you had council members, you had board supervisors.
There were a lot of people there, and that kind of gave me a lot of hope that there was that type of investment from both community members and elected (officials). I think that’s going to be the secret sauce that can make some progress in this arena here in Spokane, is the collaboration, the collective impact of all of those people working in the same direction. That’s my hope.
NSL: With that collaboration, is there any concrete ideas or areas in your first couple weeks where you’ve seen that the department might be able to improve in some specific areas on this issue?
KH: I think I’ve been pretty transparent that I think this is a public health issue as opposed to a public safety issue, but we are certainly a part of the problem.
I’ll be candid, there are some people – because of their behavior – they deserve to, you know, be arrested and, if applicable, go to jail or get a citation. There’s a whole host of people who are better served by not being arrested and by engaging in treatment. And so we can do both, and I think we can do a better job of being an access point for treatment and services than perhaps we have in the past.
That’s something I’m still exploring, but every every point where these folks interact with different systems, government systems, nonprofit systems, medical systems, those are all access points to treatment. And if we’re not leveraging those we’re missing opportunities when somebody is ready to engage in services and treatment.
We never know when that is, if they’re being discharged from the ER, if they’re getting released from the jail, if they’re having an interaction with a police officer on the street, those are all opportunities where maybe that’s the time they’re ready to engage in treatment, and we should be taking advantage of those. And I’m not sure we’re doing that right now in a structured way.
NSL: Since the pandemic happened, a lot of businesses have left downtown. There was a nice gym left downtown, still basically a vacant area over there, the Starbucks on Second and Division (is gone).
I know that talking with the Downtown Spokane Partnership was a part of the interview process. How have you engaged with business leaders and (how will you) attempt to revitalize downtown and bring some of those businesses (back)?
KH: That’s a much wider conversation that involves the entire city. Mayor Brown, her staff and all of the city cabinet are engaged in this conversation. It’s truly a model of holistic governance where we’re all looking at the same problem, and we each have a piece of that problem that we can participate in.
I think what I would say to the small business owners or the business association itself is we’re not ignoring them. We’re well aware of the problem. Anybody who drives down Second & Division, which I have multiple times in the 10 days I’ve been here, recognizes there’s an issue, and it’s not okay.
At the same time, we have to respect – these are human beings. These are human beings who are suffering from behavioral health issues, from substance use issues, from challenging homelessness issues. So there has to be a balance.
The public should be able to use public spaces. Businesses should be able to operate their businesses in a profitable manner. At the same time, we need to address these folks who are very vulnerable and marginalized and where they’re at and what they’re doing.
It’s a balance, and not everybody’s going to be happy. You have some folks who don’t want to hear about treatment, and they want to hear about arrest, and then you have other folks who don’t want to hear about arrests, they just want to hear about treatment.
It’s always going to be somewhere in between.
NSL: In both these answers, you mentioned members from City Council, Mayor Brow,n talking with business leaders. In your first 10 days, what kind of meetings (or) conversations have you been in? What kind of stakeholders like City Council members, members from executive staff, members from downtown businesses? Have you talked with and how have those conversations gone?
KH: So unfortunately, I’m going to bring something up. I spoke to a business owner downtown who suffered a break-in, and that particular business owner was very dejected, it was obvious from an email I got.
So I reached out to him, and we discussed the issues down there and the struggle. You know, the profit margins for small businesses anywhere is pretty slim and if you have to worry about foot traffic not coming down because they don’t feel safe, if you have to worry about small items getting stolen off your patio or actual break-ins, not just the damage, but then things stolen from inside, that just cuts down on their profit margin.
I am sensitive to that, and in this conversation, I mentioned that I’m sensitive to that, and I am. Revitalization of the downtown area is dependent on businesses, it absolutely is, and it’s dependent on bringing people downtown because they feel safe and they want to be downtown, and it’s dependent on city government to help foster thatsense.
