This week Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Naomi Penrod was disciplined internally for failing to follow proper police procedure when she forcibly grabbed a video camera from a local resident on a peace officer call in November. Part of the incident was captured on video.

According to a letter to Penrod signed by Village Manager Patti Bates on Dec. 16, Penrod is mandated to undergo a fitness-for-duty examination, serve a minimum 180-day performance improvement period, and serve a three-day unpaid suspension (with one suspension day held in abeyance contingent on satisfactory completion of the performance improvement program.) The improvement program includes training “designed to specifically enhance your ability to perform your duties in a proper manner,” monthly meetings with Interim Police Interim Chief David Hale and bimonthly evaluations by Hale and Bates.

The letter discusses the detailed reasons for the discipline, including the unnecessary force Penrod used against a disabled citizen who was exercising her right to record the police.

“Your conduct on November 5, 2014 was unacceptable and will not be tolerated within the Village of Yellow Springs…In this situation your duty mandated that you diffuse the conflict. Instead, you incited the conflict…”

The incident involved a call about an eviction notice served to tenant Athena Fannin at an Allen Street address on Nov. 5. When police arrived Fannin began video recording the officers, capturing a segment of Penrod approaching her and grabbing the device from her.

After an initial investigation of the complaint lodged by Fannin, in late November Interim Chief Hale found that Penrod had violated two counts of proper conduct, including forcibly taking Fannin’s camera and exhibiting hostility without cause. This week’s disciplinary action followed a series of predisciplinary hearings using impartial outside moderators.

Fannin is currently seeking criminal charges against Sergeant Penrod regarding the incident.

More on the Village’s disciplinary action will be reported in next week’s News.

On Friday, Dec. 26, Village Manager Patti Bates named David Hale as the new Village Police Chief. Hale has been interim chief since Anthony Pettiford resigned in September.

Hale was one of two finalists for the position, with the other being David Pazynski of Xenia Police. Both candidates were well qualified and interviewed well, Bates said in a press release, but “in the end it came down to what was best for the Village and the Department and I thought that would be Dave Hale.”

The selection was made after an exhaustive search process that included a 13-member search committee and interviews with both Village Council and the public.

Before coming to Yellow Springs, Hale served for 29 years with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, where he had a variety of positions, including dispatcher, sergeant, captain, major, and the head of a county-wide drug task force. He retired from that position in April and lives in Washington Township with his wife and two college-age children.

See the Jan. 1 News for a more detailed story.

Last week the Village disciplined Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Naomi Penrod for misconduct she displayed when she forcibly grabbed a video camera from a local resident during a peace officer call in the village in November. After a six-week investigation of the incident that took place Nov. 5, the Village imposed on Penrod a two-day unpaid suspension and a six-month retraining and evaluation period.

In a letter signed on Dec. 16, Bates expressed dissatisfaction with Penrod’s actions on the day of the camera incident, as well as evidence that showed a “recurring and unacceptable pattern” of Penrod’s inability to “control [her] actions.”

“Your conduct on November 5, 2014 was unacceptable and will not be tolerated in the village of Yellow Springs,” she wrote.

The details of the disciplinary action mandate that Penrod undergo a fitness-for-duty examination, serve a minimum 180-day performance improvement period, and serve a three-day unpaid suspension (with one suspension day held in abeyance contingent on satisfactory completion of the performance improvement program.) The improvement program includes training “designed to specifically enhance your ability to perform your duties in a proper manner,” monthly meetings with Interim Police Chief David Hale and bimonthly evaluations by Hale and Village Manager Patti Bates.

The Nov. 5 incident began when a landlord who had served an eviction notice to a tenant at an Allen Street address called police and then left the property. When three Yellow Springs officers (one in training) arrived, tenant Athena Fannin began video recording their actions, and Penrod forced the camera out of Fannin’s hands, a three-second clip of which was recorded and shared widely on social media. Three weeks after an initial investigation of the complaint lodged by Fannin, Interim Chief Hale found that Penrod had committed two counts of improper conduct, including forcibly taking Fannin’s camera and exhibiting hostility without cause.

This week’s disciplinary action followed a series of predisciplinary hearings with Enon Police Chief Lew Wilcox presiding. The final decision, made by Bates and based on Hale’s recommendation, included two earlier complaints lodged by the Yellow Springs News regarding Penrod’s allegedly aggressive manner. Currently Sergeant Penrod has several commendations and no complaints other than Fannin’s on her official seven-year record as an officer in the Village, a discrepancy Bates notes in her letter.

“The fact that the previous incidents noted herein are not in your file is problematic of a system that will change during my tenure.”

While the Village’s personnel manual typically allows a three-day suspension and counseling as the discipline for similar offfenses, Bates explained the need to use a heavier hand in this case.

“I find that under the circumstances, additional discipline must be imposed consistant with my interpretation of the Personnel Manual and my responsibilities as the Village Manager,” she wrote.

“You should be aware that were it within my purview to impose more stringent sanctions, I would do so.”

According to Bates this week, complaints about Village personnel that are submitted in writing and found to be legitimate are generally recorded and, according to Village personnel policy, placed permanently in the employee’s personnel file.

“That said, I believe that a certain amount of supervisory discretion in instances of minimal discipline (such as verbal warnings for tardiness) could be exercised if performance improvement is shown by the employee,” Bates wrote in an email this week. “I would not, under any circumstances, support removal of more serious disciplines from an employee’s personnel file, as they could become the basis for progressive discipline.

Fannin is currently seeking criminal charges against Sergeant Penrod. The Clark County Sheriff’s Department completed an independent investigation of the case last week and handed it to the Springfield City Prosecutor for review, and the results are pending.

The two finalists for Yellow Springs police chief met their last rounds of interviews last week, including a public interview with each candidate, Xenia Police Captain David Pazynski and retired Montgomery County Major David Hale, who is current interim Village police chief. At the close of both interviews, Village Manager Patti Bates announced that she planned to think about her decision over the holiday week and inform Village Council and the candidates of her selection on Friday, Dec. 26.

On the subject of what villager Robert Harris called community policing and the rehabilitative value of incarceration, the two candidates had different things to say. According to Hale, there is a general need to get away from “factory” policing by quotas by returning to community policing. Police getting to know people personally and getting involved in the community is a much better crime deterrent than creating fear and alienating people, he said, and while some people may need to be disciplined or incarcerated, the punishment should not be expected to rehabilitate.

“You can’t help people until they want help. You can only help people when they’re ready to get help — that’s when it’s effective,” he said.

For his part, Pazynski said he didn’t believe in the term “community policing” but preferred to call it local policing, which involves everyone in the community working together to solve the problem. The recent policing forum and the Human Relations Commission are examples of the things that bring people together for community problem-solving, he said, and getting police command and staff talking to people in the neighborhoods, in the schools, and at local coffee shops — “that’s what local policing is all about.”

In response to villager Joe Lewis’ question about the most critical incidents they had faced in their careers, Pazynski declined to go into detail about several accidental deaths he had witnessed, though he said he felt the incidents made him more aware of safety tips he could then pass on to his officers and the public.

Hale recounted one story as a new officer when he responded to an active shooter at a residence and the two traded off several rounds of shots before Hale killed the offender. He also recalled finding a dead child who had been abandoned at a rest stop in London, as well as writing search warrants, kicking in doors and all the duties that go along with being a critical responder.

Villager Kate Hamilton asked about the potential for police to learn about and apply restorative justice techniques and focus on de-escalation, crisis intervention and acting as peace officers instead of military might. According to Hale, statistically, citizen shootings by police happen very infrequently, however, because of high profile events this year, the Ohio Police Officer Training Academy is “scrambling to look at some new ideas” on how to emphasize peace officer trainings. Minority hiring could help, but it’s difficult to find minorities who want to be police officers, he said. Regarding decriminalization, police can use Mayor’s Court and work with people, especially if they’re young and there is no victim or video recording of the incident, to keep them out of jail. But restorative justice is the job of the courts, he said.

Pazynski agreed, saying that asking police to hand out the justice they enforce is unfairly asking police to “be judge, jury and executioner.” Pazynski said he had a “firm belief in officer discretion” and using warnings instead of tickets as a useful tool.

First Baptist Church Pastor Bill Randolph asked about minority hiring and using progressive discipline with jail as a last resort. According to Hale, the reason departments can’t find minority officers is because minorities don’t generally apply. It’s an image problem, he said.

“A significant number of people mistrust police, and the only way to change that is to change the function and what police are doing,” he said. “I’d love to get back to where the village was (in Jim McKee’s day), but I’m not sure how to do that.”

Even Pazynski, who is half Columbian and fluent in Spanish, has found it difficult to hire minorities in Xenia, especially among the African-American community where “anybody who wants to be a cop is labeled a snitch.” The most effective antidote is to help kids lose their fear by getting officers in the schools, having cruisers follow the buses “so kids see that police officers are there to help.”

Villager Sue Abendroth asked how both candidates would straddle the “dual” existence between protecting the village from outside influence and respecting the unique Yellow Springs culture. According to Pazynski, it’s the needs of the village that come first.

“If this is how Yellow Springs wants to do it, this is how Yellow Springs is going to do it,” he said. “I’m coming in with my ears and eyes wide open.”

Police nationally need to listen to what people want and evaluate their current practices based on that feedback, he said.

Hale said he believes the village has very good officers who with good training will do fine in both roles.

Villager Chrissy Cruz asked David Hale to explain the qualities he brings that would help villagers overlook the fact that he doesn’t live here and his recommendation to stay with the Greene County drug task force, in opposition to the preference voiced by many villagers.

The fact that such a large proportion of the crime police deal with, including the symptoms of chronic mental illness, paranoia, aggression, hallucination and violent encounters, stems from drug abuse, makes Hale a believer in doing whatever possible to deter the practice. Beside the fact that it’s his job to uphold the law, reducing drug abuse reduces crime on the street, he said.

Joe Dowdell asked, “Why Yellow Springs?” and what Hale had learned in his three months here about what the village needs. Hale said that he had a lot of experience but not a lot of degrees, so when he had a chance to lead a whole department here, it was a new opportunity, and he seized it. In his time here, Hale has seen the need for updated general orders and dispatch manuals, a schedule for crisis intervention training for every member of the department, training opportunities for the chief, better shift coverage, training to use the department’s new reporting software, and a strong mentorship system.

Pazynski said that village culture reminded him of his hometown of Madison, Wis., and though he and his wife, a nurse, couldn’t afford to live here, they live close by on Trebein Road and always considered Yellow Springs “a gem.”

Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Naomi Penrod was charged today in Xenia Municipal Court with three criminal offenses related to a physical altercation she had with a local resident in November. A special prosecutor charged Penrod with interfering with civil rights, assault and disorderly conduct after forcibly grabbing a video camera from a disabled resident on Allen Street on Nov. 5. 

According to Village Manager Patti Bates, today the Village placed Penrod on paid administrative leave until the criminal matter is resolved.

In December, the Village conducted its own investigation of the complaint from villager Athena Fannin and found that Penrod had committed two counts of improper conduct, including forcibly taking Fannin’s camera and exhibiting hostility without cause. She was disciplined with two to three days of unpaid suspension and placed on a behavior improvement program.

More on this story will appear in the this week’s issue of the Yellow Springs News.

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POLICE MATTERS

This is the first in a series of articles examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.

There is an anecdotal tradition of community policing in the village that goes back at least to the 1970s, when police were considered trusted friends who helped and supported villagers, especially youth. And largely, still, villagers have a positive view of the local police department we employ to respond to us when we need help and to enforce the laws of the village.

But for at least a decade, according to former Human Relations Commission member Joan Chappelle, the local police have sometimes morphed into a more aggressive force of officers prone to stopping people with little cause and profiling at least two groups, African Americans and youth. And when the militarized response to the Paul E. Schenck shooting ended in that villager’s death in 2013, another wave of distrust was born for the heavily armed tactics police chose over mediation in that instance.

High turnover within the department over the past three years and the inappropriate aggression a senior officer displayed last fall against a villager also have served to undermine the rebuilding of trust between police and the community, several residents who spoke to the News this week said.

To address some of these issues, last fall the Village Human Relations Commission held its first police-community forum, where residents gave input on the role of the police chief. On March 19 a second forum will focus on the Village’s involvement with the Greene County ACE Task Force on drugs and new policies Chief David Hale has added to the department.

At the same time, the YS News will be taking a deeper look at policing issues in the village with a series of articles beginning this week and extending through the spring. Story topics will include a closer look at the Village’s participation in the drug Task Force, a look at the history of policing in the village, crime statistics, YSPD’s approach to drug enforcement in the village, a report on a day in the life of a Yellow Springs officer, as well as police-community relations.

The first installment will focus on the state of the police department and the current sense of trust between police and the community at large.

YSPD’s approach to policing

As might be expected in a village the size of Yellow Springs, the local police department deals with low crime numbers and very little violent crime, Chief Hale said this week. As such, the vast majority of officers’ time is spent on routine tasks such as business walk-throughs, neighborhood patrols and aiding villagers who have been locked out of their cars or homes.

“For officers here, it’s 90 percent boredom and 2 percent excitement,” Hale said. “The trick is when WesBanco is robbed, we have to go from being an Andy Griffith cop to being  assertive and ready to solve a crime.”

YSPD saw a total of 129 reported offenses last year, of which 60 were classified as thefts, 17 were considered criminal damaging, 15 were misdemeanor assaults and 15 were operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Incidents involving motor vehicle theft, burglary, breaking and entering and felonious assault were all in the single digits.

According to Hale, the size of the local department is based less on the crime rates than on the community’s desire to have a local dispatch team and one to two police officers on duty 24-hours, seven days a week. To cover all the shifts, the department keeps 22 people on staff, including a chief, 10 full-time police officers, five part-time officers, three full-time dispatchers and five part-time dispatchers. The staffing and operational needs of the department cost the Village $1.43 million in 2014, or 45 percent of the general fund budget.

Because they have time between actual criminal offenses, Yellow Springs officers routinely do the kind of community policing that villagers have said recently they want in their local department, according to Chief Hale. Villagers said, for example, that they wanted friendly officers who are there to help people. Recently a Yellow Springs officer responded to a call from a villager who was locked out of her home. Police arrived but couldn’t use any other doors or windows to gain entry into the house. So the officer managed to squeeze himself through the cat door to let the resident back into her home. And officers routinely perform business and vacant property checks, support students at the Mills Lawn morning drop-off, and help people who call when they are locked out of their vehicles or need a jump start.

Villagers have also said they wanted a department that would employ the principles of restorative justice. On another recent investigation, several businesses downtown called police about some local teenagers who were throwing stink bombs into their shops. Police contacted the youth and their parents, who decided to have the youth speak with each of the business owners to figure out a solution. According to Hale, none of the businesses pressed charges, and one barred the youth from trespassing on the property. The issue was handled in a personal way that was commensurate with the nature and magnitude of the offense, as it often is in the village, he said.

But the village does occasionally see some of the more serious crime that Hale believes is connected to the illegal drug trade, which no city or town is immune to. He attributes most of the thefts, stolen vehicles, forgeries to activity to support drug habits.

“A lot of crimes go back to getting money or manipulating people to get drugs,” he said. “Drugs are still illegal, and if we don’t put some pressure on them, if there’s no enforcement, it leads to elements far worse than a 5-cent bag of weed — I mean violence.”

Partly for that reason, YSPD currently pays for one staff member to work full-time at the Task Force. While Yellow Springs, one of the smallest members of the force, would still benefit from the work of the Task Force without being a member, Hale said the officers also benefit from the intense, long-term training experience the Task Force offers them.

