The Washington Post - 05.11.2019

B4 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 , 2019

BY REBECCA TAN AND LAURA MECKLER

A wooden American flag adorned with a thin blue line — and the object’s place on government property — has sparked an angry debate in Maryland over police-community relations, pit- ting elected leaders in liberal Montgomery County against Gov. Larry Hogan (R). The flag is seen by some as a symbol of respect for law enforcement, and others as a rebuke of the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 to bring at- tention to police shootings of unarmed African Americans. It has long been used to evoke the role of police in keeping order. But it has been co-opted by the Blue Lives Matter movement, a pro- police effort to counter Black Lives Matter. On Oct. 28, National First Re- sponders Day, a “thin blue line” flag was donated to the 5th Dis- trict police station in German- town by a resident — identified by police as James Shelton — and his young son. County police said on Twitter that the flag would be displayed at the station. The gesture generated immedi- ate blowback, with critics saying the flag excuses police violence against black residents. Some not- ed that it was seen along with Confederate flags at the white su- premacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Responding to the controversy, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said the flag would not be publicly displayed at the police department. “The flag provides a symbol of support to some but it is a symbol of dismissiveness to others,” he said in a statement Friday. “Under my administration, we are com- mitted to improving police relations with the community and will immediately address any action that stands against our mission.” On Sunday, Hogan waded in, writing that he was “offended and disgusted” by Elrich’s decision. “To outlaw these American flags from being hung in county build- ings by law enforcement officers is outrageous and unconscionable,” he tweeted with photos of himself in front of two of the flags. “... We are proud to hang these Thin Blue Line flags in Government House to honor our brave law enforcement officers.” Elrich said he plans to meet with the county’s police union, which said over the weekend that it was “highly offended” by his order. But he does not plan to reverse his decision. “I’m not listening to Governor Hogan,” Elrich said in an interview Monday. “And particularly not on something like this, where he doesn’t understand the ramifi- cations on the community.” A staunch liberal who took office this year, Elrich has had a tense relationship with the county

police. At the start of what has been an unusually protracted search for a new police chief, El- rich announced that he was seek- ing an outside candidate and would not consider acting police chief Marcus Jones, a veteran officer in the department and the early choice of the rank and file. In September, after three top candidates had dropped out of the running, he changed his position. The Montgomery County Council will consider the nomina- tion of Jones on Tuesday. Elrich is a proponent of the county’s ambitious racial equity legislation, which is under review, and has expressed concern about recent allegations of police mis- conduct. In July, a Montgomery officer was charged with assault after allegedly using his shin to force a man’s head into the ground during an arrest. In May, an officer was caught on video using a racial slur. Last year, an officer fatally shot an unarmed man in Silver Spring. Prosecutors ruled that shooting justified. “I get both sides of this,” Elrich said about the flag dispute. “But at this particular moment, we’re trying to deal with racial tensions and issues around the police department. “To have the racial tensions heightened over something like [the flag], I did not think it would be productive. We’re trying to un- wind ourselves here.” Officer Rick Goodale, a police

spokesman, said the donated flag is at the 5th District station but is not being publicly displayed. “We’re the police department, we’re going along with what the county executive wants,” Goodale said. “This is all his decision.” Activists and liberal politicians applauded Elrich’s decision. “This is not the American flag,” Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Mont- gomery) tweeted. “It’s a violation of the flag code that prohibits altering of the flag in this manner & an affront to the #BlackLives- Matter protests that I & others were a part of.” Laurel Hoa, co-founder of Montgomery’s chapter of Show- ing Up for Racial Justice, said the flag “devalues the lives of black people... and has no place in any government building.” Shelton, the resident who donated the flag, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He and his son also donated a version of the wooden flag with a red stripe to Fire Station 31 on Darnestown Road in North Poto- mac. A spokesman for the Mont- gomery County Fire and Rescue Service said that the department had not received any similar push- back and that the flag is on display at the firehouse. Elrich said he sees no issue with the fire station’s flag, because he does not believe it has been co-opted by other political movements. [email protected] [email protected]

MARYLAND

‘Thin blue line’ flag pits Elrich against Hogan

whom they didn’t have basic infor- mation, didn’t have basic an- swers,” recalled council member Hans Riemer (D-At Large). Jones’s council supporters began to signal their preference. “Our force is working,” council member Craig Rice (D-District 2) said over the summer. “I trust and value our leadership.” Rice spoke passionately about being racially profiled as an Afri- can American motorist by a Mont- gomery police officer but empha- sized that it had happened three decades earlier. And he said “community policing” must go beyond speaking with people — citing what he called a troubled neighborhood in his district, German- town Park. “They are begging for our police to come in and lock people up,” Rice said.