Like I said, I just came from a homeless collaboration meeting. I’ve had meetings with behavioral health professionals, I’ve had meetings with Council Members. I’ve done some community meetings.
It’s been a pretty packed schedule, and it continues to be, and it will be. I knew that coming in, it’s going to be for several months now, as people get to know me, as I get to know the community.
The best way, and I heard Council President (Betsy Wilkerson) mentioned this earlier, the best way to get to know this community is to show up. And I’ve always been an advocate. I’m not just going to show up and listen. I’m going to show up and do work. So I have to continue to show up, and that’s going to include the small business community as well as the Spokane Business Association and and I am sensitive to their needs and their very, very tight profit margins, and what we can do to help them foster a safe environment that allows people from Spokane to come down and enjoy the public spaces that are downtown.
NSL: Speaking of Council President, when I spoke to her at your swearing-in, she was just over the moon at the way the presentation was handled. The tribal affiliations, your family members there.
Talk to me a little bit about your history with your tribal affiliation coming up here in the summers.
KH: So as a child, we would come up. I was, at the time, a hunter into my teenage years. You know, as I became an adult, time, family obligations, it didn’t happen as often, but we still kept in touch with our family up here.
Unfortunately, you know, some of my my relatives have passed as time went on, and probably the most impactful time I spent up here is when my my own father passed, and my brother and I brought his his remains up to the reservation to to be buried at a traditional cemetery on called Kelly Hill, just outside the reservation. So it’s, it’s been off and on.
I’m not reservation-born and I wasn’t reservation-raised, and there is a distinction there. I’m not going to use my tribal affiliation in any sense to further what I do. I think that’s disingenuous. But at the same time, I respect my traditional family history and all of my relatives and all the tribal members over on the Colville reservation.
NSL: Also at your swearing in, I couldn’t find anyone who was willing to even not be optimistic about your tenure. It seems to have a lot of goodwill going into this job.
How do you plan to keep and build off that goodwill? Because it can be a thankless job at times. You mentioned with the fentanyl problem, there’s going to be solutions that everyone’s probably going to be a little bit unhappy with. How do you keep maintaining that goodwill and foster these connections?
KH: I think, quite frankly, and this is sort of a simplistic answer, is just myself being authentic. I believe in authentic relationships. Disingenuity is not going to get you anywhere. This is a relationship-based business in law enforcement. So to be successful, you have to have those networks and those relationships with everybody in the community, and oftentimes with groups that are completely at odds with each other.
I feel it’s my job and the police’s job to help individuals navigate a lot of these social problems, because, quite frankly, public government is difficult to navigate for most folks. Even line level police officers out on the street can tell people ‘You’re going to the wrong place’ or ‘Don’t even try to call, you have to show up at this place at this time,’ because they know how public government works, and they’ve been and out of the system.
So I think that’s where we can be successful in engaging the community is helping them navigate, but also maybe showing up at places where we didn’t traditionally show up when we have time. Parks where there’s events.
I know there was a symphony event up at Comstock Park, and I drove through there, I was with another officer at the time, and I noticed there weren’t any officers there, at least to me visible. And I think that’s maybe something where we can change, and we can have officers show up and engage with the community and start fostering that sense of safety and security, but not in an overbearing way.
The other thing is, I have to do what I say, and that’s part of the authenticity. If I say I’m going to do something, then I have to do it. And it doesn’t take very long for people to understand, ‘Well, they’re just talking, they’re not going to show up, they’re not going to do the work, they’re just, it’s just a photo op,’ or ‘They’re saying something for the camera, but they’re not really going to do any of that.’ I can’t do that, and that’s not me, and that’s not how I lead.
I think that’s how you continue to foster that goodwill and build those relationships and those bridges and that collaboration. I don’t think any of these complex social problems are going to be solved by any one entity. The police department is not going to solve any of these problems. They need help. They need help from the community. They need help from other city departments. They need help from nonprofits. They need help from the business community. They need help all the way around. Just like all of those entities need help from us. It’s a partnership. Everything is co-produced, and public safety is co-produced.