Trust in the department

According to longtime villager and former HRC member Chappelle, a majority of village residents seem to trust the police and feel supported and protected by them. Though Steve Eddington would like to know more of the officers personally, he values their service as the owner of a late night business, the Dayton Street Gulch, and has always had favorable reviews of their intervention skills. Local resident Lee Ferguson also has had very positive interactions with police on two recent occasions, one involving a medical call, during which the responding officer was “very soothing,” and another in which the officer sucessfully mediated a situation involving a business in town. And Tony Seimer, who grew up in town and whose family works and goes to school in the village, also has a positive impression of local officers, who in recent dealings with him have been “fair, polite and thoughtful.”

Others also see that the police have a “tough job,” especially at a time of negative national press and in a village as vocal as Yellow Springs, said villager Janet Murie, who feels not critical but unfamiliar with the police. Others, including 50-year resident Thomas Watkins and Cassandra Courtney, said similarly that they had faith in local police but wished they would get out and get to know villagers better.

But many representatives from two particular populations, African Americans and youth, have voiced concerns that for at least a decade, the more aggressive practices of some local police have sometimes inspired fear and resentment. And some villagers also have concerns that Yellow Springs police have been affected by a more national movement to militarize local forces — a fear that was compounded by the SWAT response that ended in a villager’s death in 2013. A handful of villagers shared their experiences along these lines.

Twice in the past six months, Julius Eason, a young African American who moved to the village in 2013, was stopped by local officers and treated in a manner he felt was not commensurate to his offenses. The first time, he was pulled over at night for expired tags, but even after assuring the officer that the beer he consumed hours earlier did not impair his driving, he was given a field sobriety test anyway. Soon, two backup cruisers arrived and four to five officers were shining flashlights into his vehicle. He was released with the simple traffic citation. The second time he was stopped, Eason was putting his bicycle into the trunk of his car in Tom’s Market lot when an officer spotted him. Though he was doing nothing wrong, Eason was not suprised to find the officer followed him five turns home and asked to see his driver’s license, which, it turned out, had been suspended.

Though he couldn’t prove it, which is why he never reported the incidents to the Village, “it was hard to shake the feeling of being profiled,” he said in an interview this week.

Steve McQueen, another African-American resident, has also felt “profiled” to some extent by local officers, who for several years had him “on some kind of radar,” and thought that because he was “black and popular I must be doing drugs.” Police often stopped him and asked for his ID, asked him who he was, and acted suspicious of him until they got to know him. Then a wave of new officers would get hired, and they would do the same thing, until they figured it out as well.

Talis X, an African-American resident whose official name is Talis Gage, has had similar experiences. Shortly after he moved to the village three years ago, an officer followed him on foot from Speedway, stopping to talk to him for no apparent reason at the Little Art Theatre.

“He was the friendliest officer I had ever met,” Talis said. But he was subsequently stopped several other times for no reason at all, including once on foot while carrying signs for a local Black Lives Matter event and once while he was driving, when an officer accused him of driving under suspension and later apologized for confusing him with another person.

The police are also just recovering from a period of some public distrust marked by the resignation of a chief last August who served largely part time for two years due to injury and was rarely seen outside his office, the recent turnover of exactly half of the full-time officers, the shooting death of a villager and the missteps of Sergeant Naomi Penrod in grabbing a camera from a disabled villager. Especially because the senior officers within the department were the ones who called the SWAT team in response to the Schenck incident and used poor judgement in grabbing the camera, villager Carole Cobbs said she feared that those senior officers had been training younger officers to follow their aggressive lead. The result is that Cobbs has been afraid to call the department when she or her family members needed help.

Villager and HRC member Kate Hamilton voiced concern that officers should be using great discretion with their power to cite villagers into court, using it only if needed, and not for drug enforcement. She believes that Yellow Springs should withdraw from the Greene County ACE Task Force.

“The drug war is over, it’s been proven that that type of aggression doesn’t work to keep people from abusing drugs,” she said. “Being on the Task Force doesn’t benefit us financially and it seems to represent something that Yellow Springs is not.”

And though Ferguson’s personal experience with local officers has been positive, she also worries that the militarization displayed during the 2013 shooting and especially the lack of mental health training for the officers is a dangerous deficit for the local department. If there are enough resources for SWAT, there should be more resources for rehabilitative support systems, she believes.

What’s going right

There are signs of greater accountability from police over the past six months, evidenced by the visibility of Chief Hale and his presence in both public venues and at public meetings and events, according to both Hamilton and Cobbs. The disciplinary actions the Village took against Sergeant Penrod in December were transparent and showed that the department is serious about reining in officers who exercise undue force, several said.

According to Hale, accountability will continue with him. He aims to set a tone of fairness and friendliness for his sergeants and officers and encourages them to get out, walk around and get to know people personally, he said. He welcomes those with complaints to contact him about any grievances they might have. Regarding crimes that involve a victim, such as a vandalized homeowner, Hale supports the victim’s option to pursue his or  her own charges. With victimless offenses, however, such as a single marijuana use or disorderly conduct from an intoxicated resident, Hale does support officer discretion in guiding the outcome. According to Hale, “the idea is not to take the person to jail — that would be the last alternative…but you also can’t spend forever talking. And especially if you display aggressive tendencies, I’m only going to back up so far.”

POLICE MATTERS

This is the second in a series of articles
examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.

In January 2002, Yellow Springs High School senior Tim Lopez vanished. Described by loved ones as goofy and sweet, Tim had moved to the Yellow Springs area several years earlier with his mother, Barbara McQuiston, who worked as a researcher at YSI. While rumors swirled about Tim’s past involvement in a YSHS drug culture, he had recently, with the help of his girlfriend, turned his life around.

Tim remained missing for two years. In the spring of 2004, police, acting on a tip, found Tim’s body buried outside the home of Tim’s YSHS classmate, Michael Rittenhouse. A year later, Rittenhouse pleaded guilty to murder, and three years later, the incident was linked to the drug dealing charges against YSHS graduate Umoja Iddi Bakari, who was arrested in Atlanta, where he apparently committed suicide in jail.

The deaths of Lopez and Bakari and arrest of Rittenhouse took a toll on then Sergeant John Grote, who in 2005 became police chief. Following the Rittenhouse trial, Grote signed Yellow Springs on as a member of the Agencies for Combined Enforcement, or A.C.E. Task Force, which focuses on investigating drug-related crime.

“It’s what pushed me to go ahead” Grote said recently regarding the impact of the local tragedy on police joining the drug task force. Before the Lopez murder, he said, “I had been somewhat naive regarding the number of people involved in drug trades in high school and college.”

An apparent increase in heroin use at Antioch College at the time also affected his decision to join the task force, Grote said. While he didn’t believe then or now that drug use in Yellow Springs is more prevalent than in other communities, he believes that the village is not immune to the problem.

“It’s always been there,” Grote said of drug use in the village. “It’s in every community, everywhere.”

However, Grote wrestled continually with the expense to Village government of joining the drug task force, which includes the annual cost of an officer’s salary, along with other expenses. But until he resigned as chief in 2012, Grote stuck with the task force because he believed its work helped lessen the local impact of drugs.

“I won’t say things stopped, but it became harder to get heroin,” he said. “At least you had to go to Springfield or Dayton.”

Ten years after first signing on with A.C.E., Yellow Springs remains an active partner. However, the involvement of local police in the drug task force has become a topic of controversy, as some question whether the partnership is an appropriate use of resources in general, and especially in a time of fiscal belt-tightening.

“The war on drugs is a failed war,” Lindsay Burke wrote in an email this week. “The task force serves only to reinforce the school to prison pipeline. It ends the possibility for so many people to be functional members of society by handing out felonies over-abundantly and doling out life-altering prison sentences. Specifically in our small town, the task force is a quite unnecessary expense…”

The local police partnership with A.C.E. and the Greene County SWAT team will be among the topics discussed at the upcoming forum on police and the community, sponsored by the Human Relations Commission, or HRC. The event, which follows an initial October forum, takes place on Thursday, March 19, at 7 p.m. at the Bryan Center gym.

One of those looking forward to the event is Rev. Aaron Saari of the First Presbyterian Church, an HRC alternate.

“I do have concerns about the militarization of police and the targeting of people of color, although I’m not saying this happens locally,” Saari said this week. “I want local police to have the resources they need, but we’re not Dayton, not Springfield, not Xenia. I think policing looks a little different here.”

Saari has been very impressed with new Chief Dave Hale, and also has confidence in the local officers he knows. Overall, he said, he’s appreciative of the opportunity to discuss the issues.

“I’m glad to live here in the village where we can have this conversation,” he said.

What A.C.E. does

The A.C.E. task force is a multi-jurisdictional task force that “handles sensitive investigations,” according to Commander Bruce May in an interview last week. About 65 percent of the investigations involve drug trafficking and the remaining 35 percent involve crimes such as gambling, receiving stolen goods, burglary or murder, May said.

The task force is comprised currently of six full-time officers, although 10 to 12 officers is the desired number, May said. The officers represent Yellow Springs, Xenia, Fairborn, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department, Beavercreek and Sugarcreek Township.

While the end of year task force report for 2014 is not yet available, the group served 59 search warrants last year, including one in Yellow Springs, May said. Most of the warrants were served in Greene County, although 12 were served in Montgomery County.

According to reports from the Dayton Daily News, in October of 2014 the task force arrested 10 people in Greene and Montgomery counties charged with heroin trafficking, and in June the group, working with police from Clinton County, Wilmington and the Greater Warren County Drug task force, charged 47 people in Greene, Clinton and Montgomery counties with trafficking drugs, after a long undercover investigation.

The bulk of the group’s work currently focuses on heroin, according to May recently.

“Heroin is the one that’s on top right now. It’s the drug of choice,” he said. “Three or four years ago, I would have said crack cocaine.”

The spike of heroin use in Ohio is considered an epidemic, according to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine at a community forum in Grove City last October. Heroin overdose has overtaken traffic accidents as the number one cause of accidental death in the state, and about 700 deaths statewide were linked to heroin in 2012.

While there is no clear evidence of heroin use or trafficking in Yellow Springs at this point, Police Chief Dave Hale believes the drug is around. “I believe heroin is as big a problem here per capita as elsewhere,” Hale said.

Anecdotally, a female heroin user recently arrested while driving in the village stated that heroin was easy to get in town, he said. And as someone on the job only six months, Hale believes that it takes a while to see the links between drug use and other types of crimes.

“A year from now we’ll be more able to make the connections,” he said.

The A.C.E. arrest made in Yellow Springs last year involved a person selling D.M.T., a hallucinogen, according to May.

As someone who has spent much of his career fighting drug-related crime, Hale is a strong supporter of maintaining the Yellow Springs involvement in the drug task force. While some question why local police should put their resources into drug busts due to the smaller number of cases in the village, Hale believes that behavior linked to drug use and drug trafficking are behind at least 50 percent of all criminal behavior.

“If the funding stays current, I’m a firm believer that the task force does reduce crime throughout the county, including Yellow Springs,” he said. “It makes Yellow Springs a safer place.”

Some villagers disagree with that assumption, however. To Shane Creepingbear, the task force is one of many anti-drug initiatives that “are presented as a way to address drug trafficking but in reality have served to de-stabilize communities that have historically been targeted and marginalized the poor and people of color.”

Matt Carson also believes that the task force “targets working people and especially people of color.” He said he would like to see the Village cut the police budget altogether and instead use the $1.5 million now spent on police to end poverty in the village.

According to the 2013 year-end report from the task force, the group served a total of 76 search warrants that year, including three in Yellow Springs. According to a summary of seven of the most significant cases, four involved mainly marijuana growing or trafficking, two involved heroin trafficking and one involved trafficking in heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

What’s the cost?

As a member of the A.C.E. Task Force, the Yellow Springs police force receives varying amounts of cash in forfeiture payments each year from task force work depending on the amounts claimed in drug busts, with each municipality on the force receiving an equal amount. According to information submitted to Village Council at the end of 2014 by Chief Hale, the Yellow Springs police department had received $271,178 in cash forfeiture payments from the task force in the previous five years.

However, during that time the police paid the required annual fee for task force membership of $10,500, and also paid the salary averaging about $50,000 (plus $20,000 in benefits) annually for the officer assigned to the task force. The total cost per year for membership came to about $80,500 per year, or $402,500 for the same five-year perod. Consequently, the overall cost to the Village of task force involvement during those five years was about $131,322.

In a previous interview regarding the cost to the Village of task force involvement, Chief Hale stated that police work isn’t intended to make a profit, and the most important consideration is whether an activity helps reduce crime. However, he said last week, if budget considerations forced him to remove one officer from the department, he would take that officer from the task force rather than reducing police coverage of the village. But if there is no budget pressure to downsize, he plans to maintain the local presence in the task force. Current staffing levels locally are adequate, he believes, and while an extra officer would add one more body to the force, the addition wouldn’t increase services to the public.

When calculating the cost versus benefits a department receives from task force involvement, a municipality should also add in the benefit of the extra training received by the task force member officer, May said last week. Because officers tend to stay on the task force three to five years, they receive a considerable amount of specialized training.

“So when they go back, they take back the totality of what they’ve learned here,” he said.

However, Kate Hamilton worries that the training itself could work against the interests of the village. The task force can be seen as a “stepping stone” that attracts officers who don’t really want to work in a small town.

“I feel it could entice people to come here just to get on the task force” and then move on quickly to more exciting police work, having been trained on the Village’s dime, she said.

No longer SWAT member

Following the July 30, 2013, shootout and death of villager Paul E. Schenck, many were surprised to find out that Yellow Springs Officer Pat Roegner had on the night of the shootout suited up with the Greene County SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team, one of three SWAT teams on the scene that night. In fact, Yellow Springs was a member of the team, which also included representatives of the Xenia Police Department, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department, the Kettering Health Network and Wright State University.

Former Police Chief Anthony Pettiford had asked former Village Manager Laura Curliss the previous spring for permission to join the SWAT team due to Roegner’s interest, according to Pettiford in a previous interview. Curliss gave permission, although Village Council was not aware of the Village’s involvement with the SWAT team.

However, that involvement was short-lived because Roegner resigned from the local police force in the spring of 2014. While Pettiford had originally told Keller that he might be assigning another officer, the topic became controversial following the disclosure that Yellow Springs was a SWAT team member, and Pettiford did not move ahead with assigning the officer. Currently, according to Keller in a recent interview, Yellow Springs is not considered part of the team. Keller said he puts out a call yearly to area police departments to see if there is interest in joining SWAT and he had no indication of interest from Yellow Springs.

In a recent interview, Chief Hale said that being a part of SWAT “is a sensitive issue” about which he has mixed feelings.

“It’s not a bad thing but you have to look at the resources used, how much you train and how much you get back,” Hale said. Also, Hale is aware that the Greene County SWAT team is mandated to respond to requests for its service in all Greene County municipalities, so that Yellow Springs will receive that service regardless of whether or not it’s a member.

The cost required for SWAT involvement is far less than that of the A.C.E. Task Force, because the team contributes an officer only during raids and training rather than full time. An officer needs to train with the SWAT team once a month, according to Keller, so the expense is that required to cover that officer’s shift during training, which amounts to a few thousand dollars a year.

The Greene County SWAT team tends to be called up only a few times a year, in situations when police encounter someone using dangerous weapons, or a hostage situation. However, according to Keller, last year SWAT wasn’t called up at all.

POLICE MATTERS
This is the third in a series of articles
examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.

People getting shot, drug dealers slinging crack-cocaine and neighbors not trusting one other enough to share their phone numbers.

That was the experience of Yellow Springs Police Chief David Hale in his 30-year law enforcement career in Montgomery County — a far cry from Hale’s last six months in the village. Instead, Yellow Springs is, by most measures, a safe community where neighbors look out for each other, which Hale called a “refreshing change of pace” this week.

The numbers bear out the difference. While last year there were 28 murders in the City of Dayton and more than 1,200 violent crimes there, violence in Yellow Springs has barely been an issue, with an average of about three violent incidents each year for the last seven. Rates of property crime — the most statistically-significant threat to villagers — are well below those of nearby communities, less than state and national averages and on par with other small towns.