Out of the running By late August, Chapman took herself out of the running. When Elrich announced it at a news conference, he also was asked whether Jones would be returned to consideration. “I mean, to be honest, no,” Elrich said. Instead, Elrich tried again — approaching sort-of-outsider Dar- ryl McSwain, who after 30 years on the county force had retired a year earlier and was heading a force that patrolled the county’s parks. The pension package tied with his retirement might be an obsta- cle to returning, but Elrich said he could get McSwain confirmed, even if that meant broader chang- es to pension rules. The council balked — even before McSwain was presented to them — and he, too, bowed out, saying he appreciated the over- tures but noting the financial hur- dles. To Elrich, the council again was being overly resistant to an outsider, despite its own actions calling for more department oversight.

‘We’ll face those realities’ Elrich was at a crossroads. He could restart a search and ignore the council's growing impa- tience, or he could have his staff call Jones. The call went out to Jones. “I’ve never lost interest in this job,” Jones recalled telling an El- rich staff member. Two days later, at Nick’s Diner in Wheaton, Jones and Elrich went over subjects they’d discussed and debated for months. Jones promised more community policing, a strategy designed to build friend- ships and trust among residents. He spoke about an audit of police stops that he planned. “We’ll face those realities, whatever they are,” Jones recalled telling Elrich. And the two discussed how officers had used the odor of marijuana as a reason to search cars and people, a tactic maintained even as criminal sanctions dropped against small amounts of the substance. A new ruling from the Maryland Court of Appeals over marijuana stops would probably limit the searches. “This is going to change anyway,” Elrich recalled Jones saying. Within an hour, they had a deal. [email protected]

was ranked highest, according to the NAACP president, Linda Plummer. Elrich and his staff interviewed all four. Jones had risen through the ranks with command posts in Silver Spring, the narcotics bureau and the major-crimes bureau. As acting chief, he was in close communication with Elrich and they had discussed the McDon- ald’s encounter. Jones presented data showing how often officers had responded to reports of drug dealing and other illegal activity near the restaurant and said the incident arose as an experienced beat ser- geant appropriately following his suspicions. But Elrich found the data unpersuasive and recalls telling Jones: “What you probably need is a relationship with those kids and other kids so that they talk to you and they’re helpful.” Elrich said he also had hoped to hear Jones more rigorously ques- tion the department’s report on the 2018 shooting. “If he had [said], ‘I’m going to revaluate this report, and I’m going to reopen it. I don’t think it’s accurate,’ ” Elrich said, “that would have been helpful.” By early July, Elrich decided to pass Jones over, settling on Chap- man and DeVaul as his top choices. Days later, Jones spoke at an unrelated news conference about his department’s review of the McDonald’s incident. Jones made clear that the officer’s language was unacceptable, and that it was the subject of retraining classes and an internal affairs investigation. But he made another point, jabbing the air as he spoke. “These officers are standing in the front line, making sure the people that live in those communities, who don’t have a microphone put in front of their faces and don’t have a voice — we are their voice,” Jones said. “We are the voice for those citizens who need us the most. And we won’t stop doing that today. And we won’t stop doing it tomorrow, whatever time that ends for anybody’s career. I can promise you, Montgomery County will do that forever, okay?” At his home in Potomac, county resident Vernon Ricks was in- censed that Jones had been snubbed. A retired Xerox executive and longtime African Ameri- can leader in the county, Ricks had met Jones more than 20 years ago when both were on a mentoring task force. He thought Jones’s commitment to trying to keep young adults out of trouble was being discounted. He called Jones. “Don’t get into the fray,” he remembers telling Jones. “You can never tell. It might come back to you.” Jones had solid support from at least five of the nine County Coun- cil members, who started taking an aggressive posture toward El- rich’s picks. DeVaul’s department, Takoma Park, was too small. On Chapman, council members pushed Elrich to explain why she had been forced to resign as chief in Portsmouth. They sent him 41 questions, 11 to pose to Chapman. “They picked a candidate for

Rockville attracted 90 candidates. And the Montgomery opening was for a job where the outgoing chief had earned $240,000 — more than the $195,000 of the then-county executive.