NSL: So shifting a little bit here. You touched on it briefly at the finalist panel, (and I’m) not going to have you Monday morning quarterback some of the officer-involved shootings that we’ve already had, but I believe it was four (ed. Note: five) within this department from December to March.
It’s something that was definitely a topic of conversation earlier this year. What are some of the things that you hope to bring around, training lethal force usage?
KH: So like you said, 10 days on the job, I haven’t had the time to dig deeply into training, but I think a lot of this goes to training. But it even goes farther than that. It’s recruitment. Who are we recruiting? Where are we getting our recruits from? How are they being trained in the academy? How are they being trained in field training by the FTOs, the field training officers, and what does that culture look like?
It might be, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that, or there might be tweaks that we can do or improvements. I’m a firm believer we can always improve in most things that we do constantly and evolve in that way. So I do intend to look at both the recruiting pipeline as well as the training pipeline and all the way through FTO.
But there’s also, I mean, policing evolves and use of force evolves. And there are different techniques and different strategies that you can apply. One of those that’s gotten a lot of air time in the post George Floyd era is de-escalation and what that looks like and there was a lot of back-and-forth. Well, if you do de-escalate too much, that puts officers at risk. If you don’t de-escalate enough, it puts the community at risk.
So once again, it’s trying to find that sweet spot to find out when you should be de-escalating with people in crisis or behavioral health issues or having behavioral health issues. And a part of that, I think, can be officers, and not just in Spokane, I’m talking generally here throughout the country, they don’t recognize all the time that they’re not dealing with a rational actor, and somebody who’s in a behavioral health crisis is not a rational actor, and they’re not responding in the way that a rational actor would, you know, like you or I.
If we’re sitting right here and an officer comes in and screams at us to get on the ground, we’re probably going to get on the ground. But somebody who’s not intaking stimuli in that fashion because they’re in crisis, it’s going to take more time and more effort.
So those are the kind of things that are just in our awareness. There’s strategies to deal with that. There’s courses to deal with that. There’s national courses to do that, like from the Police Executive Research Forum, this course called ICAT, three-day course, and that’s basically what it teaches officers: slow down, get some space, take some time and reassess and calm things down, as opposed to screaming and yelling at people, which just amps things up. So there’s a lot of different things we can do in this space. You know, we could talk for hours about it.
NSL: Another thing we heard, especially one of these OIS’s that happened, is the term ‘Suicide by Cop.’ There’s people who are somewhat putting themselves in actions, or, in some cases, literally asking the cops to shoot and kill them. What are some of the difficulties dealing with situations like that?
KH: Those are extraordinarily difficult situations. And, you know, I’ve had some experience in this, in this area.
If they’re contained, if they’re in a house, quite frankly, there are times when it’s appropriate for us to walk away if nobody else is in the house. This person is by themselves. And this happens across the country. I believe it’s Portland who even leaves a door hanger with a list of crisis services, and they’ll walk away from things like that.
The real difficulty is when they’re out in an open-air situation, a park, a plaza, a commercial area, then we can’t really walk away, particularly if they’re armed with a firearm or even a knife for that matter. I’m not saying that all people who are suicidal are homicidal, but that’s not something that most officers will take the risk of saying. So we have to contain it, and we have to deal with it in some way, shape or fashion, and it all is dictated on the situation. Like I said, do they have a firearm? Do they have a gun that really changes the flavor? Do they have a knife? Do they have a baseball bat that also changes the flavor?
