BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT
The Bakersfield Police Department is hosting a community meeting tomorrow night at the Larry E. Reider building, downtown on K Street. It is your chance to get more information on the use of force policy and to be able to ask questions about it. Joining us in the studio, Assistant Chief of Police Brent Stratton.
Brent, thank you for coming in this morning. Appreciate it.
Good morning. Thank you for the invite.
Tell me -- about this big meeting and what people can expect.
Sure, it's an opportunity for the police department to release the most recent iteration of our use-of-force policy. It's something we've been working on for quite some time. We've worked on it with our community advisory panel, which has a variety of different community members and interest groups, um, to be able to work on refining it, to be able to.
A provide direction and clarity for our officers, but we want the public to feel confident in what our direction to our officers is, as well as understand what our oversight and supervision accountability processes are in place, and so it's an opportunity for us to be uh to be transparent with the public, but also to receive feedback.
Uh, from, the community as to things they might want to see that we maybe haven't considered that we can work on putting in there so you can expect us to, to provide uh an overview of what the policy is and some areas of the law and then to to have some breakout groups to be able for us to get some, some feedback and to be able to take it back and if need be go back to the drawing board and tweak things or finalize things to be able to make sure that we have a policy that works for our department but also works for our community,
You know, I was taking a look through it and it is, I mean, it's really, I mean, breaking this down on the granular level, it seems like just your, I mean, without getting too into the weeds here, just your overall impression is it doing enough of what the basically the state wanted.
Yes, I believe that it's consistent with the law. It's consistent with the Constitution. It's consistent with the expectations that uh the police department, the police chiefs have of our officers and how we want them to interact with the public the in the small percentage of times when force is used. But those times are very critical, and we want to ensure that it's being done in a manner that's procedurally just, in a manner that's consistent with the law in a manner that's fair and in a manner that our community would expect and so um we have gone down to a granular level to try to provide that clarity um of what our expectations are in very rapidly evolving difficult circumstances and the law has always allowed for that right and making sure that things are objectively reasonable.
Under the totality of the circumstances, you can't possibly create a policy for every single scenario, but we're trying to be able to do our best to provide guidance in the things that our officers are likely to face in their their day to day jobs.
Yeah, and you have faced public criticism from many people who have said that the police are heavy-handed at times, and this and that. How do you think the public's gonna react?
The perception of this policy will be: I hope it's received favorably. We've worked with a variety of groups through our community advisory panel. We've worked with a monitoring team. We're working with the Department of Justice, and so this is not something that's been developed in an echo chamber of the police department; it's been created only by the police department. This is something that we've really tried to get feedback we've tried to get feedback from those who quite frankly are oftentimes critical of the police department, but we wanted to to listen and to give that voice and to hear and to really give some thought to it and to be able to provide context to it and provide direction that's uh that's consistent and so I do feel, uh, I don't know I would hope that people would um receive this, seeing that the police department is really taking steps and efforts to try to elicit that community feedback and take it and be able to implement it into how we go about doing our jobs and that meeting is tomorrow. It's a community meeting. Everyone is welcome to attend.
It's the Larry E.Reider building on K Street downtown that starts at 6 o'clock. You get a lot more information there and get to ask questions and take part in breakout sessions. Assistant Chief Brent Stratton, thank you for coming in this morning. Appreciate it.
Thank you for the invite.
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