Perceiving tension Elrich did not start out averse to inside contenders, he said recently in an interview. The force had long enjoyed a national reputation as a well-run operation, he knew. But as he settled in as county executive, El- rich said he kept hearing from residents and activists about people feeling harassed. In his mind that diminished public safety. “We have pretty good surface relations here,” he said. “But I think underneath the surface there’s a lot of tension.” Two incidents, he said, weighed heavily on him. The first was an officer- involved fatal shooting in 2018 in Silver Spring. To Elrich, the shooting ap- peared legally justified — a conclu- sion prosecutors also reached. The victim had charged and wrestled the officer to the ground, leaving him in fear, his attorney said, of being killed with his own gun. But Elrich thought that the ini- tial police stop on a residential street never should have taken place and that the officer was slow at the start to activate his body- worn camera. A department report sent to Elrich on the incident did not address the camera issue but found that the stop was justified because the officer had seen the man making movements that looked liked he might have been jamming a weapon into his pock- et. The other incident, Elrich said, was an encounter in May recorded on cellphones and police body cameras between officers and four African American men outside a McDonald’s in White Oak. A white officer was recorded on video using the n-word in an exchange with the black men. Elrich questioned why the four men were approached and de- tained in the first place. They had told officers they were waiting for rides to work. Two received civil citations for holding small amounts of marijuana. All four got trespass warnings to stay away from the restaurant. As the county executive knew, both incidents resonated at the County Council — which has to confirm any nominee — with the council passing legislation calling for the release of more informa- tion in police-involved shootings and the creation of a police adviso- ry commission.

The shortlist By June, a seven-member panel set up by Elrich’s office had win- nowed the pool. Included on the panel: the local NAACP president, who was on Elrich’s transition team; the head of the immigrant rights group CASA, which had endorsed Elrich; and two of Elrich’s staff members. The shortlist was Jones, Tako- ma Park Police Chief Antonio DeVaul; former Portsmouth, Va., police chief Tonya Chapman and another outsider whose name never emerged publicly. Chapman

sions. Montgomery and Baltimore counties each began the year look- ing for police chiefs. Despite simi- larities — big counties outside major cities — their job postings couldn’t have been more different. Baltimore County’s, posted in December, got right to the point: “An opportunity to accelerate crime reduction and reform ef- forts in one of the nation’s largest police departments.” Montgomery’s from three months later meandered, taking prospective chiefs through five of Elrich’s “priority outcomes for the county’s future,” including reduc- ing greenhouse emissions and eas- ier commutes. The term “crime” finally arrived in the sixth point for safe neighborhoods. And then crime was raised in the context of livability issues such as the creation of neighborhood gathering places. “I thought the job announce- ment was very strange,” said Montgomery County Council member Tom Hucker (D-District 5), a frequent ally of Elrich who also has called for police reforms. “I was surprised that it didn’t emphasize management of a large department laser-focused on crime prevention, crime control and investigation as the primary responsibility.” Less than two dozen résumés came in, a relatively low total compared with police chief searches in smaller Maryland communities. Last year, the city of

challenge, given what the county
executive said publicly during the
search process,” Firestine said. “It’s
an unfortunate start for such an
important position.”
Elrich, 70, is a progressive stal-
wart who was elected with a
strong majority last year after he
narrowly defeated a business-
friendly Democrat in the primary.
He recently drew the ire of Mary-
land Gov. Larry Hogan (R) for
forbidding the county police to
display a donated “thin blue line”
flag, which critics say has been
used to denigrate the Black Lives
Matter movement against police-
involved shootings.
When Elrich took office and
assessed the police department, he
concluded that officers were too
intrusive, especially in minority
neighborhoods: “It’s kind of an
old-school approach and it’s alien-
ating the hell out of the communi-
ties.”
Where Elrich, who is white, saw
too many stops, Jones, 55, who is
African American, saw unbiased
policing that created a safer coun-
ty. “We have officers who are pro-
active,” he would say.
That was where the two stood
earlier in the year as the hunt for a
new chief launched after the re-
tirement of J. Thomas Manger
after 15 years as the county’s top
cop.
Elrich promised a diligent, na-
tionwide search in an early show
of how he would make big deci-

SEARCH FROM B1

Elrich and Jones talk out their issues in search for Montgomery police chief

TAKOMA PARK POLICE Takoma Park Police Chief Antonio DeVaul was one of the leading candidates.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE Marcus Jones, a Montgomery veteran, had been doing the top job in an acting capacity.

CITY OF PORTSMOUTH Former Portsmouth police chief Tonya Chapman was a top pick before she bowed out.

MARYLAND-NATIONAL CAPITAL PARK POLICE Darryl McSwain declined to be among the contenders.

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