If they have a knife or a baseball bat or something like that, we can take more time, and we can hopefully evacuate the area and isolate the individual and then talk them, negotiate with them, have Crisis Response folks come to de-escalate the situation
If they have a firearm, time is really compressed, and we don’t have that time, particularly if other people are around who could be victimized. Because once the bullet leaves the end of the barrel, it’s game over, and you don’t know where that bullet’s going to go. It could (hit) a complete innocent, it could (hit) an officer, who knows where it goes. That’s how things change with a firearm. But when you go down to somebody who really, really wants the cops to kill them, it’s a very difficult situation, and very much depends on environmental factors.
NSL: You brought up the post George Floyd, that summer of 2020, it seemed like that was one of the lowest times for public sentiment of police nationwide, especially in minority communities. I know Tucson has a lot of those minority communities, (and) as an Assistant Chief at the time there, what was that like? What were some of the things that you guys did in the Tucson Police Department to address some of those concerns?
KH: Yeah, it was, it was extremely disheartening. When something that happen(ed) across the country impacts the entire country and policing in such a fashion? I’ve been around for a while, so I was in the academy when the Rodney King riots occurred in Los Angeles and then in 2014 with the Ferguson riots, and then George Floyd and in the events in between.
It feels like just when we’re starting to improve and move policing forward, it’s two steps back, and that’s kind of the way it felt with George Floyd. It felt like we we were getting better, and our community relations were getting better, and then something like that happens, and it felt like we’re starting all over, and we’re going back to building the trust and having to… Luckily, we and I had those community relationships already where it wasn’t as tough, and they understood, ‘We know this isn’t you. You’re not that police department. We know we’ve never seen this kind of behavior in this area.’ And so, it wasn’t real tough to continue to build those (relationships) but some trust was eroded just because of what other officers did across the country. Officers know that. Police chiefs know that anybody who has a badge, and there’s something really, really bad happens – not saying that the officers did anything bad or not, and not talking about George Floyd now, but just anything – it’s going to impact every officer in the country. And that one globally.
So I would say that what helped me there was already having existing relationships and not trying to catch up by reaching out to people that I hadn’t reached out for. In fact, I had relationships with many, many of these communities for years before George Floyd happened, and I think that was enormously beneficial, and it’s why I’m so busy now reaching out to people, talking to people, going to community meetings, because I need to have those relationships, just so if something else happens, the community doesn’t explode.
They know they have somebody they can trust in the police department, and they know that there’s somebody in the police department that values accountability.
NSL: So one of the things that we’ve heard from our viewers over the last couple years, we’ve run some stories on it as well, is slow to no response times for some lower-level property crimes. Does Spokane have enough police officers right now to serve what needs to be served?
KH: I think I would reframe that to say: Does Spokane police department have enough police officers to rise to the expectations that the community has of them?
And I would say: No, the expectations of the community are such and they’re high, and this is partly our fault. When I say we, it’s law enforcement executives across the country.
For decades, we’ve said if you need a cop, call 911, you’ll get a cop. That’s not the way it is anymore, and we’re looking for different alternatives, so that if they need assistance in some way, shape or form, it might not always be a police officer showing up at the door. It might be an online report, it might be a report over the phone. It might be a 311 call instead of a 911, call or an online report. So we’re looking at all these different avenues to provide the same level of service, but not necessarily from a police officer.
I don’t know if anybody can say what’s the right amount of cops. There’s a lot of different formulas out there that says, ‘Well, it’s you know, depends on your population, or it depends on how many calls for service you have.’ I would lean more towards the latter, in that the number of cops you have should be able to take care of the workload you have, which means you need to do a workload analysis.
How much work is there, and then how many people do I need to do the work and to do it safely, and that’s something else that I think is not always articulated well. In order for officers to do things safely, sometimes it takes a lot of officers.
The previous example you have of a suicide by cop individual, that’s going to take a lot of resources to do it safely. And I would submit, if you only send a couple of cops there the risk of that ending up in a shooting increases. If you don’t have the right resources there, and the number of resources there that are necessary.
NSL: So when your doing that workload analysis and talking about different things that can be supplemented (along) with police, is it sometimes a matter of figuring out what… certain things could be offloaded to different places, and then also trying to elevate some staffing levels to meet some of those other workload issues?
