This story was updated with new information about the payment arrangement between Spencer Fomby and the City of Akron.
With a heaping portion of Portland, a dollop of New Orleans, a dash of Seattle and a pinch of Oakland and others, the protest policing policy proposed for the Akron Police Department is mostly a verbatim mixture of already-existing policies from police departments and law enforcement organizations from around the country.
The crowd control policy drafted by national policing consultant Spencer Fomby — intended to feature community input — is part of the city’s settlement of a federal lawsuit from the Akron Bail Fund. It alleged widespread unconstitutional policing during the Jayland Walker protests in 2022 and 2023. The city will be taking community feedback through Aug. 15 before finalizing the policy.
An analysis of the 16-page document indicates that the vast majority of the proposals are taken wholesale from policies published elsewhere, with large swaths either verbatim or with a few immaterial tweaks.
Documents provided by the mayor’s office on Wednesday indicate that the city and Fomby signed a contract in October 2024 that agrees to pay the consultant up to $35,000 to draft the policy.
An amendment was signed on May 2 to increase the contract maximum to $49,000. The increase in the cap was “due to the number of hours worked by Mr. Fomby,” Malik’s spokesperson said on Wednesday, indicating that Fomby has been paid $38,000 by the city so far.
Police department manuals tend to copy from other communities
A federal Bureau of Justice Assistance guide for developing police department manuals says “the tendency is for departments to copy manuals from other communities verbatim,” which is “completely acceptable if the manual represents the department’s philosophy and procedures and is consistent with legal guidelines.”
The small changes to the passages taken from elsewhere include minor sentence structure adjustments (such as “minimize disruption to persons who are not involved” becoming “minimize the disruption to non-involved persons”), removing paragraph breaks, reordering lists and replacing the name of the cities and police departments where the policies came from with “City of Akron” or “Akron Police Department,” among others.
The 2024 settlement agreement between the City of Akron and the Akron Bail Fund dictated that the city would host a public forum on protest policing before Fomby would draft his proposal. Then, the community would have 60 days to weigh in again.
The Feb. 26 public forum at Garfield Community Learning Center featured community members expressing anger about the APD in general and the perceived futility of the community engagement process, but not much about what substantive changes would be made to policy.
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Signal Akron reported that, “At times, Fomby appeared frustrated by the rhetoric directed by attendees toward him over incidents he had no role in and was not hired to address, such as the killings of Jazmir Tucker and Jayland Walker. He told attendees that he could write a protest policing policy for the APD in line with best practices regardless, but he was hoping for more community feedback in it.”
One hundred and ten days later, Fomby’s policy is predominantly based on the 2019 model policy from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), with large sections also matching wording from the Portland Police Bureau, New Orleans Police Department, Seattle Police Department, Oakland Police Department, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training.
Other language used in the report matched materials from the Kansas City Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Yale University Police, the Defense Information School and a blog post about the Columbus Division of Police.
As indicated by Fomby at the February forum, and as stated in the 2024 settlement agreement between the city and the Akron Bail Fund, much of the draft policy emphasizes protecting First Amendment rights so long as people do not violate laws.
The policy also would recommend significant pre-event intelligence gathering for police. “Every reasonable effort should be made to gather” as much information as possible, the report states. It also says officers should engage in surveillance and that supervisors should “deploy officers at vantage points to report on crowd actions” during “civil disturbances” and that “officers may be deployed to monitor crowd activity” in general.
How to provide feedback on the crowd control policy
Email crowdpolicy@akronohio.gov.
Leave a comment here on the community dashboard.
Send a letter to:
Attn: Public Order Policy
City of Akron Law Department
172 S. Broadway, Suite 200
Akron, OH 44308
Editor’s note: One of the policy proposals Fomby recommends — about not unconstitutionally arresting or forcefully dispersing journalists and legal observers so long as they don’t interfere – was taken from a Portland Police Bureau policy enacted after Reporter Doug Brown and others successfully sued the PPB in 2020 for violating their First Amendment rights.
Key to the color codes on the document:
- Light yellow: International Association of Chiefs of Police
- Light green: National Tactical Officers Association
- Salmon: Sacramento Police Department
- Light blue: Portland Police Bureau
- Light fuschia (pink): FEMA
- Pale gray: California commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training
- Light purple: Yale Police Department, Columbus police Department (from article about police department)
- Darker blue: New Orleans PD
- Darker green: Seattle PD
- Medium gray
- Dark gray (chemical munitions): DC municipal code (chemical munitions), Cincinnati police (de-escalation), UC Irvine (IAP) Defense Information School (crowd intervention)
- Dark gray (de-escalation): Akron police
- Darker yellow: Oakland