But at the same time, the Village employs more full-time police officers and total public safety employees per capita than most other area towns and cities, while its staffing levels are close to the national average among similarly-sized municipalities. The Village also likely spends more per capita on policing than the national average — last year local police cost each resident $350.

If Yellow Springs is safer than other towns, why does it need more officers and a larger police budget to protect its residents?

Hale, who said he is happy with the present size of the police force at 10 full-time officers, cited several reasons why Yellow Springs may need more officers per capita despite low crime rates. For one, the large number of tourists that flock here creates the potential for more crime, though tourists don’t necessarily commit violent or property crimes, he said.

“My job is contingencies,” Hale explained. “Think of what would happen in the middle of Street Fair if someone fired off a few rounds — that’s quite a bit of havoc.”

Hale added that while crime rates are “pretty low” in Yellow Springs, violent crimes or serious thefts can, and do occur here. For example, there were two murders in the village in the early 2000s. In 2013, nine homes were burglarized and last year two motor vehicles were stolen and 10 broken into in separate crime sprees that were both connected to individuals with drug addictions. For Hale, local police need to be well trained and ready for the next rash of crime, whenever it occurs.

“Yellow Springs is, by and large, somewhat insulated from a lot of the violence [in the region,] but it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen,” Hale said. “My job is to have [my officers] ready for the big one.”

But with most YSPD activity connected to traffic stops and miscellaneous activities from house checks to road clearances, some villagers are beginning to question the size and expense of the local department. Local resident Isaac DeLamatre, who is completing a qualitative survey of villagers’ experiences with local police, sees that making the town a safer place need not rely on the police.

“The results of my investigation indicate that police are largely unnecessary in the village,” DeLamatre wrote in an email this week. “Rather, the village seems to have more need for social workers, mental health professionals and non-law enforcement emergency responders.”

When it comes to cutting down Yellow Springs’ already low crime rate, Hale added that much can be done by villagers themselves, who can be on the watch for suspicious behavior in their neighborhoods and report tips to police. Ultimately, it comes down to a community where people trust each other, and the local police, Hale said.

“So much of police work deals with areas where there is less trust,” Hale said. “In Yellow Springs, it has been nice to restore my faith in humanity.”

Crime remains low here

Property crime, which has been on a downward trend in the village and nation for the last decade, remains low in Yellow Springs compared with other communities. Meanwhile, violent crime is even more rare here.

According to figures recently released by the Village, there were 75 property crimes last year (including 60 thefts, 7 burglaries and 8 motor vehicle thefts), compared with 56 in 2013 and 62 in 2012. Back in 2008, there were 109 property crimes here, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report. Nationally, property crime has fallen by 16 percent over 10 years, the FBI reported.

Using the seven-year average, Yellow Springs’ annual property crime rate of 21.4 incidents per 1,000 residents is still below the 2013 average for Ohio (29.3) and the U.S. (27.3), while it pales in comparison to nearby Springfield (74.4), Dayton (54.2), Xenia (40.3), and Fairborn (28.2). Using just FBI data, which automatically downloads reports from local police computers each year, Yellow Springs’ 2013 property crime rate could be as low as 7.0 per 1,000 residents, while Village data gives a rate of 15.8. Using Yellow Springs data alone, last year’s rate was 21.2.

Yellow Springs is about as safe as other small towns in the state and region. Depending upon which figures are used, the property crime rate in the village appears to be higher than places like Bellbrook (13.2 in 2013) and Germantown (7.61), on par with Oberlin (23.1) and Tipp City (19.3) and safer than Sugarcreek (34.1) and New Lebanon (37.3).

According to an annual report from the YSPD, the value of stolen merchandise reported to the police in 2014 was $128,060, of which $77,817, or 60 percent, was recovered. The value of unrecovered property last year amounts to about $14 per resident. There were also 17 incidents of criminal damaging last year, which includes vandalism, up from eight in 2013.

Property crime and damage, however, takes its toll in other ways, Hale said. Especially when one’s home is broken into, the psychological damage can be severe, which is why Hale said he takes home burglaries so seriously. Outside of truly violent crimes, Hale said he dislikes burglaries the most because they can be “so devastating to people.”

“Your home is psychologically your sanctuary so when it is violated, when someone enters into the home where you raise your family and spend time with your loved ones, that is very tough,” Hale said.

When it comes to violent crime, which the FBI defines as murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, Yellow Springs has had just two to five incidents per year since 2008 for an annual average of around three per year. That gives the village a rate of 0.9 incidents per 1,000 residents, which is less than 2013 averages in Ohio  (2.8) and the nation (3.7), well below Dayton (8.7), Springfield (7.1), similar to Tipp City (0.9), Sugarcreek (1.1) and above Germantown (0.2) and Bellbrook (0.3).

According to YSPD figures, last year’s two felonious assaults were the only violent crimes in town, while there were 15 misdemeanor assaults, which legally includes attempting to harm someone. Of those, five were incidents of domestic violence.

Police activity in town

With so little crime in town, what do local police officers spend their time doing? According to the village’s report, last year there were 1,972 offenses reported, 1,488 total citations issued and 10,403 calls for service received by the department, an average of close to 30 per day. There were also 67 car accidents and hit and runs in town, 11 where injury occurred.

According to dispatch reports, most of the time the YSPD deals with barking dogs, loud music, dead animals obstructing roadways, stolen bicycles, lockouts and door checks. Hale added the department engages in other miscellaneous activities like issuing warrants and parking violations, assisting the Miami Township Fire and Rescue squad on its calls, visiting the schools during the day and the bars at night or checking the doors of downtown businesses overnight.

Especially with such low crime rates, it is exceedingly rare for a police officer to happen upon a crime in progress here, Hale said. That’s why traffic stops have become a critical tactic to root out lawbreakers and deter crime in the village, he added.

“You don’t trip over that many crimes in progress,” Hale said. “The stop is how proactive police work gets done. It’s how we prevent crime.”

Last year the police made 1,193 traffic stops, issuing citations in 187 of the stops, while giving warnings 84 percent of the time. That was on par with the close to 1,000 warnings issued in 2012 and less than the 1,419 warnings in 2013 during former Chief Tony Pettiford’s tenure.

According to Hale, police can stop motorists for any number of infractions, including, most commonly, a defective brake light or license plate light, cracked windshield along with speeding, signaling or stopping violations. Hale defended the use of traffic stops because they can lead to drug-related citations or arrests. He also said that the stops disproportionately affect low-income people and younger people because their cars are more prone to defects while they are more likely to let vehicle problems go unfixed.

Hale added that officers are not expected to meet a quota of traffic stops or citations but are given a lot of discretion over whether or not to pull someone over and whether or not to give them a ticket. Generally, police warn speeders if they are less than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, though there are exceptions in residential areas. Previously, the police have maintained that the money raised from tickets does not even cover the cost of Mayor’s Court, let alone police activities.

When it comes to whether an officer will issue a ticket, search a car or take any other action, Hale said he gives his patrol officers a great deal of discretion so they learn policing.

“I want to produce intelligent cops,” Hale said. “While they need to understand my expectations, I want to give them the freedom to evaluate the circumstances.”

Staffing, funding the YSPD

The Yellow Springs police department currently has 10 full-time sworn officers (including Hale), four part-time sworn auxiliary officers and five civilian part-time dispatchers, according to Hale. While he is pleased with the level of staffing, according to some figures YSPD is relatively large.

If counting only full-time officers, Yellow Springs currently has 2.8 officers per 1,000 inhabitants, higher than the nationwide average in 2013 of 2.3 and the statewide figure of 2.4. Using FBI figures, Yellow Springs had 11 total full-time employees in 2013 for a rate of 3.1 employees per 1,000 inhabitants. That’s less than the 3.4 national average but higher than several nearby jurisdictions, including Springfield (2.4) and Fairborn (1.7), and other small towns like Oberlin (2.8), Sugarcreek Township (2.2) and Bellbrook (1.8).

For comparison, Bellbrook, which has double the population of Yellow Springs at around 7,000 residents, had 10 full-time and one part-time officer in 2013, according to its annual report, less than the 14 full and part-time officers in Yellow Springs. Last year Bellbrook also closed its dispatch center and began contracting with Xenia in a move Bellbrook estimated could save its department $150,000 annually.

While Yellow Springs may have more officers and law enforcement employees per capita than other area towns, it may have about as many as can be expected for a town with less than 10,000 inhabitants. Nationally, that rate is 3.5 officers per 1,000 inhabitants (2.7 in the Midwest) and 4.5 total employees (3.2 in the Midwest). But if the part-time dispatchers and officers are counted at one-half time, Yellow Springs could have upwards of 4 employees per 1,000 residents and 3.4 officers.

But Hale cautioned against making comparisons with other towns that don’t have the same tourist draw as Yellow Springs. He estimated that the population of the village can swell to upwards of 12,000 and when compared to municipalities of that size, Yellow Springs is actually understaffed.

Hale added that because Yellow Springs is a small town with little serious crime, the local police department is a “feeder agency” to larger police departments, and thus has a high turnover rate. The local force is also young, with five first-year police officers now in the department, who require additional training from more veteran police officers. The level of staffing guarantees that relatively-inexperienced officers aren’t on their own on busy Friday nights, which Hale said makes him uncomfortable.

While statistics comparing the per-resident cost of local police departments are not easily available, a 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics nationwide survey of 12,501 municipal and police departments found operating costs were $116,500 per sworn officer and $260 per resident. A Columbus Dispatch study last year found the average cost per resident for policing in 53 central Ohio departments in 2013 was $251 per resident.

In 2014, Village of Yellow Springs spent $1.25 million on public safety, ($1.1 million or 88 percent, on personnel), which comes to $124,162 per sworn officer and $350 per resident. If the local police department spends its entire 2015 budget of $1.33 million, policing could cost $377 per resident this year.

Note: Per capita calculations are based upon the FBI’s 2013 population estimates, which for Yellow Springs was 3,539.

The Yellow Springs Police Department will continue to employ one officer on the Greene County ACE Task Force to help contain violent crime in the region. The local police will also continue to call the SWAT team when appropriate to ensure the village’s safety during violent and potentially harmful situations. The size of the department is appropriate for the tourist-centered village, and any decrease in personnel would be at Village Council’s discretion. The current traffic stop policies work to keep drivers safe and deter illegal activity.

These were some of the explanations that Yellow Springs Police Chief David Hale offered at the most recent policing forum held at the Bryan Center Thursday, March 19, by the Village Human Relations Commission. About 40 villagers attended the event to learn more about the department and to ask questions about how the police make their decisions and why they do what they do. The forum was a continuation of the first event held last October to get community input on what villagers wanted in a police chief. The HRC plans to hold more forums in the future to keep the conversation between police and the community going.

Concern over outside agencies

Many villagers engaged in questions about police participation in or use of both the Greene County SWAT team, of which Yellow Springs is no longer a member, and the ACE Task Force, to which Yellow Springs contributes one officer.

Ellis Jacobs said the encounter in July 2013 when a SWAT officer killed a village resident actually “created problems” and was “so bad” that he wondered how the community could be assured it wouldn’t happen again. Al Schlueter was concerned that the number of SWAT raids per year has increased from several hundred in the 1970s to about 40,000 today, and that they are disproportionately employed against people of color and low-income areas. Helen Eier also had concerns about SWAT and the proliferation of heavy arms and equipment in police departments.

According to Hale, “mistakes, missteps and miscalculations” were made during the SWAT incident in 2013, perhaps partly due to the inexperience of a little-used organization in a lesser populated area. Perhaps in the future the Village could consider using the Montgomery County SWAT force instead, he said, adding that the Greene County team reviewed its tactics after the incident and significantly improved the radio communication that led to some of its mistakes. But in situations involving an active shooter causing “risk of serious physical harm to other citizens or police officers,” SWAT is still considered “the best resource available” to protect the most people and to protect the Village from being sued if police fail to use enough force.

“When someone is shooting at you, it is a military [situation], and that is why military equipment is used,” he said, noting that police cruisers are not adequate protection from bullets.

But SWAT works in tandem with hostage negotiators with the ultimate goal of creating an opening for negotiators to reach a resolution, according to Hale.

“The idea is to use SWAT to contain the problem and hostage negotiation to deal with the problem,” he said.

Regarding the county’s ACE Task Force, villager Chrissy Cruz voiced concern that illegal drug enforcement focuses too much on the small-time users, and wondered how a budget-strapped Village could afford the “luxury” of employing a full-time officer on that regional team. Villager John Hempfling also pointed out the Global Commission on Drug Policy’s conclusion that drug enforcement has no effect on drug use and asked what was the point of supporting drug enforcement agencies that only serve to raise incarceration rates and “make the community feel the police are the enemy.”

According to Hale, drugs and mental illness within a community produce violence and crime, and police need the tools to address those issues.

“Just because you’re not seeing the seedy side of things doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” he said.

Police will never be able to catch the “king pin” dealers without “casting the net” and getting a lot of “little bass” too, and the larger the Task Force is, the more effective it’s going to be, he said. The police also benefit from the training they get at the Task Force, whose officers can then mentor other officers within the local department.

Use of force and other policies

Chief Hale is currently in the process of formalizing approximately 30 of the Village’s policing policies, including modifying some, such as the domestic offense policy, and adding some, such as mental illness protocols and the use of recording devices. Villager Joan Chappelle asked about the police use of force policy, while Isaac Delamatre voiced concern that the current policy on minor traffic stops unfairly targets low-income people and young people. Al Schlueter also expressed concern that not encouraging officers to live in town was changing community-police relations in a negative way, and Ken Huber wanted to know the plan for helping officers to know the community.

According to Hale, officers are trained to employ a use of force continuum in which they get to use slightly more force than the suspect they’re dealing with. The appropriate force is relative to the disparity in size between the officer and the aggressor. All the department’s officers except Hale have had some Crisis Intervention Training, or CIT, and often use verbal techniques to handle a situation without force, though Hale said he doesn’t mandate that and trusts his officers to make good decisions.

“I want the officers to have discretion,” he said.

Officers are allowed to stop drivers who fail to obey simple traffic rules, for instance, and if the problem is limited to a small vehicle defect, they may not issue a citation. But some of those stops allow police to learn about more serious infractions, such as a vehicle stop last week that led police to a stolen gun and a bigger Task Force drug case. An officer’s presence discourages unsafe driving practices, and the stops that lead to bigger issues, Hale believes, do “deter problems.”

Former Village Manager Kent Bristol spoke in agreement during the forum that traffic stops are worth the criminal activity they prevent.

“It’s not targeting low-income people, it’s stopping people who need to be taken off the street,” Bristol said.

On the police budget

The YSPD is funded through the Village General Fund budget, which is currently in deficit spending. Police department expenditures account for slightly under half of the general fund, and most of the expense is for the 14 full-time officers and dispatchers plus additional part-time personnel. The police budget is supplemented by state seizure assets, but those funds cannot be used to pay salaries or benefits.

Villager Ken Huber wondered why the  department has grown so much since the 1960s, when it staffed four full-time officers. Steve McQueen also wondered if body cameras would be both effective and affordable for the local force.

The department is the size Hale found it when he came, which, he said, is determined by Village Council and the Village manager. While some communities of comparable size in the area have fewer officers, such as New Lebanon and Enon, Yellow Springs needs more officers to serve the tourist economy that often increases the weekend and fine-weather population to 6,500 and sometimes 7,500 people. The crowd issue is compounded by multiple establishments that serve alcohol, which demands contingency plans, Hale said.

“The bars bring in good crowds, and you want that to continue to be a source of revenue for the Village, but you need a police department that can respond to it.”