KH: Yes, all of the above.
There are things that traditionally, police did that they no longer need to do, and we’re seeing that now. You know, if the community says, ‘Why are cops going to people in crisis, there’s always going to be a bad outcome,” I don’t believe that, and I think cops do a really good job at handling people in crisis for the most part. You rarely hear about success stories. There are success stories every day. You only hear about the bad outcomes, which those are very unusual. So it’s sort of a skewed perspective.
But there are different ways to do the work. There are different ways to respond to the work, and it all comes down to outcome. What kind of outcome does the individual want when they call? Is it (that) they just want this problem to go away? Then maybe it doesn’t take a cop for that problem to go away, and maybe it’s somebody else. Maybe it’s a crisis clinician, maybe it’s a homeless outreach navigator, maybe it’s some other entity that can handle that.
So it’s looking at that, but it’s also looking at the priorities of the community: what is important to them. One of the things in the community I came from, it was violent crime, violent gun crime in particular, and so that’s where we put a lot of our resources and our strategies and our time… reducing and preventing violent gun crime.
I’m not hearing a lot about violent gun crime in Spokane. I’m hearing far more about property crime and homelessness and substance use issues. So as I listen, I can’t avoid violent crime, and in fact, that’s part of my sort of mission coming in here. I still have to address that there is still violent crime and human life is always going to take precedence over property. But this is where the concern of the community is, and I police at the will of the community, and so this is where I need to spend a lot of time.
NSL: Speaking of the staffing levels, there’s kind of two major things. One, the budget issues the city is facing right now. I guess just starting off that with that, I know you had some experience working with budgets down in Tucson. How does that budgeting aspect, when it comes to working with city leadership and also knowing what your needs are, work with the mayor’s office?
KH: Sure. First, let me say, I think Mayor Brown and her staff are doing an excellent job, and it’s very collaborative. There’s no ‘You shall do this, or you need to cut that,’ that’s not occurring.
There are conversations that occur at the cabinet level, with the Mayor and her staff, with other administrators in the city, about what can we cut, or what can we do without. Where are the inefficiencies? And sometimes it takes things like this, a crisis like this one – it’s not even a crisis.
Budgets, they come and go. There’s deficits and there’s, you know, (then) you have tons of money, and it just – it’s hills and valleys. But in this instance, I’m really impressed with how city staff come together.
They sit around the table and they have these conversations in a rational manner. It’s not ‘I want to keep all of my stuff, cut from over there.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, we have efficiencies here, and we can address that.’ And then the next department leader will say, ‘Yeah, and we can do this.’ It’s very collaborative, and quite frankly, I noticed that during the process for this.
One of the reasons I was really attracted to Spokane was the level of leadership I saw at the cabinet and with the Mayor and her staff and quite frankly, the council members. It was refreshing.
NSL: One of the other things I want to touch on in that staffing area is recruitment. There’s a lot of competition for recruitment these days. It seems that across our entire state, departments seem to be short-staffed. You have competition coming from within this own building (ed. Note: Spokane Police and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office share the same building) for lateral hires. What is it going to take to get new people, lateral officers, into this department. What is that recruiting effort looking like?
KH: To be completely candid, I can’t tell you right now what that’s going to look like moving forward. I have a lot of ideas on what recruiting should be, and it goes all the way back to what I said earlier, is targeting who we want. What kind of police officer do we want, and then targeting those groups.
In making it open to groups that traditionally weren’t interested in being police officers or didn’t think that it’s a job they would enjoy, because there’s so much mythology around the the career field, both by media, by TV shows, by movies. There’s these sort of urban myths about what policing is and what they do.
It’s breaking through those myths, reaching out to the groups that you really want to bring in and very much in a focused and targeted manner, bringing them along to show them that policing has evolved and is a different profession than it was even 20 years ago. And they can be a productive part of serving their community as a law enforcement officer.
