The four finalists for Spokane police chief answered questions Thursday evening at a public forum at the Central Library.
They are:
Kevin Hall – Assistant Chief of Police, Tucson, AZ Police Department
Kathleen Lanier – Colonel, Memphis, TN Police Department
Matthew Murray – Chief of Police, Yakima Police Department
Tom Worthy – Chief of Police, The Dalles, OR Police Department
Here are questions and lightly edited answers. You can hear the entire forum at the link above.
Why are you interested in serving as Spokane police chief?
Kevin Hall: “This is such a special community. It’s beautiful. There is diversity here. I’ve heard, ‘It’s not very diverse.’ I beg to differ. It’s very diverse. It’s diverse in ideas, in culture. It’s diverse in socioeconomic status and all of that is valuable. It’s valuable perspectives that I believe in and everybody who has those perspectives would have a voice that I would listen to. I intend to be incredibly accessible. I want people to call me….to talk to me about what’s going on in their neighborhoods.”
Kathleen Lanier: “I would like to be the chief of police of the Spokane Police Department and the city of Spokane because I bring 34 years of experience, knowledge, skills and I certainly have the ability. I’ve worked in many capacities. I could be an asset to this community coming from a major city’s police department where we’ve had many, many, many challenges. The areas that I’ve worked in have been vast in my 34 years and I could package that up, put it in a suitcase, bring it here and share that with you and identify some of the areas of improvement where there needs to be change.”
Matthew Murray [whose last day as Yakima police chief is today]: “I’m a Washington chief and those who live here know that can be a challenge. We have a different set of laws than a lot of the country. So we navigated that. We navigated a lot of the post-George Floyd period…When they asked me the question, ‘Do you still have gas in the tank? Can you still do this?’, I realized I do. I feel like I could be a good fit. I could do that work. I’m certainly going to do it in a way you’ve probably never seen. It may seem a little strange at times. That’s just who I am. I’m a little unique that way and I really have some different ideas.”
Tom Worthy: “The Dalles really mirrors Spokane in many ways, maybe not by population, but the challenges that we face on a day-to-day basis, every single day, engaging with the community…I want to bring my brand of community policing. I have this experience. I have this education. I have the training. I’m an FBI National Academy graduate and I have that value that I want to bring to Spokane, a community with the resources and the challenges to fully implement my brand and my approach and my philosophy to policing and make Spokane better.”
One of the most mentioned issues in our community meetings was the frequency of officer-involved shootings. How would you address that?
Kathleen Lanier: “Trust with the public is very important. In my current position, I oversee officer-involved shootings in my current agency. I’ve learned that when my team and I investigate these we find that there are training issues. We need to look at a wider array of training for officers, ‘shoot-don’t shoot’ scenarios, de-escalation training, use of less lethal munitions, things that could work instead of firing the fatal shot.”
Matthew Murray: “In seeing this and hearing about this, because I knew it was a question a lot of you are asking and it’s an issue, I did a lot of research in your city. Listen, you have an independent monitor, an ombudsman. You have training that’s required by the state that this department does in de-escalation. You have a great training cadre and a great training academy. We use them so I know.”
Tom Worthy: “The way to modify and moderate the number of police shootings occurs well before you get to that point. I look at the medical profession, the Hippocratic oath, if you know what that is, which states, first, do no harm. Let’s not go to a situation and make it worse. So when we evaluate police shootings, and we’ve had them, we go back well before that event occurred. What was that person doing? What information was known to that officer on their response and what did they do to plan that response as they went that direction?”
Kevin Hall: “There’s not a whole lot police can do when an individual has a firearm and is threatening the lives of the officers or people around them. Where we can have an impact is when there are edged weapons, knives or blunt force instruments, baseball bats, sticks, pipes, things like that. Those are the ones we can impact to a much greater degree. So there is training. I’m not a big fan of trying to solve every police problem with training. That’s like the low-hanging fruit. But there is a training element and it goes all back to the academy and how we’re training officers in the academy.”
How will you navigate pressing public health challenges such as homelessness or opioid use disorder?
Matthew Murray: “I think the biggest thing is we have to care about the outcome. The biggest thing we suffer from, in American policing, is indifference. When I got to Yakima, we changed the mission statement to we’re going to reduce violent crime through exceptional customer service and if you look at the side of a Yakima police car, it says delivering exceptional customer service. Guess what, the guy in the dumpster is a customer and we need to treat people in a way that they feel like a customer.”
Tom Worthy: “Fentanyl is taking lives. I was behind a dumpster last week with an individual who had overdosed. We saved his life with Narcan. That’s one thing that the police can do. When we get those overdose calls, we can be Johnny-on-the-spot with Narcan, know what to do with it, know what to do if it fails and get our fire partners involved as well to offer services to those people and save lives. Additionally, the drug trafficking organizations that are bringing that poison into Spokane need to be disrupted. They can’t operate openly. They need to be on their toes knowing that the police are watching.”
Kevin Hall: “There’s no one solution. You need multiple solutions, multiple pathways to attack this. I do believe it’s a public health issue, not a law enforcement issue. However, criminal behavior has to be addressed by law enforcement. There is a perception of unsafe environments when citizens walk the streets and see open-air drug use. I don’t believe we should be allowing open-air drug use and I don’t think it serves the community these folks live in. At the same time, we have to offer a pathway to treatment or at least treatment engagement. We have to offer a pathway to housing. We have to offer a pathway for these folks to be able to address their behavioral health.”
Kathleen Lanier: “I’m passionate about bringing the criminal, the trafficker to court, make them face the music. But one thing that we do, we have an overdose response team and it’s worked. Our overdose response team comes to the scene…an investigator talks to them and we try to convince them to work with us to bring that person to justice, arrest, prosecution, jail time, whatever. It’s about arresting the offender because it’s not a crime to be an addict.”