Regarding body cameras, Hale likes the idea but wants to gauge how other cities handle privacy, security and data storage issues before investing in a relatively new technology.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com

At 11 p.m. on Friday night Yellow Springs Police officer Jessica Frazier was making her usual rounds across the village when she came across a pickup truck idling with its headlights on in the parking lot at Ellis Park. She pulled her cruiser into the lot, swung around behind the truck with a spot light and walked to the passenger’s side to find out why the vehicle was in the park well after it closes at dark. While she and the driver were chatting, a second Yellow Springs officer, Mark Charles, pulled in as a safety measure and put a second spotlight on the unknown vehicle.

It turned out that Frazier knew the driver, a villager who said she had stopped at the park to make a phone call. They talked for several minutes, Frazier advised the driver that people are not permitted in the park after dark, and the driver left. The stop ended, as most do in the village, without incident.

During a ride-along with this reporter last Friday evening, local police displayed an eagerness to explain their process and offer the perspective of an on-duty officer. That night, three officers reported to the PD for evening duty; Frazier and Charles for the regular evening shift, and Jeff Beam for special detail with the Greene County ACE Task Force — his first. The on-duty officer passed along the relevant information about the day shift and the fresh officers suited up to take over the watch.

The evening shift

With a few hours of daylight still left, Charles put out a “signal 2” to dispatcher Ruth Peterson and started out cruising the main drags to catch a glimpse of the people in the downtown area before heading south to nowhere in particular. His aim: cover all the village streets evenly to maintain public awareness of officer presence and keep people on the roadways safe.

“I look for patterns so I notice when something is out of place — like garage doors that are half open,” Charles said. “I don’t have a routine, I just try to be observant and make sure people are okay.”

Within the first 60 seconds of the shift, Charles pointed out three vehicles with license plate violations, including no plate light, obscured plates and no front plate. He didn’t hesitate to drive on by. According to police, about a third of the vehicles they see every day have a violation, and officers typically only stop the ones with multiple violations or some evidence of suspicious behavior. Most of the actual vehicle stops are resolved with a verbal or written warning.

“If you stopped every vehicle for every infraction, you’d be nonstop, pulling hundreds of people over every day,” Charles said. “It would be impossible.”

Speeding is a slightly different story. Every officer has a personal limit, and on Friday night, when the radar in Charles’ vehicle clocked a black sedan headed westbound on Fairfield Pike at 20 miles over the 25 miles per hour limit, he made a safe but quick 180 degree turn for the stop. Approaching the vehicle in the driving early spring snow, he learned that the 16-year-old driver from Centerville (who was upset at being stopped) was restricted to driving with a parent and had recently been suspended after an accident. Charles relayed to dispatch for verification and began writing a juvenile traffic citation while waiting for the driver’s mother to arrive. Then three young men in hooded jackets approached the cruiser.

“We’re here to rescue our friend,” one of the boys said.

Charles ushered the teenagers to the side of the road for safety and asked who they were and what they were doing there. After a chilly roadside interview, Charles learned that the juvenile driver had called her friends to come get her without telling him. He spoke to the mother when she arrived and released the juvenile with a simple citation of speeding and driving in violation of operator’s license.

“Citations are issued to correct behavior,” he said. Though he could have written the driver a warning instead, Charles felt that since she had recently had an accident and had driving restrictions placed on her license, and was now caught speeding, a court hearing might serve as yet another warning to her about improving her unsafe driving.

Frazier also believes that her job makes a positive difference. She recently stopped a woman for speeding through a crosswalk near Mills Lawn School, where two children had been waiting to cross the street. When she informed the driver, the driver was appalled that she had been in such a rush, and Frazier felt that a warning would suffice to change that driver’s habits — at least for a while.

More tools than they use

At the beginning of every shift and after every speeding citation, officers are required to calibrate their radar equipment with metal tuning forks and record the time in case the charge is challenged in court. The equipment is quite reliable, according to Charles, so usually no adjustments are needed. After returning to the police station, Charles checks his radar and arranges other equipment in his mobile office. It’s a tight space for everything he must roll around with.

The computer is the biggest obstacle but also one of the handiest tools. It sits on a swivel arm and offers access to all the Village and State laws officers use in their citations. It also allows the officers on duty to track each other on a digital map to facilitate patrol and expedite backup when necessary. The cruisers are also equipped with radar that picks up the speed of other vehicles both in front of and behind the cruiser, and two license plate scanners that use a national database to check for stolen vehicles. Communication gear, including a police radio, lights and sirens, are located just in front of the shotgun and AR rifle that are standard issue for every cruiser. Last but not least is Purell, an antibacterial hand solution that Charles uses faithfully.

The officers themselves heft a 38-pound load of equipment as well, including a protective vest, two pairs of handcuffs, a taser, a duty weapon and two extra magazines, a radio, a microphone for the dash camera and a duty knife. Most of the equipment they don’t use regularly, but Charles feels more confident when he is prepared.

The spotlight, for instance, came in very handy Friday night, when Frazier stopped a driver for speeding on Corry Street. The vehicle had just turned onto a dark and woody part of Grinnell Road and the spot allowed the officer to see that there were two occupants in the vehicle who appeared calm. Frazier still approached the vehicle cautiously, as she does with every stop, because she has no idea who she will meet in the vehicle ahead and she has been trained, for personal safety, to expect the worst.

“Just because I think the worst doesn’t mean I will act on it,” she said. “But you never want to let your guard down.”

For Frazier, every time she approaches a vehicle with unknown occupants, she gets what is known as an adrenaline dump, when emotions of fight, flight or freeze are triggered. She went through scenario training in police academy to handle her own reactions, and believes that “just because I get a dump doesn’t mean I’m on the verge of overreacting … If I overstep our use of force continuum, I’m not okay,” she said. “I will never overstep my bounds.”

But officers are also trained to stay in control of the situation, and are constantly watching body movement, hands and eyes for signs of aggression in those they deal with. Talking is always the ideal response method, said Frazier, who received crisis intervention training (CIT) and believes she developed strong interpersonal skills working at the Greene County Jail for a year before coming to Yellow Springs last spring. She sees her primary role as a mediator and counselor to help people stay within the limits of the law.

“My experience in the jail in close quarters is it’s easier to talk to people and explain to them what’s going on — it’s easier to be a mediator,” especially with “people you know,” she said.

But when someone isn’t responding to the verbal address and “wants to take it to the next level by escalating, we have to escalate too,” she said. “People have to know that we will always be plus one.”

The boredom of duty

Frazier is a small, fast officer who is constantly multitasking in her cruiser, focusing radar on cars she can’t see, looking for people in the neighborhood, scanning the police radio and just driving her own vehicle. But she had no problem pulling over three cars for speeding Friday night and issuing three warnings to the drivers. Each stop lasted an average of eight minutes. She joked with one car full of teenagers who had just come from Young’s Dairy, asking if they brought her any ice cream.

“I want people to feel comfortable,” she said.

Later in the evening both Frazier and Charles got out of their vehicles with flashlights and walked the streets to make sure  downtown businesses had locked their doors for the night. They also stepped into the late-night bars, the Dayton Street Gulch and Peach’s Grill, to talk to folks there and make sure no one needed a ride home. Patrons did not appear surprised to see a cop in their midst, and several stopped to talk to Frazier.

After walking through some parking lots and checking vehicles for people in need of assistance (one driver sounded like she was having car trouble but was in fact demonstrating to her friends that her horn sounded like a coffee grinder), Frazier headed out again to patrol the streets. Though driving around at night can be agonizingly boring at times (and typically eats up about a half tank of gas per shift), Frazier still loves the part of her job when she gets to interact with people. She’s outgoing and likes to kid (she said “just kidding” about five times while cruising and talking). And she also loves the fact that the purpose of her job is to help people.

“I’m there in times of crisis for people, people who’ve been hurt, and I’m there to help kids who might be starting to get into bad behaviors,” she said. “It’s a unique job and I love what I do.”

As part of its series on policing in the community, the Yellow Springs News is gathering community feedback on the local police department.

Share your experiences with the YSPD and opinions on local policing in our short, online survey:

Begin survey here

All responses will be anonymous, unless express permission is granted to the YS News. Responses may be used in an upcoming issue of the News. The survey is for those who live in, work in or visit the village.

Read articles in the police series here.

POLICE MATTERS
 
This is the fifth in a series of articles examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.
• Click here to view all the articles the series

Late one evening last month, a local couple was celebrating their anniversary with friends at the Gulch. The couple went out to the parking lot to partake in the marijuana sent by the woman’s brother for the occasion. The man stood outside their car packing marijuana into a pipe when a local policeman walked up — seeing the officer, the man threw a baggie into the car, according to the police report. The policeman asked what was in the baggie and the man said it was marijuana. Asked to hand over the bag, the man did so. The officer called for back-up.

Asked if there were more drugs in the car, the woman handed over a second baggie of marijuana, after which the officer said he would conduct a search. He found several pipes with marijuana residue. The couple were handcuffed and transported to the police station, where they were separated, interviewed and held for about an hour and a half. The man was charged with possession of controlled substances and illegal possession of drug paraphernalia and his wife with possession of controlled substances. (They later pled guilty to a lesser charge and paid about $300 in fines.)

The couple, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their children, were stunned by the event. Yes, the man said recently, he broke the law. But as local residents active in the community and parents of children in the public schools, they never expected such treatment from the local police. Being handcuffed in front of friends was embarrassing and being held at the department was nerve-wracking, the man said. They felt themselves treated like criminals, not respectable members of the community.
“The chief said the police are going after bad people,” the man said. “Why are citizens getting harrassed?”

Also last month a police car began following a local young man at about 10 p.m. when the man turned from Xenia Avenue onto Corry Street, the officer driving so closely behind that the police car was tailgating the man, until the officer turned off onto Allen Street. Although the man was sober and within the speed limit, he felt unnerved.

The man, who has been followed by police several other times too, has no idea why police follow him except that he drives an old car. Having grown up in Yellow Springs, he hadn’t experienced what feels like harassing police behavior until fairly recently.

“It felt like an agggressive pursuit for someone who has done nothing wrong,” according to the driver, who asked to be anonymous due to discomfort criticising the police.

Another young man who also grew up in town and drives an old car reports that police have followed him at least a dozen times over the past year. An officer will fall in behind him and when the man, feeling nervous, turns off to another street, the officer turns too, over and over. While the man has never been stopped, the man doesn’t appreciate being treated as if he’s doing something wrong.

“It makes me kind of nervous,” the man said recently, also requesting anonymity due to discomfort criticising the police.

Rex Gilbert, a resident of the village for 40 years, was disturbed by two recent incidents when he was stopped by police when walking his dog in Gaunt Park.

Walking his dog at night is nothing new for Gilbert and both times he was surprised to be stopped by officers with flashlights who told him the park was off limits at night, Gilbert said. While the officers were polite and respectful, he found being stopped by police for such an innocent activity unnerving. Since then he’s changed his route.
The problem, according to Glbert, wasn’t how the officers treated him, but that they stopped him at all. It’s an example, he believes, of a police presence that seems more ever-present and authoritarian than it has felt to him in the past.

“I wasn’t harrassed per se but it made me feel uncomfortable and to me the question isn’t, “what am I doing in the park?” — the question is, “why is the question being asked?”

Change in style?
In recent years, some villagers, especially younger ones, feel there’s been a change in the style of local policing, with an increase in incidents that feel harassing and unfriendly, such as those cited above.

“It feels like they’re everywhere,” said one young man, who asked for anonymity due to discomfort criticising police.

Some older villagers have also felt a difference.

“I’ve noticed a shift,” said longtime villager Carole Cobbs. “I’m not feeling the same sense of community policing. I don’t know when it changed but some newer officers don’t seem as friendly or as good at handling people.”

When longtime villagers talk of past policing in the village, they often use the term “community policing” to refer to the low-key police presence in town initiated by former Chief Jim McKee in the 1950s and largely extending through the tenure of John Grote that ended in 2012.

“There were fewer police, they were on foot, they knew us, they’d come to our door to say our kids were doing this or that,” said Joan Chappelle, who as a longtime Human Relations Commission member kept an eye on police activities. “There were fewer citations. Enforcement was the exception, conversations were the rule.”

The foundation of the style was a strong relationship between the community and police officers, who lived in the village, according to Joan Horn.

“It was their familiarity with the community that was important, feeling they were a part of the community,” she said of the officers. “It was the humanizing of the process I appreciated.”

A significant component of Chief McKee’s philosophy was his belief that police shouldn’t just stop crime but address community problems that might lead to crime, according to former Chief John Grote, who was hired by McKee in 1984. McKee wanted his officers aware of teens in crisis or people struggling with poverty. Noticing that some children lacked warm coats in winter, McKee started the police coat fund, which continues today, along with other McKee-related initiatives such as the Yellow Springs Food Pantry (started with Mary Ann Bebko) and the annual Christmas gift program.

“It grew,” Grote said. “We made sure people were fed, that they were warm and had holiday gifts. That’s the way we did things here.”

After Grote became chief in 2005, he tried to continue McKee’s legacy. For instance, to build better community relations, officers read stories to preschoolers at the Children’s Center and continued Officer Huey Livingston’s engagement with kids on the Mills Lawn safety patrol. Grote tried to make officers more visible by putting some on bikes, and he also tried to be at Mills Lawn each day to greet children as they arrived, taking advantage of the opportunity to talk to both kids and their parents.

“It was a good way to keep the lines of communication open,” he said.

Overall, according to Grote, in order to engage with the community, “We tried a lot of things. And a lot of what worked was the way Jim did things.”

A different definition
New Yellow Springs Police Chief Dave Hale, on the job since December after 29 years with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, is also an advocate of community policing, he said in a recent interview. However, Hale acknowledged that there’s a difference in what villagers refer to as community policing, which emphasizes familiarity between police and the community, and his understanding of the phrase, which is linked to its use by the Department of Justice as a crime-fighting tool used especially in the War on Drugs.

“During the interview process, I was interpreting the use of “community policing” with the terminology I was used to, which was closer to the DOJ definition,” he wrote in a recent email, regarding his hiring process.

Crime prevention is the DOJ’s highest priority and likewise, it’s the first priority of the local department, Hale wrote.

Statistics show that crime rates are low in the village and have remained steady over the past seven years, according to figures released by the department. Rates of property crime are well below that of nearby communities, below the state and national average and similar to other small towns.

However, regardless of the local low crime rates, it’s important that police train and prepare for more serious crime, Hale said in a recent email, citing a recent murder in New Richmond, a village of 2,700.

“What can happen in New Richmond can happen in Yellow Springs, so part of my job is to provide the village with the best officers and provide those officers the best training possible. It is much better to train for the improbable than to pray the improbable does not happen,” he wrote.

But some villagers worry that a focus on more serious crime could undermine the low-key police presence and community engagement that villagers have enjoyed in the past.

“The bottom line is fighting crime,” said Dayton attorney and villager Ellis Jacobs in a recent interview. “But so many other things need to be done besides that. If the emphasis on training and hiring cancels out other things the community wants police to do, like engage with the community, provide support or even guidance, that’s a problem. This is a less exciting version of policing but a more effective one longterm and certainly one more suited to this community.”

Familiarity harder
Several factors work against familiarity between police and the community, Hale said. Most obviously, once the Village could (and did) require that its police officers live in Yellow Springs, and now it is against state law to make residency a requirement.

“It’s not legal to give extra points for residency,” Hale said.

Currently, only two officers (David Meister and Dennis Nipper) out of 10 fulltime police live in Yellow Springs. And adding to the sense of unfamiliarity between police and the community, four of those officers were hired within the past year.

Aside from the change in residency requirement, Hale, who lives in Washington Township, said he has mixed feelings about the value of officers living in the community. While he can see the benefits of familiarity to the town, he also sees drawbacks for the officers.

“As a police officer, people want to talk to you about that ticket they got,” he said. “I don’t relish the idea of going to the grocery store and having to listen to someone complain about their ticket.”

