The Tallahassee Police Department’s new Citizen Advisory Council is expected to meet monthly over the next two years. During the group’s first official meeting in August, members focused on learning when police are allowed to use force. Now some members of the council are speaking out about about what they say was a rocky start.
Retired Lieutenant James Fairfield acted as the class instructor, walking committee members through how Use of Force cases are determined.
“As a person who trained a lot of law enforcement officers and trains the civilians ... I kind of have the historical knowledge and legal knowledge to explain why we do it that way,"he said.
During the class, Fairfield showed examples of videos where police used force and explained whether it was proper.
Pastor Rudy Ferguson is the chairman of the Citizen Advisory Council. He says he wanted to start the meetings by giving members an understanding of the rules police officers follow now.
“The ultimate goal we had was to understand the use of force, whether we agree with it or not," said Ferguson. "I thought it’d be very important so that when we get back to the table and we actually hit the ground running, we will have in our hands, you know, the manual, heard it first from out of the mouth of an expert.”
But the meeting soon grew awkward as the discussion turned to events leading to the death of George Floyd. Floyd died after a police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest. His death has sparked protests and even riots in cities across the country.
Fairfield provided his opinion, saying Floyd should have followed the officers’ orders, and those comments didn’t sit well with Ferguson.
"The mindset he said about the George Floyd situation, that if he had gotten in the car then he wouldn’t have died, well, wrong statement to make, definitely." Ferguson said he wasn’t surprised by Fairfield’s point of view and takes issue with the retired Lieutenant.
"He’s embedded as a law enforcer. Everything he sees is going to be law enforcement-related. Everything that he knows is going to be as it pertains to protecting or defending law enforcers. We have to know that going into this," said Ferguson. "It’s our job as a council to make sure he sees the citizens side of what he’s teaching us.”
Ferguson says he was more surprised by what happened during another part of the training. Fairfield showed a video of a white college student fighting a Black officer. Fairfield repeated one of the students, who used a racial slur at the officer.
"Hey film this dog, hey film this dog, I’m going to kill this n*****," Ferguson claims Fairfield said. "That’s what he' [Fairfield] said. I'm like, 'what the...?"
“It took me by surprise when he said it. I understood in the context and how he meant it,however it was offensive for him to use it in the context. [Fairfield] could’ve said the 'n-word', could’ve just simply said that.”
Ferguson wasn’t the only one who had an unpleasant reaction to the use of the word.
"Being a white person, I was embarrassed for starters," said fellow council member Nancy O' Farrell. She said she wasn't surprised that it happened. "I thought it was for shock value."
O’Farell does say she learned a lot about what officers have to deal with in the field. During the meeting, she took part in a mock simulation where she had to choose whether to shoot someone. She says it taught her how quickly law enforcers have to make decisions. But she still wonders if those are the only decisions that should be made available.
"I wish that we could approach policy from the point of view that shooting someone is the last resort instead of the first one," said O'Farrell. "Some of the things that we are seeing in these encounters it really looks like it’s the first instinct of police officers to pull out a gun and shoot someone."
Ferguson says exploring more policy options is one of the goals of the council.
"I really want us to be as the chairman to be the catalyst between prevention rather than intervention. Let’s deal with this on the forefront so that there won’t be another issue like George Floyd and the others who have died unnecessarily throughout the country," he said.
The council’s next meeting hasn’t been scheduled yet but the group is supposed to meet once a month over the next two years. Ferguson says the next meeting will be one so that all members can get to know each other.
We reached out to the Tallahassee Police Department to comment on Lieutenant Fairfield’s remarks. They asked that the retired officer be contacted directly. His response.
"That is exactly what the suspect said to the Black officer during that act of combat," Fairfield said in response to why he choose to directly repeat the N-word. "So again if we’re going to be mature about this, it would be no different than an officer writing it in their offense report, we have to write down what is in fact happened.
Regarding his comments about George Floyd, Fairfield says he isn’t a medical doctor but says the forensics show Floyd had pre-existing conditions and also fentanyl in his body.
“Now, I did acknowledge that in the sense of combat when somebody does kneel on your neck for long periods of time that’s going to aggravate your adrenal glands and the system," said Fairfield. "That’s going to cause a systemic overload that’s going to be an excitable and possible neuro-chemical reaction that doesn’t process well when you have a bad heart and you have a mass amount of fentanyl in your bloodstream.”
Last Friday, a defense attorney for Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, asked the judge to drop all charges. The Minnesota attorney claims the death was from a drug overdose and not a result of the knee in the back of Floyd’s neck.
