We are recycling this year-and-a-half old story as it is relevant today — except, I direct your attention to the insights and experiences of Mr. Shep Wilbun, the “father of citizen oversight of police” in Tennessee. Skip down to Oversight: An International Issue to get to the heart of Mr. Wilbun’s observations. Mr. Wilbun also appears in our feature doc Who Will Watch the Watchers?
In the lobby of Memphis City Hall, outside the ongoing City Council meeting, people were flocking around a dapper-looking gentleman in a plaid sports coat. Some took selfies at the end of a stick. Most lined up for photos with, over and over.
Surely, this was a celebrity.
Except, it looked a lot like former Memphis City Councilman and founder of citizen oversight of police in Tennessee, Shep Wilbun.
“Did you win the lottery?” I asked.
“No, I just think people have not seen me for awhile,” said Wilbun, who was at City Hall for a reception honoring retiring City Court Judge Ernestine Hunt Dorse.
CLERB BORN AFTER A TRAGEDY
As a member of Memphis City Council in October, 1994, Wilbun was the sponsor and driving force behind the first citizen police oversight board in Tennesee, the Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board. It was not easy. Opposed by Mayor Willie Herenton and voted down by City Council at one meeting, the ordinance was approved at the next meeting on Oct. 25, 1994.
But it took a tragedy in between, the police murder of 68-year-old neighborhood watcher Jesse Bogard on Oct. 19. Bogard was allegedly brandishing a gun and trying to scare off boys who were throwing rocks at this house, which was right behind Save-A-Stop Market in Orange Mound. Somebody called the police; it may even have been Bogard.
When police showed up, they fired nine shots, killing him. Officers said he refused their commands to put down his gun. Witnesses said he was not holding a gun when officers fired.
TALE OF TWO CITIES
In 1998, Knoxville became the second city in the state to adopt a police oversight board, the Police Advisory Review Committee. Then in November, Nashville voters approved a referendum establishing the Community Oversight Board. Nashville’s ordinance is one of the strongest community police oversight laws in the country, partly owing to the fact that citizens approved it as a referendum instead of a law having to go through the grinder of a city council and various elected officials.
“Nashville’s last mayor (Megan Barry) wasn’t for this. The mayor they have now (David Briley) is for it,” Wilbun said. “Mayor Barry came to Memphis at one point, and I talked to her. Later, I wrote her a letter encouraging her on citizen oversight. I never heard back.”
While its potential is great, Nashville’s level of success will depend on its first board members and staff and the level of cooperation it gets from the mayor and police chief.
As Nashville is coming on with citizen oversight, the Memphis CLERB may be on the wane — or at best, treading water. CLERB just decided to stop having monthly meetings and to meet every other month, due to a diminished case load which CLERB Chair Casey Bryant frankly admits is due to lack of community awareness of the oversight board.
In Memphis, CLERB was secretly disbanded in August, 2011, by Mayor A.C. Wharton’s administration. After incidents of police arresting citizens for filming them in 2013, a grassroots movement led to an updated ordinance in 2015.
CLERB began hearing cases again in late summer 2016, after a five-year gap. However, to the dismay of many citizens, Police Director Mike Rallings has rejected every single recommendation CLERB has made regarding officer conduct. The board can only hear cases after police internal affairs has heard a citizen complaint; board members are appointed by the mayor, and CLERB can only make recommendations.
OVERSIGHT: AN INTERNATIONAL ISSUE
“I found out -- this was in ’93 -- that problems we were having here they had in Britain, they had in Scotland, they had in Australia,” said Wilburn, who is now Shelby County’s chief diversity officer. “So this whole issue of police oversight is international -- although it’s different to some degree in America because our police have guns.
“They don’t really have guns in England and places like that because they only have Tasers,” Wilbun said. “And the military are the ones with the guns. Unlike police, the military have a pre-determined, identified enemy.
“It was interesting to see, even internationally, where they don’t have guns, and where the possibility of taking a life is reduced, there was a strong desire from citizens around the world to monitor police,” Wilbun said as a stream of citizens and politicians greeted him.
”And so, here we’ve upped the stakes and given police the power of life and death. And to not want civilian oversight – to have somebody to make sure we know that police are acting fairly and appropriately -- is just astounding to me.”
LIFE AND DEATH
“If you gave me the power of life and death – and you say, Shep, you have the ability to kill people if you think they’re a problem. Or if they threaten my life. Are you sure you want to give that power exclusively to me? Because it’s fraught with the possibility of abuse,” Wilbun said.
“The people I like, I treat one way. The people I don’t like, I treat another way.