When former Chief Grote had the job, he faced similar restrictions regarding giving preference to local candidates, he said recently. But he saw ways around the restriction, and at times actively tried to recruit people from the community.

“I do think it makes a big difference,” Grote said regarding familiarity between police and the community. “You could see the officers’ buy-in. They took a special interest” in the village.

Given that many villagers don’t know most current police officers, Chief Hale said he is doing his best to get his officers out into the community. He encourages them to walk downtown, he said, and to engage with people.

However, preventing crime is the department’s first priority, so it takes time for officers to get to know the community.

“When you have officers putting their focus on crime prevention, it’s a slow process,” he said.

Hale also believes that he is creating the groundwork for community policing by helping his officers, especially those new to the job, learn effective communication skills. He reviews the in-car footage of police interactions in order to give them feedback on their responses, and occasionally rides along to witness interactions.” And so far he has received no complaints about his officers’ behavior, aside from the assault and disorderly conduct charges against Sgt. Naomi Penrod regarding an incident with a villager in November. Penrod is currently on paid administrative leave.

As well as encouraging his officers to get out into the village, Hale has made himself available to groups and the local schools in an effort to reach out.

“I’ve only turned down one invitation,” he said.

The department is continuing some previous efforts to promote a relationship with the village, Hale said, including the coat fund and taking doughnuts to Mills Lawn crossing guards every Friday. And while an officer is frequently present when Mills Lawn children arrive at school, as Grote once was, Hale does not want to post an officer there on a daily basis, as he believes such a practice can encourage local crime.
“It would not take long for someone to figure out that if they wished to commit a crime (such as burglary, car theft, bank robbery) when would be the time they would most likely not be apprehended,” he wrote in an email.

Response to concerns
In a recent interview and emails, Chief Hale responded to the concerns surrounding the incidents cited above.

Regarding officers stopping those in parks after dark, Hale wrote in an email that if villagers want their parks to be accessible after dark, they should “contact the people who make the rules. The police department is the enforcement arm; we do not make rules/laws, we just enforce them.”

No one has been cited for being in a park after dark so far, Hale said, although several have been warned.

In response to the villagers who felt that police aggressively followed their cars at night, Hale pointed out that at least the drivers hadn’t been pulled over. It’s hard to respond to a vague accusation without knowing specifics, Hale said, but police generally need to follow a driver to see if they witness any infractions. If the same driver is being followed night after night and doing nothing wrong, that’s a problem, Hale said. But if police follow a variety of people in order to determine they’re driving within the law, he stands behind his officers.

“It’s okay for police to follow people. That’s what police do,” he said.

And while he’s sorry if the police actions made some villagers feel intimidated, he did not feel that that the police actions were necessarily to blame.

Seen from a different perspective, the officer was trying to do his job, and getting a drunk driver off the street is important to the community.

“My guess is that the cop was out there trying to be proactive,” he said. “You have to follow a little bit to see if it’s an OVI (operating a vehicle while intoxicated). This is what cops do. Their job is to prevent crime.”

The incident involving the couple with marijuana in their car would likely have gone differently in earlier years, according to former Chief Grote, who said his officers would probably have confiscated the substance and not arrested the couple.

The officer was certainly within his rights to make an arrest, Grote said, adding, “A lot of things are legal, but is that the kind of policy that people want?”

However, according to Hale, the department’s job is to enforce the law, and marijuana possession is still illegal in Ohio. He believes his officer acted appropriately in handcuffing the couple and bringing them down to the station.

“It is a correct and legal way to proceed,” Hale said.

And regarding putting a local couple in handcuffs, Hale said that was also an appropriate response to the situation.

“We’re not walking someone into the building without their being handcuffed and checked for weapons and contraband,” he said.

In a follow-up email, Hale said that while he stands by his officer, he would have preferred the officer confiscate the substance but not make an arrest. However, he said, he sees himself as having only two options as chief:

“First, I could micro-manage the department, which is a poor management style. This style leads to unhappy employees, a large percentage of turnover of employees, thus creating the lack of familiarity between the community and the officers.”

His second choice, Hale wrote, is to “allow officers the appropriate discretion within the limits of the law and attempt to mold those officers over time to a philosophy that is appropriate to the lifestyle that is Yellow Springs.”

“The second will not happen overnight,” he wrote.

Good will from police
Some villagers have had nothing but good experiences with local police and see indications that small town friendlness is still the norm among police and Yellow Springs residents. For instance, recently Joan Horn was surprised and pleased to see an officer taking an older woman grocery shopping.

“I was astonished. I thought, gosh, that is such a lovely thing, a way to build good will in the community,” Horn said.

And in a recent email, Hale described many instances of officers going an extra mile for villagers.

“I know of officers who shoveled snow for residents, stuck half of their body through a pet door to unlock a home where the resident had locked themselves out, bought breakfast rolls for a family after one parent felt they needed to leave the home for a while, made anonymous donations to families at Christmas, donated unclaimed bicycles to Antioch, allowed subjects too intoxicated to drive to arrange for a ride instead of charging them with a disorderly conduct,” he wrote, among other examples.

Hale wants the community to know that he hears their desire for more familiarity between police and the community, and for a department engaged with the village.

“We will continue to seek alternatives to enforcement action in victimless crimes or crimes where there is little to no damage and the parties are willing. We will continue to make contact with the businesses and owners. We will continue to seek training that promotes understanding of persons and cultures, the appropriate and minimal use of force,” he said.

To Hale, the best way to enhance familiarity between police and the village is to build a department that’s a professional and rewarding place to work thus inspiring longevity in his officers.

“I want to keep my officers here so they have time to know the community,” he said.

The town of Granville, with a small university, a healthy business district and proximity to a major city, is similar in many ways to Yellow Springs. But Granville, located 25 miles east of Columbus, has slightly fewer police officers per capita than Yellow Springs, as do five other towns of comparable size and composition in the western-central Ohio region. All seven towns spend between 30 and 50 percent of their general fund budgets on the police, with some departments subsidizing their budget with a police levy. While police in some of the towns live within the jurisdictions they serve, officers in other places live outside the city limits. And police chiefs among the seven towns had different ideas about the meaning of community policing.

A national standard for law enforcement practices is difficult to find. Policing is unique to each community, and each police department is designed around its own community’s population, budget, crime trends, minimum manning levels and sometimes a detailed work-load analysis, according to a 2012 criminal justice study published by the ICMA Center for Public Safety Management. But comparing Yellow Springs police to police in comparable towns highlights some similarities and some differences between departments.

For example, several chiefs said this month that budget plays an especially significant role in determining the “what can I afford” brand of staffing — an issue that became more common after the 2008 recession. Yet in Yellow Springs, despite two years of minor deficit spending in the general fund, which funds the police department, local police staffing has increased.

Also in other towns, the police chief is required to live in the community the department serves, while in Yellow Springs, Police Chief Hale lives in Washington Township near Centerville. Though they’re not required to, some officers in other towns also live locally, though in communities where property values are high, most officers live remotely. Similarly, in Yellow Springs, all but one full-time officer live out of town.

And while community policing in Yellow Springs means working together to solve crime, some of the other departments see it as a hyper focus on relation building and making sure police are responding at every moment to what the community says it wants.

Staffing to need

Relative to national police statistics and safety standards, the village of Yellow Springs has ample police for its size. With a population of 3,500 (2013 Census), the Village has 10 sworn officers (including the police chief), or 2.8 officers per 1,000 residents.

Though the Department of Justice cautions against using population to determine police staffing levels, the federal agency recommends 2.1 officers per 1,000 residents, which several departments in the region used to help gauge their staffing levels. According to data published by the FBI each year, the national average ratio of police to population is 2.3 officers per 1,000 residents, and 2.7 officers per 1,000 in Midwestern towns with less than 10,000 people. And on a more regional scale, the average ratio of officers to residents for the six towns comparable to Yellow Springs is 1.4 officers per 1,000 residents.

According to Yellow Springs Police Chief David Hale, the local department bases the number of officers needed on not just the residential population but the visitor population, which can rise to over 6,000 on weekends, especially in warmer seasons. Hale has also said that the high number of businesses in town puts demand on police to ensure the security of those operations.

In past years, the local department has been smaller. Though the Village did not have complete staffing records for the police department, according to Yellow Springs News archives, in 2003 and 2012 the department was down to six sworn officers, in both cases following the departure of the police chief with leaders commenting that the department was understaffed. In the intervening years, the department climbed back up to a “fully staffed” department of nine in both 2004 and 2013, and now has a full complement of 10.

To support the current level of law enforcement, the Village budgets about 44 percent of its general fund budget on the police department, which has an annual budget of about $1.4 million. Local dispatch has been maintained, as well as the average annual cost of $25,000 a year to staff a full-time officer at the Greene County ACE Task Force (five-year average of furtherance of justice revenue minus one officer’s salary and benefits).

Staffing on a budget

Cities comparable to Yellow Springs spend within a similar range of their general funds on the PD, but they staff fewer officers. Bluffton, a university town of 4,100 just off I-75 near Lima, staffs two officers per 1,000 residents and uses 34 percent of the city’s general fund to support the department. According to Police Chief Rick Skilliter, due to state cuts to local governments, Bluffton was down to six officers and feeling strained to police the 1,100 students at Bluffton University and the local hospital (neither of which has security officers), a healthy downtown business district, five major industries and an interstate business district that has generated two shootouts and a bank robbery during which the suspect set himself on fire.

Even with the addition of eight part-time officers, the Bluffton PD is “stretched pretty thin for coverage.” Part-time officers often work day jobs and have little time for additional training or connecting with the community, and they tend to have a higher turnover. Skilliter aims to have two officers on most shifts because of the generally accepted practice that the more officers responding on a call, the less likely they are to use aggressive tactics.

“It’s been shown that it’s more dangerous with one officer because that person has fewer options to resolve a hostile environment and is more likely to resort to tools such as holds, a taser, pepper spray, or, god forbid, deadly force,” Skilliter said.

Granville PD staffs at a similar ratio to Bluffton, with 1.8 officers per 1,000 residents and devotes 30 percent of its general fund budget to operate the PD on a $1.35 million budget. Granville, population 5,700, retains 10 full- and six part-time officers to cover the town’s thriving business district and Dennison University’s 2,100-student campus, which also has its own security.

“Ten full time is … ideal for our community not because of crime rate, but because the community as a whole wants to enjoy 24/7 police coverage,” according to Granville Police Chief Bill Caskey.

Police Chiefs Doug Doherty of Bellbrook and Lew Wilcox of Enon agreed that their cities’ budgets greatly influenced the size of the police department. With 7,000 people, Bellbrook has 12 full-time officers, or 1.7 officers per 1,000 residents; while Enon, population 2,600, staffs four full-time officers, or 1.5 per 1,000. Doherty insists on staffing a minimum of two officers per shift, and with the help of two part timers, is able to accomplish that goal. Though he would like to get to the DOJ’s recommended standard of 2.1 officers per 1,000, he is cognizant of the bottom line.

“A lot of chiefs use that as a standard, but probably most departments have less after the recession,” Doherty said. “You can only have what you can afford.”

Though Enon’s ratio of officers to population is comparable to Bellbrook, the village empirically has so few officers that even with the assistance of six part-time officers to fill in the gaps and on weekends, Wilcox can only staff one officer on most shifts.

“I would like more full-time people, but it won’t happen based on the finances,” he said. “When someone’s out due to illness, vacation or training, we have to juggle people around … even one more full-time person would give us much more latitude for scheduling.”

Bellbrook devotes 50 percent of its general fund to support its $1.6 million annual police budget. And while Enon spends 42 percent of its general fund on police, the department derives the majority of its $450,000 annual budget from two police operating levies. Neither department has local dispatch, and both stretch their resources for as much coverage as they can afford.

“People pay extra money to have 24-hour police protection and we can’t just stop because crime doesn’t stop between the hours of 9 p.m. and 8 a.m.,” Wilcox said. “We cruise the neighborhoods, rattle the doors at night, respond to people who get sick day and night and when fires happen.”

If Bellbrook and Enon departments run lean operations, Cedarville and Union are both on strict policing diets. Cedarville staffs 1 full-time officer per 1,000 people, and Union has slightly less than one per 1,000 residents. Both towns lean heavily on part-time officers, which greatly outnumber the full-time staff, and deal with the inconvenience of a constantly changing pool of people to depend on.

While Union, with 6,400 people, is slightly bigger than Yellow Springs, as a bedroom community without a business district, there is very little crime, according to Union Police Chief Mike Blackwell, who doubles as the city’s fire chief. Still, the city manages to get two to three officers on most of its shifts using five full-time and eight part-time officers with an annual budget of just over $900,000.

Cedarville, on the other hand, with four full-time and 20 part-time officers, often gets stuck with just one officer on a shift to police the village of 4,000 with a small business district and support Cedarville University security for 3,600 students. With a tax exempt university as the village’s largest employer and local government funding cuts, Cedarville police subsist on a budget of $320,000, which includes a salary of $53,000 for Chief Chris Gillaugh, a Cedarville native.

Effect on community policing

While most of these small-town police departments operate on relatively tight budgets, many still practice what their leaders feel is successful community policing. Variously defined as public service type policing, officers knowing the residents they serve, community and police working together, interacting with residents in a positive manner, and seeing the community as part of a family, community policing is a practice several of the local chiefs felt they were living.

“Honestly, when you’re in a small community that’s what you do because everybody knows you — there’s no such thing as a secret,” Cedarville Chief Gillaugh said. “You know the people because you see them every day.”

Bluffton’s Chief Skilliter agreed that community policing is second nature to small town officers, who know that building trust in the community makes it easier for residents to approach police when they have a problem.

“We were doing community policing long before the governor’s task force prescribed it,” he said.

Community policing is also policing with a focus on safety rather than crime, according to Granville’s Chief Caskey.

“There are far too many agencies which have become (or are becoming) ‘militarized’ through the war on drugs, and this is reflected in their attitudes and their dealings with the citizenry,” Caskey wrote in an email last week. “Perhaps we are a little too Norman Rockwell here, but I would rather my officers spend time interacting with the residents in a positive manner, and in one that reflects the fact that we are literally servants to the people, and not an occupying force.”

To Enon’s Chief Wilcox, community policing means involving residents as “the eyes and ears” of the department. It’s also providing help to people in emergency financial or physical need, he said. Police connect with the community through events such as annual National Night Out, a community barbeque and game night aimed at building trust and solidarity between police and the public.

“We try to mix with people as much as we can, and when they need something, they can come and see us,” Wilcox said. “Community policing also pays off for us — people tell us when they see things that are suspicious.”

Similarly, Union engages in a kind of community policing that uses “Block Watch” (a national program), “vacation house watch” and “speech watch” to “mobilize communities to take action against crime.”

Local residency can facilitate a sense of familiarity and accessibility between police and citizens, several chiefs interviewed for this story said. Ohio law requires local residency for police chiefs, but village and city councils can waive the requirement in the officer’s contract, as in Chief Hale’s case.

But the chiefs of Cedarville, Union, Bluffton and Granville live in or on the border of the towns they serve, and several said local residency for the chief is good for the community.

“It has its ups and downs — I can’t go the grocery or out to a restaurant without someone saying, ‘Hey, chief,’” according to Chief Skilliter of Bluffton, nine of whose full- and part-time officers also live in town. “But I’m okay with the chief living here. It’s good for public relations, and it’s good for the community to be able to approach the chief and discuss things with him or her.”

Also aiding in community policing, several chiefs said, is the 40-hour Crisis Intervention Team, a program that teaches first responders how to work effectively with residents with a mental illness. In Yellow Springs, all full-time officers except the chief in Yellow Springs have some training in crisis intervention, but not the 40-hour program, according to Hale.

Bluffton has required CIT training for its full-time officers for the past eight years, and three of eight part-timers are also trained.

