The national trend for police chief searches is for them to be open, transparent and with plenty of public input.
Jennifer A. Kingson writes in Axios Cities that the choice of a police chief has become like an election, with the need to build consensus around a candidate.
Gary Peterson, CEO of Public Sector Search & Consulting, told Kingson, “Communities are demanding — they want to have input in who’s going to be their next police leader.”
Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson has launched a national search for the city’s next police chief over the objection of the local police union that wants one of its members to be appointed to the spot.
Robinson’s predecessor, Ashton Hayward, made his police chief appointments – Chip Simmons, David Alexander and Tommi Lyter – without any national search or public input. All were from inside the Pensacola Police Department.
High-profile searches are under way in San Jose, Albuquerque, Miami and Memphis. In San Jose, a top-down selection approach was scrapped in favor of community vetting of the candidates.
San Jose City Manager David Sykes told Axios,”We wanted to take some of the mystery” out of it and ” do a much more kind of rigorous evaluative process.”