NSL: I know it’s only 10 days in, (but) talking to your officers, engaging with them, how is morale among the department right now?
KH: It’s always difficult for somebody in my position to get that, you know? They’re very optimistic, from my viewpoint, from my perspective.
There’s a high – just just like from the community, there’s a level of expectation they have of me. Well, the officers have some expectations of me as well that I hope I can fulfill for them. But from what I’ve seen, they’re very optimistic, and they have a lot of hope for the agency moving forward.
It’s a very professional organization. They want to continue to learn and be better every day. And I see that as a really positive thing. And I’ve had nothing but support from everybody I’ve met in this organization, from The Guild, through professional staff. I’ve met with records, I’ve met with dispatchers. Everybody has a lot of hope for this organization, and they obviously have a lot of passion for this organization, so I see really good things happening here.
NSL: One of the things that (Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels) likes to harp on a lot is lack of jail space, what he calls catch-and-release practices by local judges here. How does that affect your department and your officers who might end up dealing with somebody holding them in jail and seeing them the next week because there’s just not enough space for them?
KH: Yeah, and it’s generally not the next week, it’s generally that day or the next day.
But I’m a firm believer in ‘I’m going to worry about what I can control, and I’m not going to worry about what I can’t control.’ What I think a lot of people don’t understand is the criminal justice system is actually a bunch of different systems mashed together. Police are just one. We have no control over the judiciary; what judges do or don’t do. They have the same amount of discretion as police officers do. We also don’t have, I mean, we have little to no control over prosecutors or public defenders, they have their own levels of discretion that they (use).
All we can control is what we do out on the street and within the community, and the judiciary, the prosecutors, the public defenders, all the way through corrections, those are all different systems that we don’t have a whole lot of influence over.
We can try, and I hope at some point in time we can have those conversations. But these are, these are, in fact, separate systems of the criminal justice system. So I think to your question, it frustrates officers, and they feel that if they arrest somebody, then they should go to jail, that there should be consequences for their actions. I completely understand that a lot of the community feels the same way. But if we don’t have enough space in the jail for these folks, then we need to figure out different ways to hold them accountable. And I believe there are different ways to hold people accountable. We just have to build the structure for that, the infrastructure for that.
It’s kind of like the homeless problem. The reason police officers for so long have been dealing with that, or the substance use problem, is because the infrastructure wasn’t there for other systems to deal with it. The ERs weren’t really built to deal with it. Behavioral Health weren’t built to deal with it, because traditionally, they’re an 8-to-5 organization, and a lot of these things happen after 5 p.m.
So we have to build the infrastructure. We have to build the systems to improve it overall. So yes, there’s a level of frustration, but we’re not going to fix it overnight. We need to look at other alternatives.
NSL: A lot of things that I think you’ve mentioned over the course of this interview was talking about how far policing has come, and then the George Floyd thing happens.
I know you go to a lot of conferences. You have a lot of education in this area. Seems like a lot of what you do is around evidence-based policing. Tell me a little bit about kind of just going to those conferences, learning from other departments about what are best practices that you can implement in this department?
KH: I don’t always agree with the term best practices. When agencies are trying to address problems, a lot of times, they’ll look to other agencies and see what other agencies are doing without really evaluating it. They just call it best practices because other agencies are doing it.
I’m what I call a healthy skeptic, so I take that into account, and I do think other agencies come up with some really innovative problem solving strategies. I don’t discount that, but I also like to look at research and evidence and, quite frankly, science, to address those and that’s where evidence-based policing comes from. That concept of using the best-informed research out there to help craft your policy, your programs and your strategies.
Policing hasn’t always been great at that. It’s getting much, much better, but I do believe that is the future of policing, is the merging of academia and science and social systems to begin having an impact on these really big, audacious social problems.