“It plays into the need to have resources for officers so they don’t resort to hurting people or getting hurt,” Chief Skilliter said.

All of Granville’s officers are CIT-trained, and half of Bellbrook’s officers are certified, and that department sends one officer each year to CIT training.

“Our officers are all CIT-trained and always engage in verbal de-escalation tactics whenever possible,” Granville’s Chief Caskey said. “99.9 percent of our arrests occur without incident.”

Caskey also added that though his officers will file charges if they find illegal drugs and “are aware of the war on drugs, we are not participants.”

“Is it a more responsible use of tax payer funds to put an officer out and encourage drivers to slow down where children are, or is it more responsible to have an officer running around trying to find someone to sell them a marijuana joint?” he wrote. “I would argue for the former.”

POLICE MATTERS
 
This is the seventh in a series of articles examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.
• Click here to view all the articles the series

This is the first of two articles reporting the results of a Yellow Springs News online survey on local policing.

Some villagers fear for their own safety because they believe the Yellow Springs Police Department unfairly targets them. Others believe the police force is so professional and respectful that any critique of the force is unjustified.

Most of those who participated in an anonymous online Yellow Springs News survey on local policing fell somewhere in the middle of these perspectives, with two thirds reporting that they were satisfied with the YSPD.

The survey also revealed that respondents believe Yellow Springs is an extremely safe community, some of which is attributable to the Yellow Springs Police Department. The majority believe that officers are professional, respectful and reasonable and not overly aggressive or unjustified in their actions. The majority of respondents also know one to two of the 10 local officers by name or sight and believe that crime here has stayed the same over the years.
However, while two thirds were satisfied with local police, those figures may have fallen from a 92 percent satisfaction rate 10 years ago. And among those who have been pulled over, cited, arrested or appeared at Mayor’s Court, around 30 percent agreed that officers were unjustified in their actions, and 25 percent found them overly aggressive during their interaction.
Some respondents specified harassment and profiling by the YSPD as reasons for their dissatisfaction. One noted:

“I haven’t had a run-in recently, but that’s because I only work, live and have kids go to school here. I hardly shop or hang out downtown, one reason being police harassment.”
Another said an officer was “belligerent, aggressive, provocative and menacing” and lied about an expired registration to gain entry into a local home.

Others have had mostly positive experiences, including a large percentage whose experience with police has been from calling for assistance or because they were a victim or witness to a crime.

“I’ve called a few times, and when I needed assistance it arrived within a minute or two,” one respondent wrote. “We are very lucky to live in an area that has such good coverage,” they wrote, adding that officers are “all professional and friendly” while those who criticize the police are a minority. Another respondent wrote:

“My experience with and observations of the YS police officers have been very positive and it leads me to believe that the citizens of this town are still extremely critical of those in an authoritative position.” The respondent added that those who are most vocal speaking critically of the police are “the same people who tend to break the law.”

In total, 477 people completed at least part of the survey, 80 percent of whom live in the village. A further 20 percent of survey respondents work here and 15 percent are visitors.
The online survey ran for three weeks, from April 15–May 5. It was advertised in the Yellow Springs News, posted publicly on YSNews.com, emailed to subscribers and website members and posted on Facebook discussion sites.

Demographics
The survey was not representative of the village in several demographic categories, especially in regards to race and youth. The survey had far less participation from teenagers and lower participation from African-Americans. Survey demographics were similar to village demographics in other racial and age categories as well as in household income and gender.

According to the 2010 Census, the village is 78 percent white, while 85.5 percent of survey respondents were white. Only 5.5 percent of survey respondents were African American, compared with an African American population figure of 12 percent here. The survey had about the same percentage of respondents from two or more races, or who were Asian or American Indian/Alaskan Native as the village.

The age of survey respondents was on par with 2010 Census figures in the age ranges of 20–29 and 40–59, while there were about twice as many 30- to 39-year-olds and 60- to 74-year-olds responding compared to Census figures. About half as many older than 74 took the survey compared to Census figures. In the largest deviation from age demographics, there was essentially no teenage and youth participation in the survey. While there are some 200 local teens (15–19 year olds) according to the Census, only two residents under 20 years old took the survey.

Household income figures of survey participants were similar to village figures, and were nearly on par with Census figures of lower income (below $25,000 per year) and upper income (more than $100,000) residents. There was slightly more survey participation for those making $25,000 to $49,000 per year. And about 58 percent of survey respondents were women, compared with a local female population of 54 percent.

Satisfaction with police
Overall, nearly two-thirds of survey respondents reported they were satisfied with the Yellow Springs Police Department. That included one third who were very satisfied and another third who were somewhat satisfied. Only 28 percent of respondents reported they were either somewhat or very dissatisfied with the YSPD.

However, villagers may be far less satisfied now than was reported in a 2005 mail and random telephone survey completed by the Village of Yellow Springs. According to that survey, designed to gauge citizen satisfaction with many government services in light of budget constraints, 92 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the police department, two-thirds of whom said they were very satisfied. Only six percent said they were dissatisfied by the YSPD in that survey. While in the News survey 13 percent of respondents were very dissatisfied, just 1.2 percent were very dissatisfied in the 2005 Village survey.

It may appear that satisfaction with police, while still high, could have declined precipitously over the last decade. Other factors may be that the News survey included more self-selected respondents who harbored concerns over policing. The fact that the survey was online, focused solely on policing and was advertised primarily to News readers may have also played a role.

Other survey questions showed somewhat less positive perceptions about the police department, though generally the police received good ratings across all questions. When asked how they would rate the management of the police department in its ability to address the needs of the community, about one third of respondents selected good and another one quarter said fair. About 16 percent chose either excellent or poor.

The police received slightly less favorable responses when survey respondents were asked about their opinion of the relationship between local citizens and the police department. Again, one third selected good, but one third also selected fair. Just 8 percent of respondents noted the relationship was excellent, while 18 percent reported they believed it was poor.

In a related question, the largest number of those surveyed responded that they only knew one local officer by name or sight (38 percent), another 30 percent knew two officers, 25 reported knew three to four and just 7 percent knew five or more. There are currently 10 police officers in the department, including the police chief. One respondent discussed the issue in a separate section of the survey:

“Used to know all our officers in the 1960s–80s and they all lived here. They also worked here almost their entire career. Now, with twice as many officers, I only know one by name and don’t know any that reside in YS. They come and go very quickly, turnover is high, retention low.”

Experiences with police
When asked to rate the Yellow Springs Police Department after a direct personal experience, the majority of respondents gave officers and dispatchers high marks for being professional and respectful and reported that officers were reasonable in their actions and communicated in a clear and direct manner. While the rating was slightly lower among those who were pulled over, cited, warned or arrested by police compared to those who called the police for assistance or who were victims or witnesses to a crime, a majority still said they agreed police were respectful and disagreed that they were overly aggressive or unjustified in their actions.

About half of survey respondents reported that they called the police, or were a victim or witness to a local crime in the past several years, documenting a wide variety of interactions with local police, from smaller concerns (stolen bicycle, bat loose in the home, neighbor dispute, loud party next door, dog bite, dead animals, etc.) to more serious issues (rape, abuse, stalking, home and car break-ins, health crisis, car accident, burglary). Several respondents wrote that they witnessed the 2013 shootout between police and Paul Schenck, which ended in Schenck’s death.

Two thirds of those who had these interactions with police said they strongly agreed that officers and dispatchers were professional and respectful. Including those who selected slightly agree, the numbers were even higher (73 percent for officers, 79 percent for dispatchers). In addition, 75 percent agreed that officer response time was adequate, when applicable to their situation, and slightly less, 63 percent, agreed that the YSPD helped them solve their issue, when applicable.

One respondent, who described an incident of being struck by a motor vehicle in town, wrote “the YSPD went out of its way to help me feel safe and make sure a report was available for medical and financial purposes,” adding, “I couldn’t be happier with the level of assistance they provided when I needed them.”

Another respondent expressed gratitude for police for assisting them after the theft of money from a nonprofit organization:

“I worked with one officer who was remarkable in understanding me and my plight, who guided and advised and protected me, who made it possible for us to get our money back. The officer was remarkable, helped me emotionally and legally. I was and am very grateful.”

Respondents also commended the police for help in dealing with suicidal family members and childhood traumas, with one writing:

“Can’t imagine anyone getting through that kind of trauma and end up sane without the same level of assistance, caring, kindness, accessibility, responsiveness and commitment I and my family experienced from YS Police.”

Other respondents, who gave police lower marks, wrote that police have harassed them, expressed frustration that the police never contacted them to return found stolen personal property, criticized dispatchers, and were upset that police chose not to press charges against juveniles, among other issues. One claimed they were “threatened” by Yellow Springs police in their home, while they are reluctant to file a complaint because of concern over retribution. “I consider them, far from peace officers, thugs in the employ of the state,” the respondent wrote.

Regarding the local dispatch, one respondent wrote: “I have found the dispatchers amazingly helpful in all calls I have made to police.” Others were critical of the skills and urgency of dispatchers. One suggested Xenia dispatchers have better training. Another person surveyed wrote:

“There are several dispatchers who lack the skill of being a dispatcher, they don’t answer with a sense of urgency, they don’t take your information, they are not asking important questions and giving that information to the officer.”

Fewer survey respondents have been pulled over, cited, warned or arrested by police or appeared in Mayor’s Court in the past few years. Around one third of those surveyed had those experiences, most of them because of a traffic violation, whether alleged or not. Survey respondents still rated police highly, with two thirds agreeing that officers communicated in a clear and direct manner and closer to 60 percent agreeing that officers were professional and respectful and reasonable in their actions. At the same time, around 30 percent agreed that officers were unjustified in their actions, and 25 percent found them overly aggressive during their interaction.

Most high marks came from those who said they deserved their speeding ticket or other traffic citation, others reported that the charges for more minor violations, like expired tags, were later dropped if they received more than just a warning in the first place. Others noted their experiences with the police have been positive, one writing, “In my opinion, a very helpful and kind police force. As it should be.” Another respondent wrote:

“I was in a highly stressful car accident. [The officer] was helpful, courteous, and eased the anxiety of my loved one; he addressed our concerns while remaining a calm presence and not elevating crisis.”

About 42 percent of those who appeared in Mayor’s Court agreed the mayor was fair and reasonable, one quarter disagreed and one third were neutral. Several noted that the mayor dismissed minor vehicle-related violations. One respondent expressed frustration that after the person was “brutally assaulted” in a local business, the mayor left off the perpetrator with a small fine. “Time for a new mayor,” the respondent wrote.

Of those who were more critical of the police, respondents wrote that police have hassled them, unfairly searched their home, followed them in their car, lied about the reasons for pulling them over, and violated the person’s fourth amendment rights.

When they were caught speeding a few years ago, one respondent said the police went on to tailgate them for a period before pulling them over, which seemed like an aggressive tactic designed to “elicit a reaction from me to justify an escalation.” However, once stopped, the commenter said the officer was “professional and appropriate” for the rest of the interaction.
Another respondent said that police who arrived before, or with, the Miami Township Fire and Rescue squad when called for two incidents of panic attacks and one alcohol poisoning, made the situation worse. The respondent wrote:

“On all three occasions they closely swarmed the would-be patient (each one in a disoriented and frightened, though not violent state) with 4–6 large men in uniforms, began questioning them, giving them orders they were in no position to follow, and refusing to step away.” The commenter added that medical professionals and public mental health responders were needed, “not big gruff men whose primary training is in violence and control.”

Results from the remainder of the survey on the direction of local policing will be reported in the next issue of the News

A desire for more engagement between the police and the community was at the top of a list of suggestions for the Yellow Springs Police Department in a recent online survey.

Three-quarters of those surveyed said they would like the police to engage with the community more often, including by patrolling more on bicycle and foot instead of in their cruisers and visiting schools to speak with students.

Police should also complete in-depth training in how deal with the mentally ill and disabled in crisis situations, dispatch services should remain local and the Mayor’s Court should adjudicate on as many local matters as possible, according to the majority of those surveyed. In addition, majorities did not believe that the YSPD should participate in the regional SWAT team and ACE drug task force and that the department needs more officers.

The survey also revealed that respondents believe Yellow Springs is an extremely safe community, and two-thirds are generally satisfied with the YSPD. However, while two thirds were satisfied with local police, those figures may have fallen from a 92 percent satisfaction rate 10 years ago. And among those who have been pulled over, cited, arrested or appeared at Mayor’s Court, around 30 percent agreed that officers were unjustified in their actions, and 25 percent found them overly aggressive during their interaction.

The survey also revealed that respondents believe Yellow Springs is an extremely safe community, some of which is attributable to the Yellow Springs Police Department. The majority believe that officers are professional, respectful and reasonable and not overly aggressive or unjustified in their actions. The majority of respondents also know one to two of the 10 local officers by name or sight and believe that crime here has stayed the same over the years.

In total, 477 people completed at least part of the online survey, which ran for three weeks in April and May. The survey was not representative of the village in several demographic categories, with less participation from local teens and from African Americans. It fairly represented the village in other racial and age categories as well as in household income and gender.

Read the articles summarizing the survey in the May 14 and May 21 print editions of the News.

Download a summary of the survey here:YSNewsPoliceSurvey_Summary

Download the “Additional Comments” section of the survey here:AdditionalComments

Download two other sections of open-ended comments here:ExperienceWithYSPD
And here: ExperienceWithYSPD2

Read the other articles in the Police Matters series here: Police Matters Series

POLICE MATTERS
 
This is the eighth in a series of articles examining the local police department and its relationship to the village.
• Click here to view all the articles the series

This is the second of two articles reporting the results of a Yellow Springs News online survey on local policing.

A desire for more engagement between the police and the community was at the top of a list of suggestions for the Yellow Springs Police Department in a recent online survey.

Three-quarters of those surveyed said they would like the police to engage with the community more often, including by patrolling more on bicycle and foot instead of in their cruisers and visiting schools to speak with students.

Police should also complete in-depth training in how deal with the mentally ill and disabled in crisis situations, dispatch services should remain local and the Mayor’s Court should adjudicate on as many local matters as possible, according to the majority of those surveyed. In addition, majorities did not believe that the YSPD should participate in the regional SWAT team and ACE drug task force and did not believe that the department needs more officers.

The survey also revealed that respondents believe Yellow Springs is an extremely safe community, and two-thirds are generally satisfied with the YSPD.

In comments, some survey respondents wrote that the police are being unfairly targeted. One said the current critiques are a “witch hunt,” and another said police are judged for the actions of other officers. Yet another said that police are sworn to uphold and enforce the law and “are not here to make everyone happy.”

“When someone breaks the law we as a society have established, we pay [the police] to take action and protect us and our community,” the responder wrote. While the police need fair and reasonable oversight, “We as a community should not continue to beat them for doing their duty.”

Other survey respondents were critical of the tactics of the YSPD, writing that their tactics are overly aggressive and that they are prone to racial profiling and involved in a failed “war on drugs.” One said that local police should not follow the policies of departments in large cities, preferring “safety officers,” with another suggesting “peace officers” instead of police officers. Of a different approach, one respondent wrote:

“Don’t go out seeking criminals. You are not an army to keep us lowly citizens in line. You are our employees. ‘To protect and serve,’ not ‘To bust and convict.’”

In contrast to more critical statements, one respondent wrote: “Our village has a rare set of circumstances that allows it to be an example of progressive, community growth-oriented justice that sets it apart from the ominous direction our nation at large is heading.”

In total, 477 people completed at least part of the online survey, which ran for three weeks in April and May. The survey was not representative of the village in several demographic categories, with less participation from local teens and from African Americans. It fairly represented the village in other racial and age categories as well as in household income and gender.

Direction of the YSPD

The largest percentage of survey participants agreed that all officers should complete the 40-hour Crisis Intervention Training (86 percent). According to Police Chief Hale in an interview this week, all of the department’s officers except Hale have had some crisis training during their police academy education, but he is not certain if any have had the 40-hour CIT training.

