A year and a half after Akron police officers were permitted to remove their name tags, they will again be required to wear them.
“We knew from the beginning we would come back to name tags – that is back,” Acting Chief Brian Harding said at a press conference on Thursday.
A majority of officers have already started displaying their name tags, Harding said. The rest will have to do so by March 1, although some officers are still waiting to be provided with name tags.
In July 2022, after Akron police officers shot and killed Jayland Walker after a car chase and brief foot pursuit, and subsequent protests, the police department stated that officers had received threats and could remove their name tags to help with that situation. Officers then only displayed an ID number.
“Every officer is wearing a badge. I authorized them to take their name tags off because of the threats that were made against our officers and the bounties that were placed on officers’ heads,” then-chief Steve Mylett said at the time.
“People were getting their names off of their uniforms, getting on social media and elsewhere and going into our Facebook page here in the police department to identify, get a picture, send that picture and that image out into the public. In some instances, they got family photographs and put it out on social media,” Mylett said.
Akron Mayor Shammas Malik said on Thursday that it was Mylett, who retired as chief effective Jan 1, who reversed the policy as his time with the department came to an end.
“It’s important, I think, as we’re trying to build trust, to build relationships, that people have an opportunity to get to know the officers,” Malik said. “And I want to be clear, where there are threats and where there are things that cross a line, that we are going to make sure that those are investigated and folks are held accountable for that.
“But at the end of the day, we have to balance the need to have community policing and build relationships against the safety concerns that are there,” he said. “I think that was a safety concern for a particular moment of time, and we now kind of need to get back to the normal, regular order of doing things.”
Harding said “one of our primary focuses as a police department is community outreach, community engagement, and continuing to develop that close bond with our citizens and the community, and this is a step in that direction. So, our officers are eager to continue to engage as we look to serve our community.”