“The same thing’s true with law enforcement. We have cultural differences in our society. And unfortunately, your experience in life is not my experience. I can’t blame you for your experience, but I can say that your experience is different from mine, For you to understand what I’m going through is going to be a little bit different from someone who has been through what I have been through.
“You have to make an effort,” Wilbun said. “I’m not even saying you can’t understand it. But you have to make an effort to familiarize yourself with an unfamiliar context, because that’s not what you grew up in.”
CULTURAL TRAINING
“Most of our law enforcement agencies don’t do any cultural training,” Wilbun said as a woman approached with a selfie stick. “They don’t do any type of acclimation on behalf of those who are not African-American, who will serve in the African-American community. Conversely, they bring all their pre-conceived notions to the execution of their jobs.
“If I have grown up in an environment where I have been taught, or where I have learned or where the underlying current is, ‘Those people are not as good as us, or those people are thugs, or those people are dangerous,’ when I’m in a position where I am supposed to be interacting with them, I bring that to my decision-making.
“It’s not my fault, per se, because nobody has shown me anything different. So I bring all those preconceived notions.
“So here we are,” Wilbun said. “I teach young
African-American men, and I say I’m going to give you a fact of life that nobody else is going to give you: The law says that if a policeman fears for his life, he has the right to take yours. That’s what the law says.
“He grows up in another neighborhood, another environment, where he believes, he is taught, that most of us are thugs.
“He doesn’t know who the good ones are and who the bad ones are. So the way he protects himself is by treating all of us as if we are thugs.
“Since he has been taught that we are thugs, translation is that as soon as he gets out of his car, he already is in fear for his life,” Wilbun said.
“So if you make any sudden or inappropriate move, he’s going for his gun. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be, the way I wish it was. But it’s the way it is. Until we can address that, that’s why we have so many young black men being shot who basically have not committed a crime.”
CLERB’S FIRST 2019 MEETING
CLERB’s first board meeting of 2019 was two days later. I find nothing uplifting about going to City Hall twice in one week – to a place where I have witnessed deception, self-aggrandizement and had my intelligence insulted.
Hoping to offer insights to Nashville folks who are setting up their new board this month — and for public awareness generally — I made an extended video package of the Jan. 10, 2019, meeting. I am calling this meeting “CLERB Classic,” because it showed many typical and oft-repeated elements that aggrieved citizens and CLERB members deal with.
CLERB CUTBACK
CLERB is scaling back from monthly meetings to meeting every other month, announced CLERB chair Casey Bryant. CLERB’s case load has lessened, Bryant admitted, because the public does not widely know about CLERB. The website is not fully functional, and the board needs to do community outreach.
CLERB heard one case, a complaint made by warehouse equipment operator Trent Collier, who said a K-9 officer choked him and punched him after falsely accusing him of a robbery in September, 2017. This happened after Collier’s sister had called him to help a friend jump-start a car and while Collier had his head under the hood. So much for good deed doing.
If CLERB only heard “10 or 12” cases last year, according to Bryant, it is not entirely due to the general public not being aware of CLERB. It takes a person like Collier to persevere through the gauntlet that leads to his or her chance to be heard by a public body.
WHAT IT TAKES TO COMPLAIN
Most complainants who make it this far are fairly savvy and are determined to get back, on some level, at those who have physically and emotionally abused them and lied to get away with it.
For openers, Collier said he was given the run-around at trying to make a complaint. The precinct where the offending officer worked (Mt. Moriah) turned him away and told him to go to the Hickory Hill precinct. Hickory Hill said, no, you have to complain at Mt. Moriah.
Having to complain to MPD, the organization that abused you in the first place, is a strong barrier to just get started. A citizen may not complain to CLERB until after his or her case has been adjudicated by MPD Inspectional Services Bureau.
When he spoke to a public defender, Collier said the attorney pressured him to plead guilty. Collier refused and hired a private attorney. Although Collier had to make several court appearances, miss work, and suffer the emotional and physical scars of injustice, there were no consequences for the officer. In fact, the officer failed to show up for two court appearances, Collier said, so his case was
dismissed.
Collier said he ultimately lost his job as a result of being falsely arrested and charged with assaulting an officer.
“After this happened, they started nit-picking me at work,” Collier said. His employers did not care to understand the circumstances.
“All they heard was, I got arrested.”
Gary Moore operates Moore Media Strategies, founded nonprofit Citizens Media Resource, makes films about social justice issues, and writes for Daily Kos as FreeSpeechZone. The feature doc Who Will Watch the Watchers? examines filming police, citizen oversight of police, Black Lives Matter, and the condition of the First Amendment in the Trump era.