NSL: So this question comes straight from my news director. It says, if I’m a young family – a young parent living in north Spokane, how can I expect my life to change under your leadership? How can I expect my neighborhood community to change?
KH: You’re going to see officers more often in the community. You’re going to see them in different places that maybe you haven’t seen them before. And I only say this with 10 days in, and maybe they are already seeing them, and I would submit they probably are.
In the park, maybe, you know, if they’re in the downtown area, the officers are doing something a little bit different than they’ve done in the past.
It is my hope that the officers will begin, although I’m sure they’re already doing this, to sort of humanize the badge a little bit and a little more interaction at very small increments, at different locations.
So they’re going to see officers more, they’re going to understand that the officers are people just like them. The officers live in the community just like them. They shop at the stores just like them, the same restaurants. We’re all in this together. We just have different jobs.
Humanizing the profession, and I think that’s what a family in north Spokane is going to see moving forward. As well as probably going to see their Chief quite a bit.
NSL: Over the last three to four years, I know you’ve been up for various high profile jobs. I believe Seattle, Oakland, and I can imagine those processes were intensive. This process was super intensive. I mean, it took basically eight months between the last Chief retiring before they settled on you.
What was it like getting the call after coming to Spokane, meeting with the citizens, meeting with other stakeholders. What were the emotions when you got the call and said, ‘Hey, how would you feel about being Spokane’s police chief?’
KH: I was ecstatic. Absolutely. I think it’s the perfect fit.
Police chiefs, it’s all about fit. It’s about fit with the Mayor, the administration, the community. From the very first time I started this process and came up here, I thought I was a good fit. That just grew as I went through the process. I got along well with the Mayor. I got along well with her staff. Got along well with the council members, I thought, and the community members who I met.
Even informally when I wasn’t doing interviews and meetings, I was just downtown, (I) stayed at a downtown hotel and (would) go out to get something to eat that night, and I would engage with community members.
I just thought: this is my place. This is the perfect fit. So yeah, I was very happy, ecstatic, and I had done my due diligence. I researched Spokane, and they, like every agency, they’ve had some stumbles over the past few years.
But in my mind, from what I saw and what I’m seeing now, the trajectory is straight up. This agency and this community can go in a lot of different directions, but all of that is up.
NSL: I guess to wrap it up; 10 days in what are your reflections on Spokane, the Spokane Police Department, just the beautiful in the Northwest in general. What have your reflections been 10 days in?
KH: I think it’s awesome. The weather, I can tell you, is very, very good up here. You know, if you come back in January (or) February and ask me that, I might have a different opinion, but right now, I’m enjoying it. I am. I’m not surprised, but I am.
I’m very impressed with the staff, both sworn staff and professional staff, all the employees here. Like I said, I’m very impressed with the staff that the Mayor has built in the city.
And the community, the community wants this city to succeed. That’s obvious. And like I said, even people on this side and people on that side, they all want the same thing. They want the city to succeed. And that’s impressive to me. So I’m very happy to be here, and I think this is a great city, and I think it’s just going to continue to grow and get better.
NSL: All right, is there anything else you want to say, anything maybe, about building community relationships, not just between the chief and the community but between your officers below you?
KH: No, I just think sometimes I believe there’s a perception that police officers and police chiefs and police leadership shy away from difficult conversations, or, you know, they don’t really want to have those courageous kind of conversations with people who might have a different opinion or maybe not such an optimistic opinion of policing.
I’m willing to have those conversations with anybody, because that’s the only way there’s going to be some sort of understanding and you can improve those relationships. I have to be able to listen to criticisms of policing, whether it’s my department or any other department of the country, and then provide a rational perspective back.
Maybe I agree with them, and maybe I don’t, but at least we’re conversing, or having a conversation. When we stop talking to each other, it just goes downhill from there. I haven’t met an officer yet who was going to shy away from those conversations, I certainly won’t, and I can tell you, I’ll actually probably seek them out.