Dispatch services should remain local, according to 81 percent of those surveyed. As one respondent wrote: “Local dispatch employees have enormous knowledge of individual villagers … Their professionalism and efficiency is stellar!”

Majorities also said that Mayor’s Court should adjudicate on as many local matters as possible (71 percent), social workers, mental health professionals and non-sworn emergency respondents should play a larger role in public safety (70 percent), and the department should explore alternatives such as restorative justice (60 percent).

One respondent wrote that, “Mayor Foubert makes sound decisions and his court should be utilized much more,” and another wrote, “We shouldn’t be outsourcing justice to Xenia.”

Others weighed in that Mayor’s Court can’t legally hear more cases, needs fresh blood and is an “outdated and ineffective system.”

“Violations should be heard in municipal court with a proper judge and prosecutor,” one wrote. That respondent added that social workers and mental health workers have a proper role in treatment if that is part of a perpetrator’s sentence, but “are not trained or equipped to respond to emergency situations.”

However, more survey respondents wrote in support of the use of social workers and others to deal with some of the work now handled by the YSPD. One wrote, “Minimize the service work done by expensive police officers and employ non-police citizens … everything from helping children cross the street to jumping cars that won’t start to doing mental health crisis intervention.”

Another wrote that judging from weekly police reports in the News, the Village might need an animal control officer. A different respondent was critical of the police escorting villagers shopping. Weighing in on the matter, one wrote that, “All [the police department’s] incidental medical, mental health and community service functions can and should be carried out by people who are specifically trained for that purpose, and who are not armed, nor constantly threatening racial violence by their very appearance.”

More than half of those surveyed did not feel that the department should participate in the regional SWAT team (55 percent), including 40 percent who strongly disagreed, while 25 agreed with the participation in SWAT. A smaller number, around 40 percent, did not think the YSPD should continue to participate in the ACE Drug Task Force, while 35 percent agreed it should continue to be involved.

A slight majority disagreed with the statement that more officers are needed in Yellow Springs (51 percent), while 12 percent thought more officers should be added. Additionally, two-fifths disagreed that the police should patrol their neighborhood more often (one-fifth want more neighborhood patrols).

Police-community engagement

Majorities of those surveyed said they would like the police to engage with the community more often (78 percent), including by patrolling more on bicycle and foot than cruiser (73 percent). In an open-ended comment box, some survey respondents specified how they would prefer police engage. One mentioned that police should be put on foot patrol when they first come to the village to “get to know the community.” Others said it’s a “show of good will,” and “could help repair the relationship between the community and officers.” One said foot and bicycle patrols are important because “a cruiser moving along with windows closed is not approachable.”

However, a recent attempt by officers to “get to know” villagers milling outside of a local bar at 1:30 a.m. was perceived as “extremely disingenuous,” according to one respondent. Another said they already see patrol officers on duty frequently walking around town in places such as the library and Tom’s Market and “engaging with people on the street in friendly conversation.”

The police presence at morning drop-off at Mills Lawn Elementary School was noted as a bright spot by several of those surveyed, with a smaller number suggesting that it is a waste of time for officers.

“We don’t need to pay someone more than minimum wage to help children cross the street to go to school!” one survey respondent wrote.

Another survey respondent wrote that if more police officers lived in town, that engagement would come naturally since they would be “a greater part of the community.” In fact, numerous survey respondents added that local officers, and the chief, should live in town. One person surveyed wrote that when officers live in town, it “keeps them invested in the community, and makes them see the community members as individuals rather than faceless perpetrators of crime.” A few noted that police were more engaged with the community in previous years.

“In years past it seemed the department was more a part of the community and now it feels as if it is apart from and scrutinizing the community, looking for wrongdoing,” one respondent wrote.

Another disagreed with the notion of past “golden years of policing,” adding that the police department has been managed well over the last 20 years and it is access to information that has changed perceptions of police behavior.

A few wrote that more engagement with the public and school would be a negative. One wrote that “police are basically in a violent role” and another wrote, “My feeling is that the YSPD should stay as far away from the public as possible, as they are the problem in the current manifestation, not the citizenry.” One person surveyed wrote they would prefer to limit their interactions with officers because of a lack of trust, stating that one “horrible experience” with police can instate fear.

“When officers abuse their power, a citizen realizes how powerless they are,” they wrote. “It’s pretty unnerving.”

Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported they would like police to visit the schools more often, with one specifying that the police should be there to “inform students of their rights as citizens” and another saying “it would be great if my kids were comfortable around local officers.”

In addition to asserting that more officers should live in town, survey respondents added that the local police department should be more diverse, specifically with respect to gender and race.

Community policing

Many survey respondents noted a desire for “community policing.” In a follow-up email to some survey respondents, they defined community policing as generally about police officers interacting with the public on foot patrols, in local shops, at meet-and-greets and other local events to build mutual trust and connection. One wrote it involved the police “embedded in the community,” which can lead to them “pre-empting” crime.

Another called community policing “authority with compassion,” and said the practice involves police walking around their “turf” to get to know community members.

“By doing this, police are not a foreign invasion during times of trouble, but perhaps a friendly face that is there to help,” they wrote.

Another respondent described community policing as “a partnership with an objective to determine community needs and policing priorities.” In a related comment in the survey, one person suggested a “public oversight committee” that would keep tabs on the department, while another said the Village should be involved in hiring new officers, who should be more closely examined on personality factors like antisocial and sadistic traits to “weed out persons poorly suited for the work of community policing of a peaceable small town that, as a whole, values and embraces non-violence.” Yet another respondent wrote that Council should not “micro-manage the police department,” adding, “If they don’t trust the police chief to do his job, they should not have hired him.”

Others noted the term “community policing” has multiple definitions, including the use of neighborhood watches and citizens to look out for, and report, suspicious activity and persons. One wrote that community policing is about making sure that those who harm villagers or morally debase the community face “detrimental consequences” while also ensuring that there will be “watchful eyes, at all times, looking out for the well-being of this community.”

Another survey respondent was critical of community policing, which the respondent called a “buzzword,” adding that citizens should realize the village is “part of a much larger world and as such should participate in the big picture of law enforcement,” balancing a community policing approach with “task based enforcement.”

Finally, one respondent with law enforcement experience wrote that at its best, community policing is a “two-way street.”

“Respect and understanding must flow from both sides, officers and citizens alike,” they wrote. “An adversarial mindset on either side will doom the efforts.”

Crime and safety concerns

The vast majority of respondents said they felt safe in the village (93 percent), including nearly 70 percent reporting they felt extremely safe here. Only 2.5 percent said they felt unsafe, while another five percent were neutral on the question.

However, when asked how much their feeling of safety they attributed to the Yellow Springs Police Department, the majority, 55 percent, reported that some of it was attributable to police, 22 percent reported that most of it was, and just four percent selected “all of it.” Meanwhile, 18 percent of respondents said none of their feeling of safety could be attributed to the YSPD. One respondent, who attributed some of their feeling of safety to the YSPD, wrote:

“I feel like police are doing a great job, but I’m not sure if repeat offenders are out on the streets. Would like to hear the statistics, but I feel very safe because of the Yellow Spring PD.”

In comments, those surveyed wrote that Yellow Springs is safe by comparison and one wrote that “two patrols increases security significantly.”

Other survey respondents mentioned that they don’t feel safe because of the presence of guns in and outside of the community, recent car and home break-ins here, and the presence of drugs and mentally ill people here. One wrote: “Have always felt safe here, but crime and violence can happen everywhere.”

Others reported that they didn’t feel safe because of the actions of the police themselves, one noting, “I feel safe, despite the police.” Another wrote:

“As a person of color I am always somewhat concerned about becoming a victim of policing.”

Respondents added other concerns in an open-ended comment box. Nearly half of the comments were concerns about the Yellow Springs Police Department’s tactics, with mentions of racial profiling, aggressiveness, unnecessary traffic stops, militarization of the department, police brutality, and the departure from community policing.

“The Police overly target the already marginalized members of the community,” one respondent wrote, while others specified youth and people of color being singled out by police. One person wrote: “I am now afraid of the police after living here for 43 years.”

A smaller number of commenters said they supported the police, and are concerned about recent criticism of the department. One wrote: “I feel safe here and appreciate the job our police do in trying to keep on top of problems that can and sometimes do cause problems.”

Another noted: “I am concerned that Council is being bullied about the new Chief, the ‘drug task force’ and the force in general. Those criticizing have taken extreme positions, used false or misleading data, apply incidents in other places as though they happened here. They are stubbornly refusing to accept reasonable explanations and are at bottom intellectually dishonest.”

Drugs were another category of concern about which several respondents added a comment. Concerns included heroin use by local teens and heroin dealing in a local business.

“The town may not be able to admit it, or would like to look the other way,” one survey respondent wrote, “but narcotics are in the area, to include heroin being used by high school age children.”

Sexual assault and rape, which were not categories in the question, were also noted as a concern by a handful of those surveyed, and parking and speeding were also concerns. As one commenter wrote:

“I wish the speed limits were enforced so that our villagers, children and elderly could feel safer, calmer when being social in the downtown and thus help us maintain a small town atmosphere.”

Specifying what about the crimes listed concerned them, one commenter said, “Property maintenance does not concern me, crooked landlords do. Domestic violence is a symptom, not a problem. I am concerned about social services and mental health care which are things that would address the actual problem.”

Other crimes and concerns mentioned include unpermitted door-to-door solicitation, non-enforcement of junk car law, thefts from yards and buildings by “scrappers,” loud kids and animals, and guns.

Crime over time

More than 70 percent of those surveyed said they felt crime in the village has stayed the same compared to the past, with the rest of respondents split between an increase and decrease over time. The question was based upon perceptions of crime, not statistics. The News has previously reported that crime has dropped over a 10-year period here, in line with national trends.

A few commented that it seems that crime has grown here due to more drug activity, specifically “hard core” drugs like heroin and especially due to the town’s location on the U.S. 68 corridor. In clarifying their view that crime has increased here, one person wrote that they lived here for 27 years but moved recently because they didn’t feel safe in town anymore. Another wrote:

“We didn’t lock our doors when we moved here in 1994. Our house was broken into in 2006 and 2009.”

One person commented that they felt crime decreased here from the 1970s, when rape was more prevalent. Others wrote in comments that they believe the crime rate has been steady over the last 20 to 30 years. Several respondents wrote that the number of police officers, not crime, has increased over recent decades, and that crimes committed by police may be on the rise. As one survey respondent wrote:

“Strangely enough when we see the contrast between what we think of as a safe almost bucolic village, in fact terrible crimes and terrible scenes created by the police are in direct opposition to how we like to see ourselves.”

For full survey results, visit ysnews.com.

Contact: mbachman@ysnews.com

Village Council members had a tough time at their meeting this week settling on a format for their local policing discussion, scheduled to take place Monday, July 20. After a 30-minute discussion about whether to voice their own opinions or hear from Police Chief David Hale about his strategies so far, Council agreed to do both at the upcoming meeting.

Villagers are invited to attend the meeting, which will begin with an hour of business at 6, followed by the policing work session at 7. Council will meet in its chambers on the second floor of the Bryan Center.

Council members agreed that the discussion is the first opportunity the governing body has taken to share its thoughts and opinions on policing in the village since the policing forums organized by the Village Human Relations Commission began last fall. The public weighed in with their opinions, concerns and desires for local policing during a forum in October 2014. And at a second event in April 2015, Chief Hale responded to questions from villagers about the department’s operations, policies and policing tone.

But Village Council members, who oversee the Village manager, who oversees the police chief, never participated in any of the discussions, several Council members said this week. The upcoming work session is their chance to do so.

This week Council members Brian Housh and Marianne MacQueen presented a draft agenda for the discussion. The plan was developed from a review of the HRC forum, interviews with Village Manager Patti Bates, Chief Hale, former police chief John Grote, local resident Ellis Jacobs, and HRC members Kate Hamilton and Nick Cunningham, as well as a Yellow Springs News series of articles and a public survey on policing in the village.

The agenda opens with a chance for Council members to give their perspectives on policing in Yellow Springs and follows with a broad discussion about the values the community wants reflected by the Yellow Springs Police Department. The discussion then heads into “concerns,” including how the department has been affected by national issues, such as police militarization, Black Lives Matter and the war on drugs, as well as how the department has been affected by local areas of concern, such as non-local police/high turnover, possible targeting of young, poor and African Americans, stops for no cause, officer aggression, training in crisis intervention/dealing with the mentally ill, and participation in ACE Task Force. The agenda suggests considering potential strategies to meet local values, such as use of bike/walking beats, developing local capacity for local officers, training new officers with the Yellow Springs ethos, restorative justice/Mayor’s Court, and closes the discussion with planning next steps.

But before giving her own opinion about policing, Village Council member Karen Wintrow said she first wanted a chance to hear from Chief Hale about what the department has done in the eight months he’s been in office to respond to the community’s concerns and desires. Council member Gerry Simms agreed that Council should be fully informed of the department’s efforts and direction before opining about issues the department might already be addressing.

“Why are we starting with Village Council? We should start with a summary of the issues from the chief,” Wintrow said. “I’m still learning — I don’t know that there are issues” with the department.

MacQueen and Housh felt strongly about Council getting a chance to speak about policing matters, and Askeland suggested that the discussion open with a presentation by the chief and then move into the broader discussion among Council members.

Chief Hale, who was present at the meeting, also welcomed the opportunity to take about 30 minutes on July 20 (the entire event was originally intended to last about 90 minutes) to present to Council what the department has been doing and how they are responding to some of the community’s needs.

“It’s clear that this Council values a positive community and police interaction, and we want to do something about it,” Wintrow said. “I want to hear from the chief and understand why the police department is doing certain things.”

MacQueen and Housh agreed to work with Chief Hale to revise the agenda to reflect Council’s needs.

Additional items addressed at Council’s July 6 meeting will be included in next week’s News.

Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Naomi Penrod was found not guilty on all three counts, assault, interfering with civil rights and disorderly conduct, following an incident in November in Yellow Springs. Penrod was found not guilty after an hour of deliberation by an eight-person jury on Thursday, July 16, at about 6 p.m. in the Greene County Court of Common Pleas. The verdict followed a three-day trial, with Judge Teresa Liston of Columbus presiding.

Following the November incident, Penrod was put on paid leave by the local police department, and she continues on paid leave. She was suspended for several days without pay following an internal investigation.

The criminal charges against Penrod were brought by Springfield City Prosecutor Marc Ross, after the Clark County Sheriff’s Department completed an independent investigation of a complaint against Penrod brought by a villager, Athena Fannin. According to Fannin, on November 5, Penrod, at Fannin’s Allen Street home for a peace officer call for an eviction notice, grabbed away from Fannin the camera she was trying to use to record the police presence, and in the process inflicted physical harm as well as interfering with Fannin’s civil rights. However, during the trial the prosecution produced no evidence of Fannin’s physical harm, and also had no medical report to back up Fannin’s assertion that she had to go to the emergency room following the incident.

The trial took three days, an unusually long time for the Greene County courts, according to a county victim advocate on Thursday evening. The first day was taken up with jury selection, with opening statements made by the opposing attorneys on late Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, the prosecution presented its witnesses: along with Fannin, the witnesses were Yellow Springs Police Officers Mark Charles and Tom Sexton, who had both been on the Nov. 5 call with Penrod, and Chief Dave Hale. The prosecution also called as a witness Detective Darlene Buxton of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department, who had interviewed Penrod as part of the Clark County investigation.

On Thursday, July 16, the defense attorney, Adrian King of Xenia, presented his two witnesses: Penrod and ACE Talk Force Director Bruce May. The opposing attorneys then gave closing statements.

