This police chief has had enough with how his cops treat people of color

At least 206 African-Americans have been shot and killed by police this year, with several cases — like those of Philando Castile and Keith Lamont Scott — triggering protests among those calling for more restrained policing and accountability. At least one police chief is joining their ranks, fed up with his own department’s treatment of people of color.

In a leaked tape of a private August meeting with his commanders, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo laid the responsibility for better policing squarely at their feet, telling them that “the problem ain’t the cops. The problem is the leadership.”

An unarmed and naked teenager had been fatally shot by one of his officers early this year and news outlets had just published video of a schoolteacher being violently arrested in June the year prior. But some of the officers in his department had questioned Acevedo’s actions in firing or disciplining the cops involved in each incident.

He couldn’t understand it, he told his commanders in the Aug. 10 meeting, reported the Austin American-Statesman.

"If you can’t handle a kid in broad daylight, naked, and your first instinct is to come out with your gun, and your next instinct is to shoot the kid dead, you don’t need to be a cop,” he vented. “I don’t give a s—t how nice you are.”

He spoke similarly about the officer who had dragged 26-year-old teacher Breaion King out of her car during a traffic stop: “That was such an easy stop to de-escalate.”

The fault for that, he added, lay with his own subordinates.

“We have got to raise our game,” Acevedo said in the closed-door meeting. Most of his 18 commanders were doing well, Acevedo added, but some “have my attention and you’ll soon find out who you are.”

Acevedo’s comments were made public Wednesday when a commander at the meeting who secretly recorded the conversation and provided the tape to the American-Statesman.

The tape, urgent and profanity-laced, showed Acevedo defending his position on disciplining the cops involved in each incident. For example, when 17-year-old David Joseph was shot and killed in February while charging toward former officer Geoffrey Freeman, Acevedo fired Freeman the following month after an internal affairs investigation into his use of force.

“The [police] union got all pissed off because I fired Freeman,” Acevedo said in the meeting. “Some of you might have gotten pissed off. I’m going to tell you right now, if we have another Freeman tomorrow, that is what’s going to happen. I didn’t lose a minute of sleep.”

Freeman has appealed to be reinstated on the force and has a hearing scheduled for December.

Acevedo also spoke at length in the August meeting about a video that had been published in late July of King’s arrest, which showed officer Bryan Richter hurling her from the driver’s seat of her car to the asphalt, then wrestling her arms behind her as she wailed “Oh my god” over and over again. She was charged with resisting arrest, but a judge dismissed the case after watching the dashcam footage that captured the encounter.

“Had that been a pretty white girl in her Sunday best dress, I don’t think that Richter would have responded - acting the same exact way - I don’t think that Richter would have responded that way,” Acevedo said. “That was a horrific video, and if you don’t look at that video and aren’t horrified by what you saw, shame on you.”

Acevedo, who ascended to the top position in the Austin Police Department in 2007, has struggled to foster a department culture that more critically examines how officers use force, particularly with minorities, with mixed results, the Statesman reported. And in his meeting in August, he told his commanders that if they disagreed with his agenda, they should “step down or step out.”

“If your heart isn’t in this job, either step down or step out, so you can leave with your integrity and maintain your integrity before we have to take action, because I’m not opposed to taking action against a commander, and you guys know that,” he said.

After the tape was leaked to the American-Statesman, Acevedo acknowledged that the comments were his. He criticized the officer who recorded his conversation for not having “the fortitude to have a face-to-face conversation” but defended the message as “consistent with my message to the public and community.”

In the recording of the meeting, Acevedo was blunt about the urgency of the task at hand — and who was responsible for ensuring things would change.

“I have given nine years of my life to the Austin Police Department,” Acevedo said. “Nine years aren’t going to go down the drain because we have people in this room that don’t want to do the hard lifting, that don’t want to be the bad guys. Sorry, we have to be the bad guys sometimes.”

This story was originally published October 21, 2016 at 8:26 AM with the headline "This police chief has had enough with how his cops treat people of color."