Jersey City's New Police Chief Has Never Been a Cop
Tawana Moody has never conducted an arrest. She’s never had a badge or a police-issued gun, and she hasn’t gone through academy training. Yet she’s in charge of Jersey City, New Jersey’s 950-officer police department.
Moody, a 50-year-old Black woman with no traditional law enforcement experience, became the country’s first civilian police leader earlier this year, when her predecessor retired. To address the growing gap between the force and the community at a time when national faith in law enforcement was at an all-time low, Democratic Mayor Steven Fulop decided the department needed a fresh perspective and appointed Moody, instead of a sworn officer, in February.
“I was born and raised in Jersey City my whole life,” Moody, who’s also the first Black woman to lead the department, said of the fast-growing and racially diverse city, just outside Manhattan. “Growing up here, we know the struggle of what people didn’t understand about homelessness, about the drug dealers and other issues in the city. And all the community really wants is accountability and to know what’s going on.”
Police departments often hire leaders who’ve retired or haven’t worked on the force in years—much like the Constitution’s requirement for control of the military. But unlike Moody, these retired officers have always had a firm foundation in law enforcement, working their way up the police hierarchy for decades before exiting and returning to lead. Without that same experience, the idea is that Moody can merge the interests of the community and the department, without the same pressure to adhere to the problematic elements of police culture, like the “Blue Wall of Silence.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvevk/jersey-citys-new-police-chief-has-never-been-a-cop
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More of this, please!
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