Atlanta Looks For The Next Chief

While there are probably great internal candidates, finding the right person to run Atlanta's police department is harder than it looks.

Rodney Bryant’s accidental tenure as Atlanta’s police chief ends in two months.

At the height of police brutality street protests in 2020, an Atlanta police officer shot and killed a man during a DUI traffic stop in south Atlanta. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately fired the two police officers involved, prompting the resignation of police chief Erika Shields.

Bryant came out of retirement as a replacement, holding things together at the department as best as anyone could while conditions deteriorated. COVID-19 decimated the department’s readiness, even as violent crime spiked. Lingering resentment over City Hall’s reaction to public pressure created difficult internal dynamics. Recruiting stalled.

The city held a press conference announcing Bryant’s retirement last week. While Dickens said a national search would be conducted, both Bryant and Dickens strongly suggested that a local candidate is a likely pick.

Atlanta has been a fertile recruiting ground for police leaders. Chattanooga poached Atlanta Deputy Chief Celeste Murphy to run its police department in February. Major Reginald Moorman is a finalist to be appointed sheriff of King County in Washington, essentially police chief for suburban Seattle.

“That shows the talent that we have here, especially when it comes to leadership,” Bryant said. “I think the city of Atlanta probably produces more executive leaders in the country than any other agency. But again, that's to the the training and experiences that we have here in the city of Atlanta.”

People often think of leadership as a kind of soft quality abstraction. It gets one measurement: good or bad. That’s unfair. I prefer to think of it as a kind of rock-paper-scissors problem. A very good leader of one type might be the wrong answer under other conditions. Every leader isn’t going to be equally excellent in every situation.

Sometimes you’ve got to pull Pedro Martinez off the mound. Sometimes you should leave Clayton Kershaw in. Neither decision is a value judgment about how good someone is, just a managerial assessment of conditions matching up.

As mayor Andre Dickens considers his options, I think it’s worth understanding what the next police chief is going to be expected to do, and perhaps more importantly what he or she is not expected to do.

I went to the press conference looking for a signal that the police department was looking for some kind of organizational transformation … and I really didn’t get it.

Mayor Andre Dickens talked about an emphasis on recruiting, community-based policing, violence reduction and crime abatement around clubs and nuisance properties, all in line with how the department operates today. He didn’t articulate a fundamental rethink about how to train, staff and deploy cops.

Which … might be fine. But it is not especially ambitious.

The loss of Erika Shields left the police force in a two-year interregnum where big, fundamental changes in doctrine became impossible because it wasn’t clear who would be administering policy in the long term. The apparent sidelining of the Office of Violence Prevention and the tepid initial effectiveness of the city’s new pre-arrest diversion center speak to this problem: it’s hard to commit to new ideas when you don’t know who is going to be in charge.

Transformational leadership is difficult. It’s a specialized talent, and one that isn’t often produced by police departments. The organization culture of most police departments rewards bureaucratic efficiency, attention to detail, conventional training, relationship building, longevity and excellence in example.

Whoever takes over will have to be able to manage the operations of the department while getting as few people killed as possible. Risk management — legal and operational — is a critical skill that is often at odds with transformation.

Transformational leaders come from organizations where people are allowed to experiment — and fail. The public reaction to police department experimental failures is usually unfair. One segment of the public will loudly demand reform with protest and politics, while another segment will punish experimental failure with firings and denunciation. It produces a policing culture that increasingly becomes terrified of the public and small-c conservative about doctrinal change.

So, we’re not looking for someone to transform APD organizationally. Nor are we looking for a crisis leader to come in and keep the ship afloat in an emergency, as Bryant had to do. The skills needed in an emergency are not the same skills needed for what’s coming.

Dickens placed recruiting at the top of the list. “The chief has to be the chief recruiter in charge as well as chief,” Dickens said. “I'll be the chief chief recruiter in charge … but the chief has to know how to get out there and recruit so that we can reduce some of the pressures.”

Dickens has a target of 250 new officers every year, which will be difficult but probably achievable with competitive salary and a sense of reform. But it’s hard to overstate the value of an internal promotion on recruiting and retention. Rank-and-file officers want to see competence rewarded. The right officer would send a signal.

I asked Bryant how the job had changed since the summer of 2020, and what he had to do differently as a leader.

The bond between the community and the police department required work even before the incidents of 2020. He’s had to work harder on those bonds since. “But COVID threw us a curve that no one had anticipated,” he said. Coalition building is hard when you can’t meet face to face. Bryant had to recognize “that we had to use every technique, every level of technology to strengthen the relationship, both internally and externally,” he said.

The city also needed to improve its relationships with local, state and federal agencies, he said. Left unsaid was how some of those relationships had become more difficult. The street protests created friction between Atlanta’s police and neighboring departments, while the mayor clashed with the governor’s office over how to deploy state patrol officers and National Guard units.

Whoever takes over will have to be able to articulate a very clear strategy for reducing violence. Right now Atlanta and the agencies it works with have clearly shifted into a posture emphasizing enforcement — making arrests and building convictions — giving relatively less attention to violence reduction through nonpolice intervention. That might not actually work, if the events of the last three months are any indication. Atlanta has a murder problem — the murder rate is increasing, even as the aggravated assault rate is flat — and enforcement isn’t abating that increase.

A new chief will have to be able to shift strategies quickly in a way that reflects data, and sell those changes to a skeptical public.

Dickens also said he wanted to emphasize community policing, which is next to impossible to conduct with staffing shortages. Community policing is labor intensive. If every officer has to spend every hour of every shift answering calls to service, adding community policing events like barber shop forums is a recipe for officer burnout.

Rebuilding morale is a nontrivial problem. Police departments nationwide have endured a massive morale problem, Bryant said. “We have to strengthen it. And so we have to rely on the leadership to make sure that your message gets out. We have to continue to support the mayor. Even when you don't align, you have to support your mayor.”

I don’t think Bryant expected to be back forever. At the press conference Friday, he talked about his long-anticipated return to retirement with genuine relief. “What comes next?” a reporter asked?

“A much needed vacation,” Bryant replied. “You recognize when it’s time, to be honest. I took a vacation this week, and I’ve been in this uniform every single day.”