In our country, most cities operate either under a strong mayor system of governance or under a city administrator system. In the strong mayor system, the mayor appoints all city department heads, including the chief of police, and they serve at his pleasure. In the administrator system, the mayor or city council appoints a professional city manager who appoints all department heads.
It is NOT common knowledge that most city police chiefs are NOT free to run their departments absent of political interference. Everyone knows that county sheriffs have to be elected to their jobs every four years or so. On the other hand, police chiefs who are appointed by a mayor have to run for office every day. If they displease they mayor they are out of a job pronto. Thus, they have to serve the mayor’s political ambitions in order to keep their jobs.
The City of Houston offers a good example. The city’s strong mayoral government has led to a succession of police chiefs who are most notable for being the political puppets of whichever mayor happened to be in office. Houston will soon be saying goodbye to Mayor Bill White who is now running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The city will also be saying goodbye to police chief Harold Hurtt because the next mayor will want to appoint his own chief.
There is a much better way to select police chiefs than to have them appointed by a mayor who requires that the first priority of his police chief is to make sure that the police department does not get in the way of his political ambitions.
A city would be well advised to establish an independent police commission for the purpose of selecting the city’s chief of police. That commission would not only select the police chief, but it would also establish general guidelines for the police department. The chief would then be free to operate within those guidelines, absent of political interference. The commission would also be able to fire the chief, but only for malfeasance in office and only if he fails to follow the guidelines or turns out to be incompetent.
To ensure their independence, the members of the commission should be elected rather than appointed, as is the case in Los Angeles.
The city would be divided into five police commission districts. Candidates for a seat on the police commission would run for office in each district. A candidate would have to show proof that he/she had been an actual resident within his/her district for a minimum of five years. The election should be non-partisan – no candidate should be identified as Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Marxist, or whatever.
The police commission can be established at little cost to the taxpayers. Its members should be paid only one dollar a year plus their out-of-pocket expenses. In this way, only the most civic minded candidates would run for that office. The commissioners should not have to meet more than once a month unless some emergency would require additional meetings. As for staffing, the commission would only need a secretary, probably a part-timer at that.
No mayor would want to give up his power to appoint the police chief, but by having a five member independent police commission make the selection, the police chief would be free from political interference, thus allowing him to run the police department for the good of the whole community.
No comments:
Post a Comment