Opinion: Coddling Cops Who Killed or Pretexts About Cops Who Killed?

The “Oh my God!” moment in reading the OIR Report on the shooting of the unarmed African-American youth Kendrec McDade is the following sentence at the Report’s page 63:

In fact, the Department recently informed us that they did not provide specific feedback to the two involved officers because they did not want to single these officers out or cause them to perceive executive staff was overly critical of their performance.

The Office of Independent Review Group’s lawyers understating style in describing this disturbing information communicated to them by the Pasadena Police Department cannot prevent the sentence from jumping off the page when reading it. Readers stumble through their minds for the right words to describe the PD’s no-feedback practice – words come to mind like a practice that “pampers,” “coddles,” or “over-protects,” an explanation that is ‘incomprehensible,” “preposterous,” or “pretextual”, and a sentence that is “astonishing,” “absurd,” or “irrational.” But no adjectives capture one’s amazement that the Pasadena PD failed to give specific feedback to the shooting Officers on the cornucopia of their bad police practices when they chased, shot, and killed Kendrec McDade – and that the PD could with a straight face calmly report their no-feedback failure to the OIR reviewers.

The PD’s astonishing view of the Officer’s fragile psyches

The PD’s premise that the shooting Officers’ psyches are so fragile that they have to be treated with kid gloves is an astounding assumption. If the PD believes the Officers will crumble from critical feedback about their shooting McDade from the PD’s command staff, what do they think the Officers will do when they are in the rough-and-tumble street patrol world? Surely they are concerned that, when the streets taunts them as “murderers,” and “executioners,” the Officers’ fragility may lead them to wilt and shirk from doing their job. Surely the PD has considered that when the Officers’ read the headlines and harsh feedback from the community that the Officers’ unstable mentalities will explode into unreason and again make a series of tactical mistakes that lead to unjustified fear and unwarranted reactions – like the series of tactical mistakes the OIR Report documents in their killing of the unarmed Kendrec McDade.

The PD’s reported presupposition about the Officers’ fragile psyches is inconsistent with returning the Officers to patrol. The PD is either acting irrationally or its justification for no-feedback is a protective pretext.

Is the PD a learning organization?

Critical performance feedback is a universal requirement for a learning organization that does not repeat its mistakes. Critical performance feedback is also an essential requirement for a personnel system that humanely values its employees; employees who make mistakes but are retained without giving them feedback are disserved by not being taught about their mistakes so they can improve their performance. While many view the Officers who shot and killed Kendrec McDade as trigger-happy cowboys beyond redemption, the authors of the OIR Report articulate a view of the Officers as making tactical mistakes that led them to blunder into a position where they may have feared for their lives and thereby acted reasonably from fear at the moment of the shooting – i.e., as Officers who may not be beyond redemption if (1) they were not previously taught to avoid those mistakes before they killed Kendrec McDade and (2) they are given feedback in the teachable times after they made those mistakes. But the PD has not acted as a learning organization by its eschewing feedback to the Officers. Rather, it performed as an organization hunkering down to avoid feedback. Why?

The pregnant “recently” in the OMG sentence

The OIR Report’s date is August, 2014. The OIR authors’ statement that “the Department recently informed us” that it did not give the Officers specific feedback is pregnant with suggestion when set in its temporal context. The federal court wrongful death lawsuit by McDade’s mother that was set to go to trial in June, 2014, was instead settled in early June. In this context, the adverb “recently” raises troubling questions. First, why did the PD only recently inform the OIR attorneys that it did not give specific feedback to the officers? What clock was the PD running out by delaying disclosing its no-feedback failure for more than 2 years? Was the no-feedback failure related to McDade’s mother’s lawsuit?

The broader pattern of delay, denial, obfuscation and misstatement

In our opinion the Pasadena PD’s not giving feedback to the shooting Officers and the PD’s delay in disclosing that fact to the OIR’s outside reviewers was probably not the irrational act of a dumbed-down organization. Rather, our opinion is that the no-feedback failure and the delay in its disclosure was part of a much broader pattern by the Pasadena PD, the Pasadena City Manager, and the Pasadena City Attorney to delay, deny, obfuscate, and misstate in order to save the City from paying millions of dollars more than the approximate $1 million it paid to McDade’s mother. That much broader pattern and the facts supporting it will be discussed in op-ed pieces that will follow.

Dale Gronemeier and Skip Hickambottom are local civil rights attorneys who represent Kendrec McDade’s mother and Pasadena police oversight organizations and activists in the still-0ngoing Public Records lawsuit seeking the maximum legally-permissible release of the full OIR Report. They were not the attorneys in the federal wrongful death lawsuit brought by McDade’s mother and are not seeking additional damages for her.