Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and Police Chief David Roddy took questions from numerous local pastors during Thursday’s town hall meeting.
Mayor Berke mentioned the new Office of Community Resilience, which was formed when the city moved $150,000 from the police’s $72 million budget. This office’s goal is, according to the mayor, to help “communities heal from trauma and minimize their contact with the criminal justice system.”
“For the future, how do we make really good decisions so that the right people are involved in keeping our community safe? Sometimes it might be police, and sometimes, it might be someone else too.
The most important thing we can do is to invest in all of our communities and neighborhoods around the city.”
Chief Roddy also spoke about the newly formed police advisory review committee, which he said is a community-formed group that will review policy and allegations of misconduct. He said “training and the scale of training” will also be reviewed by this committee.
Chief Roddy told pastor Marcellus Barnes that the majority of grants the Chattanooga Police Department receives are not based upon arrests.
“In many of them, arrests are not reported at all,” said Chief Roddy. “The only one we use repeatedly is the Tennessee Highway Safety Office program, and that is in relation to traffic fatalities and DUIs. Part of that grant is the number of citations we write for excessive speeding and DUI’s or impaired arrests we make that is either because of alcohol or narcotics.”
Pastor Chris Sorensen advocated for an “innovative” way of treating those with drug addictions. He said he has struggled with drugs and alcohol in the past, and that going to prison would not have helped him. He asked the mayor if there was any way the city could invest in rehabilitation rather than incarceration.
“It is clear to most people that a purely enforcement strategy, which has been what the United State’s enforcement strategy has been over the last several decades, has failed and not helped Americans. We have to figure something else out,” said Mayor Berke. “Right now in Hamilton County we have the drug court, and the police chief is heavily involved in health policy.”
Chief Roddy spoke at length about the need for “community policing,” where CPD officers are out and about in the community doing more than just making arrests. He pointed out that officers often run sports leagues with children in different parts of Chattanooga.
While the mayor and police chief spoke about community policing and helping minority business owners, viewers of the Facebook livestream wanted other topics. Many asked about the budget, and asked for divestment from the police.
Others wondered why organizers from the local protests were not involved in this town hall. Marie Mott and Cameron Williams, both prominent figures in the protests, were actively commenting during the livestream.