Akron Mayor Shammas Malik accepted the invitation from three Black-led organizations to a community forum held Tuesday evening about his controversial police chief search.
The mayor, 99 days into his first term, listened intently and took notes from the front row of the Buchtel Community Learning Center auditorium. Black leaders and community members criticized his insistence that he must only consider the Akron Police Department’s two white male deputy chiefs as the department’s next leader. They also said he should wait for a charter amendment to change the rule before he appoints the next chief.
Malik said last month that his law department stumbled upon a state law that says police positions above entry level must be filled by internal promotion from the rank below. Akron’s City Charter doesn’t have language to supersede that. Because both deputy chiefs – Brian Harding, who is serving as acting chief, and Jesse Leeser – applied for the chief role, Malik believes he’s legally required to pick one of them.
“It looks like it excludes a diverse candidate pool,” said Akron NAACP President Judi Hill, whose organization hosted the forum along with the Black Elected Officials of Summit County and Freedom Bloc.
“We need a police chief who is going to come in here and do things differently,” said attorney Imokhai Okolo from the auditorium stage.
Okolo spoke for eight minutes about why he believes Malik’s interpretation of the law is wrong, stating the Akron City Charter allows the human resources director to adopt hiring policies that would override the state law Malik says prevents him from hiring externally.
A number of religious leaders were in the crowd on Tuesday night, including Pastor Gregory Harrison, a retired Akron police officer. When community members had their chance to speak, Harrison called Malik’s search process “arbitrary, unfair and biased. … I’m advocating for a fair process that is not arbitrary.”
Among the 26 community members who spoke was former Akron Ward 4 City Council Member Mike Williams.
“I hope in all of this the mayor is listening and will act on the instructions he has received from his constituents,” he said. “… We are not going to stand for the same old same old.”
Malik took the stage for 12 minutes and defended his legal interpretation that he must pick one of the deputy chiefs as the new police chief. He also defended his decision to go forward with the hiring process instead of waiting until after a potential November ballot measure to change the charter to allow for external hires for open positions in the police department.
“I will always, always, act with fidelity to my understanding of the law whether it’s popular or not popular — I will stand on that,” Malik said. “Our law department looked at [the law], and I said, ‘Please go back and look at it.’ They went to outside counsel and outside counsel looked at it too. They sent emails, they sent us memos, we sent them back. We had questions and questions and questions.”
Waiting until after November’s election to hire from a pool that would include external candidates, he said, “would do more harm than good. I could be wrong about that, but I’m giving you my opinion.”
Value of waiting is disputed
In an interview with Signal Akron after the event, Malik elaborated on why he’s against waiting to change the rule that is guaranteeing the only candidates for police chief are white men.
“At some point, it’s a value judgment on how you’re going to best get systemic change,” he said. “Having a diverse pool for a police chief search is absolutely a priority. [But] should it be a priority to the limit of every other priority? That by itself is not going to fix the Akron Police Department.”
Malik said it’s important to have a chief in place quickly “who is able to help lead on the vision that I set out around community policing, around reviewing our policies, around so many different things. And not to go into [upcoming] union negotiations with someone who might not be there in three months, but with someone we know is going to be the chief that they’re going to deal with. I really view it, from an organizational standpoint, I owe people my best judgment, and my best judgment is not holding that seat open for a year.”
In an interview with Signal Akron, Okolo rejected the idea that a new chief should be hired now from a pool of two white men instead of from a pool of diverse candidates later this year.
“He’s giving us an excuse that we need to have a new chief immediately,” Okolo said. “Four hundred years of problems are not going to be fixed in the next three months, so don’t give us this small sense of hope that this next police chief is going to spend these next three months really concretely doing things that could not have been [done] if he waited a few more months. It’s just this false narrative that is not rooted in reality. We can wait – we’ve been waiting this long as Black folks for change that I’m sure we won’t mind waiting to make sure we do it right this time.”
Akron City Council President Margo Sommerville told Signal Akron she also wants Malik to wait on the hire.
“The Black elected officials are simply saying that we would like to see diversity in a pool of applicants for police chief,” she said. “When we look at the landscape of our city, we need to also see diversity leading the police force. That is concerning that we don’t see that. That is our concern. Our wish was to put a pause on the search so that we could be more intentional about making sure the pool of candidates were diverse and reflective of the community.”
Okolo also called on Malik to publicly release the legal interpretations he’s received from his law department and the outside legal firm he mentioned he sought advice from.
“Put out the legal opinion!” Okolo said to Signal Akron about Malik. “It’s in writing, you can literally put it out. If you think it’s so solid, put it out. If I had an opinion sitting there in my email that is sound, that I paid a law firm to write up for me, it speaks for itself. We don’t even know what firm it is. Just put it out! It’s so simple.”
Signal Akron asked Malik why he hasn’t released the legal analysis he’s relying on.
“One, we’ve been very transparent about our findings on the law,” he said. “Very, very transparent. Do we want to set a precedent where any time we get a memo on an issue that’s confidential, that could result in litigation – any issue like this could result in litigation – do we want to set that precedent? We will continue to communicate around what our findings are and I think I was pretty clear up there, but as of now we don’t plan to do that.”