According to Ross, Penrod, who forcibly removed Fannin’s camera during the Nov. 5 event to prevent her from video taping the encounter with police, was interfering with Fannin’s civil rights.

“This is not just Athena’s Constitution, it’s all of our Constitution,” he said, citing the importance of citizens such as Fannin as citizen journalists. “This case is asking you to hold a public official accountable for her actions.”

However, King asserted that Penrod took the camera away to ensure the safety of herself and her officers, and that Fannin was obstructing police business by introducing a camera into an already volatile situation. He also asserted that Penrod was “on her own” in making a snap judgement regarding how to deal with the camera, since the Yellow Springs police department has no written policies or procedures regarding police interactions with citizens who are filming encounters with police.

“Yellow Springs police training is horrific,” he said in an opening statement. “The training is very thin.”

In the end, the jury went with the defendant, and found that they could not determine without a reasonable doubt that Penrod had intentionally taken away Fannin’s civil rights, nor had she intentionally caused physical harm.

See the July 23 News for a more detailed report.

Village Council members voiced some common themes at a work session Monday, July 20, as they took their turn to voice opinions about policing in Yellow Springs. The current national bias against police and police militarization is somewhat out of context here in the village. Still, tension exists between residents and police, largely because both groups don’t know and trust each other like they did in the 1970s. Both citizens and police officers must do some work to get to know each other and to treat each other with less suspicion and more respect. More and better officer training is a good approach, and one Yellow Springs Police Chief David Hale has already begun.

About 40 villagers came to hear Council discuss the start of a vision statement to guide the Yellow Springs Police Department and Village Manager Patti Bates, who supervises the chief of police. The discussion was a follow-up to two previous policing forums organized by the Village Human Relations Commission. At the October 2014 forum, citizens voiced concerns about a sometimes unnecessarily aggressive police force that seemed disconnected from the community and their desire for more of a peace officer presence. At a March forum, Chief Hale gave the police department’s perspectives and rationale behind some of its policies, stops and citations.

On Monday, each Council member gave initial thoughts on local policing. For example, connecting the YSPD to the national conversation on policing is both unfair and not relevant, according to Karen Wintrow, who has seen “big changes” under Chief Hale in response to citizen concerns with the local department. More discussion is needed about whether to continue with the Greene County ACE Task Force (the combined drug enforcement agency), she said, adding that the “incredibly unfortunate incident” in which an armed citizen was killed by a Task Force deputy in July 2013 “doesn’t need to define us.”

Lori Askeland agreed that scapegoating police doesn’t solve local policing issues, which are real and should be addressed with more and better officer training, a more overtly compassionate approach from officers, and at some point perhaps higher pay. Askeland leans away from participating on the Task Force. She also spoke about an “elephant in the room:” the older, whiter, wealthier majority in the village (including herself, she said) needs to be aware of its “implicit association,” which makes those in the dominant culture feel safe as “insiders,” while young, black, underprivileged citizens may be seen as “outsiders” and unconsciously treated differently.

“That can allow us to go on thinking everything is fine, and it’s not,” she said, adding that police need to be trained about implicit association or bias.
Brian Housh said the Village had hired Chief Hale based on the needs the community expressed at the first forum, and he had already demonstrated a responsiveness to concerns, for example, by engaging with school staff to connect with local youth. Continuing to criticize police and reducing staffing would only raise the risk of discouraging and perhaps losing the good officers Yellow Springs currently has, Housh said.

According to Gerry Simms, because the village has become less affordable, officers tend not to live in town, therefore villagers need to make time to get to know them personally. Villagers should also try to understand that officers sometimes cite residents for seemingly harmless offenses because they are trying to prevent a possible crime from occurring. For example, a person walking in a park at night is an easy target for a potential criminal and might get cited for his or her own safety.

“Some of our citizens expose themselves to possible crime” and are unaware of the dangers their actions pose, Simms said.

Marianne MacQueen focused on the policing concerns community members raised at the forums. Yellow Springs police, she said, should withdraw its full-time officer from the Task Force, whose participation in the war on drugs has “caused more problems than it’s solved” and wasted money treating a “social issue as a criminal issue.” The chief’s commitment to the full 40-hour Crisis Intervention Training, or CIT, for all of its officers is good news, but more positive engagement between police and especially youth is still needed. More discussion is also needed on the validity of a citizen review board to moderate policing complaints, the use of Mayor’s Court to resolve local issues, and potentially taking a “laissez-faire” approach to offenses that aren’t causing immediate harm, such as having a dog off leash at Ellis Park or walking in a public park after dark.

Laissez-faire policing took on a life of its own during the discussion, in which citizens and Council members disagreed on the usefulness of the leash law itself, as well as on how strictly to enforce it. Such loose law enforcement could potentially be applied to any law, MacQueen pointed out, including someone with a marijuana joint. But Hale, Bates and other Council members argued that the use of “double standards” could lead to unwanted discrimination. Instead, Hale said, police can issue warnings as a type of behavior changing enforcement for situations that officers deem less threatening.

Hale also mentioned that increased training is currently being mandated by Attorney General Mike DeWine, and new officers are now required to have 16 hours of CIT training in addition to a larger block of time dealing with people and situations. He said that increased scrutiny of police through widespread video camera use was “a good thing,” but that police also needed training beyond the current “shoot or don’t shoot” model that would give them options such as how to take cover quickly or use alternatives to deadly force.

“Bad cops stick out like a sore thumb — I can weed them out in an instant,” Hale said, stating that it’s much more difficult to train for the instantaneous judgements they sometimes have to make. “Good cops that make bad decisions” could potentially include any officer on the force, he said.

Local residents stated some of their concerns and needs as well, during the meeting. Longtime villagers Joe Lewis, Becky Campbell and Sue Abendroth said they wanted the Village to stay on the Task Force and that police did a good job providing safety necessary for the town. Abendroth added that police deal with complexity and should be given the benefit of the doubt; also that there was ample oversight of police, including Chief Hale, Manager Bates, Village Council, and Village Solicitor Chris Conard, to render a citizen review board unnecessary and even problematic.

“I don’t want my system of safety to be [guided] by someone I don’t have any influence over,” she said, referring to a citizen board, which could face privacy and legal issues.

Trauma nurse and paramedic Jeff Reich, Talis X, HRC member Steve McQueen and John Hempfling all voiced adamant opposition to the village’s participation on the Task Force, and both Hempfling and Antioch College student Angela Myelovega said that many young people don’t feel safe around police. Cheryl Durgans emphasized that Yellow Springs isn’t immune to the racial bias and profiling that affects police across the country.

Ken Odiorne acknowledged that polarization between the community and police was “a problem for all of us.” He said he would do his part and hopes the department will “turn things around.”

Village Council plans to continue its policing discussion. MacQueen and Housh agreed to present a draft vision statement for the police department at the Aug. 24 Council meeting.

During last week’s trial in the Greene County Court of Common Pleas, a Springfield prosecutor asked a jury to find Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Naomi Penrod guilty of two criminal charges — assault and interfering with civil rights — following a November 5 incident in which Penrod forcibly took a camera away from a villager attempting to videotape an encounter with police. In the end, Penrod was found not guilty of both misdemeanor charges. Judge Teresa Liston of Columbus then pronounced Penrod not guilty of a third charge, disorderly conduct.

The three-day trial was an unusually long one for the court and its issues were complicated, according to Attorney Marc Ross, the Springfield City Prosecutor who brought the charges against Penrod after the Clark County Sheriff’s Department conducted an independent investigation of the incident. The investigation came at the request of the Yellow Springs Police Department after villager Athena Fannin filed charges of assault against Penrod following the November event.

In a statement after the verdict was delivered, Ross said the case appeared to be the first in Ohio to reference the Ohio Revised Code’s statute that guarantees the First Amendment right of freedom of the press to citizens who film encounters with police.

“The role of the citizen journalist is an important role,” Ross said in his closing remarks. “It’s how we keep our officials and police in check. This is not just Athena’s Constitutional right, it’s our Constitutional right.”

But that right is accompanied by responsibilities, according to Defense Attorney Adrian King of Xenia, who charged that Fannin’s use of the camera destabilized an already tense situation, undermining the safety of all involved. And according to the ORC statute, a citizen forfeits the right to film encounters with police when the camera interferes with police business.

The jury agreed with King. The verdict was reached in about an hour, finding Penrod not guilty of assault and violation of Fannin’s civil rights. On paid leave from the Yellow Springs Police department since the charges were filed in February, Penrod is currently using accumulated vacation time and will likely return within a week or two in her former position as daytime sergeant, according to Police Chief Dave Hale this week.

“This was clearly an unfortunate event that everyone involved in wishes hadn’t occurred. The case has now gone through the criminal justice system,” Hale said. “From here, we move forward. If there’s damage to the public trust, we will try to rebuild that trust.”

In a comment this week, Fannin said that she wasn’t surprised at the trial’s outcome, given the history of jury selection in cases involving police. However, she said, “I want to emphasize that none of the steps I took were done lightly or without thought or care. I did what I thought was best for the community and for the police. I believe I did the right thing and am sorry I couldn’t bring more people along with me.”

Penrod did not respond to several phone calls requesting comment.

The prosecution’s case
According to testimony at the trial, on the morning of Nov. 5, 2014, Fannin looked out the window of her Allen Street home to see two police officers, Officer Mark Charles and Officer Tom Sexton, in her driveway, apparently verifying the license plates on her car. She walked outside to find out why the police were on her property, but Officer Charles said only that they were meeting someone. She protested their activity checking out the license plates on the two cars — her van and her health aide’s car — and asked who had given permission.. Fannin then asked her health aide to go inside the house and bring her the camera, as the unexplained police presence was unnerving.

“I wanted to document the incident,” Fannin said.

Fannin asked the officers who had given them permission to run the plates on her car. At that point, Sergeant Penrod, who arrived in a separate car, stated that she did. Fannin’s aide gave her the camera and after Fannin looked down to check it, she looked up to see Penrod, “rushing me with her hand coming at me,” and telling Fannin she could not record. A three-second video of the moment was widely viewed on Facebook.

According to Fannin, who is disabled and often uses a cane or wheelchair, Penrod yanked on the camera and twisted Fannin’s wrists to release it. Fannin asked Penrod to stop hurting her, she said in front of the jury, and Officer Charles steadied Fannin to keep her from falling. Penrod also threatened Fannin with jail if she didn’t give up the camera, which Penrod finally secured.

At that point, the three officers turned to leave, although Fannin said she heard Penrod make derogatory remarks, including “pathetic” and “disgusting.”

“I didn’t expect Yellow Springs police to act like that,” Fannin said, stating that at no point had she been aggressive toward police.

Later, feeling unwell, Fannin said she visited a local emergency room, where she was told muscles had been strained. She was then released, although no medical records from the visit were introduced at the trial.

In his testimony as second witness for the prosecution, Officer Charles said the two police were called to the Allen Street property to act as a peaceful presence while eviction papers were served — the officers did not realize upon arriving that the server had already come and gone. A witness to the skirmish between Penrod and Fannin, Charles, who was a trainee at the time, said the event was upsetting to him.

“I saw no reason to take the camera,” he said. “Somewhere, something was not right.”

When the three officers returned to the station, Penrod told Charles, who she supervised, “that’s not the way you handle that situation, that was not correct,” he said.

The third officer on the scene, Officer Sexton, presented a slightly different picture of the event, with an focus on Fannin being distraught with the officers and “not letting us get a word in edgewise,” though he said she did not interfere with the police doing their job. In cross examination from Attorney King, Sexton stated that Fannin’s agitated demeanor, and the distraction of the camera, had kept police from taking proper safety precautions.

In his testimony, Chief Hale of Yellow Springs described receiving a call from Penrod just after the incident, during which she “said she had messed up, she took the camera from a citizen.” Hale later made two visits to Fannin to speak with her, saying that, “She was professional, polite” but upset about the incident. Hale also said he knew there would be an investigation into the incident, so he didn’t question Penrod further at the time.

Several weeks earlier, Hale said, he had presented a briefing to his officers about citizens’ right to videotape encounters with police, sparked by an open carry demonstration expected at the October Street Fair.

Asked by Attorney Ross if he felt Penrod had a legal right to take the camera, Chief Hale said, “No.”

In cross examination, King honed in on the verbal nature of Hale’s Street Fair briefing, and the department’s lack of written policies and procedures regarding police interacting with citizens who videotape police. He asked how police can be expected to know how to interact in such situations, when there are no written policies or procedures.

“You can’t have a procedure for everything. To some extent it comes back to experience,” Hale said.

The prosecution’s final witness was Detective Darlene Buxton of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, who interviewed Penrod for the independent investigation. Buxton said Penrod did not have a clear answer about why she took Fannin’s camera, although she alluded to her previous work on the ACE Task Force, where officers are trained to not allow themselves to be photographed.

Defense perspective
Penrod began working part time for the ACE Task Force, which mainly investigates drug-related crime, in 2008, and then came on the force full time for most of 2013, after which she was promoted to sergeant in Yellow Springs. However, she still helped out the Task Force when asked to do so.

Bruce May, the head of the Task Force and the first witness for the defense, emphasized that he instructs those who work for the group to maintain anonymity as much as possible. While anonymity is especially important for officers working undercover, which Penrod had stopped about a year earlier, it was also critical for those who worked on surveillance during drug busts, which Penrod still did.

“Even if it’s surveillance, you need to have your anonymity protected,” May said, stating that publicity could compromise the safety of everyone involved in a bust.

“You have to be careful,” he said.

Asked by King if he would direct an officer to take a camera away from a citizen, May replied, “I have done that.”

However, he said, if an officer removes a camera from a citizen and the citizen wants it back, “In 2015 I would give it back.”

Later, in cross examination from Ross, Penrod acknowledged that in fact she has allowed photos of herself to be made public, such as a 2014 photo in the Yellow Springs News showing her involvement in a youth leadership program. The difference, Penrod said at the trial, was that the News photo was in a positive context, whereas she believed that Fannin would use the videotape in a negative way.

In her description of the Nov. 5 event, Penrod, the second and final witness for the defense, described her past work for the ACE Task Force, and the paramount importance of safety for all involved. Her training, both for the task force and the local department, emphasized the necessity of limiting distractions when on a call.

“Distractions interfere with safety,” she said. “You have to minimize them.”

The scene at the Allen Street house was chaotic when Penrod arrived, she said, with Fannin agitated and not listening to officers’ instructions. And when Fannin attempted to introduce the camera into the mix, Penrod needed to stop her.

“It was another distraction,” she said. “It was interfering with why we were there.”

Regarding the allegation that she hurt Fannin when taking the camera away, Penrod said she had never touched her, and she never heard Fannin say she felt hurt.

Overall, Penrod said, she knows she did the right thing in taking the camera away.
“I have no regrets of my action,” she said.

Asked by Prosecuting Attorney Ross why she appeared to apologize to the chief and her fellow officer following the incident, Penrod said she was describing the situation as messed up, and not her own actions.

“I didn’t think I was wrong, I thought the whole situation was wrong,” she said.

Part of King’s defense strategy was depicting the Yellow Springs police department as a young group of officers who lack training and written instructions on how to interact with citizens with cameras.

“These officers were in a situation of having to make split-second decisions with no procedures or training,” he said, stating, “They were on their own.”

And in her testimony, Penrod said she only understood Hale’s briefing on citizens’ rights to videotape police as relevant to the Street Fair, not in general.

In his closing remarks, King emphasized the risk involved in police work, and the need for constant vigilance.

“Officers have to treat everyone as a threat. If they don’t, they might not make it home,” he said. “It’s tough being a cop.”

King emphasized that to find Penrod guilty of assault, they had to find that she had intentionally caused harm and intentially taken away Fannin’s civil rights. However, he said, Penrod could not have intentionally taken away her civil rights because she didn’t understand them, having no written policies from her department.

The jury agreed with King, and returned verdicts of not guilty on both counts.