- I think right now, what people don't realize is that we've had ongoing dialogue with members of the Amarillo Police Department.

We've established a great unique relationship with Chief Martin Birkenfeld whom I think is doing a very impeccable job in his leadership role.

- The city of Amarillo named Birkenfeld to succeed former Chief Ed Drain, who left the department at the beginning of 2020.

Birkenfeld assumed the role in May - Things that were established prior to him, assuming the office of chief are still in existence because he wholeheartedly believes in those things whether it's neighborhood police officers, community policing, but he went a step farther and actually implemented implicit bias training.

- Well, implicit bias, we all have it.

And so implicit bias has a lot of definitions but a basic definition is it's an attitude or a thinking process that can manifest itself in behavior but it's a - something that's in your mind from the time you're born and you start learning.

So an implicit bias, you may not be aware of, in fact most of the time you're not.

And another word for it is a flinch.

What makes you flinch?

A poker player's always looking for tails, but you sometimes see that when you tell somebody information and it surprises them, they have a reaction and it's a flinch, and that's the little bit of their bias towards that situation coming to the surface.

What we try to do is make sure that we understand what our implicit biases are, as much as possible, and then understand when they come to the surface, how do we react on those situations?

Because we're judged on how we behave not necessarily what we think and you may not be able to control as much what you think is how you behave on those on those thoughts.

In police work it's very important to be cognizant of those biases because our job is to walk in the middle and take care of everybody.

- In July, Chief Birkenfeld joined other representatives of APD and Potter and Randall counties in meeting with leaders of Amarillo's B lack and Latinx communities.

It was a reactivation of Community Alliance of Leaders and Law Enforcement.

The local group was formed after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed black man, in Ferguson, Missouri in August, 2014.

- We live in a community, God bless us, that is - hasn't had that type of interaction that other communities have had.

Thank God we haven't.

But who's to say it cannot happen here.

- Through the alliance, members of law enforcement in Amarillo and Potter and Randall counties come together with representatives of our Black and brown communities.

- The thought was to start developing relationships.

And if I know you, Karen, if I could pick up a phone and say hi this is Alphon-, Oh, I know who you are.

Then the establishment more comfortability.

Listen to what makes me tick, listen to what I've been going through, listen to what my feelings are, listen to what my community feels toward you, the perception, whether it be real or not it's a perception.

Listen to why, I still carry the historic significance of anguish and hurt and frustration and anger.

As in beginning of the turn of the 20th century, when African-Americans were being lynched, in an enormous rate, simply because you were Black.

We've got to get outside of our comfort zone.

We've got to engage, we've got to reach out.

We can't wait for the other person to do it.

We've got to do it ourselves.

- It's a good group.

There - it's tough to listen to somethings that are critical of the police department, but it's very important because we need to hear that criticism.

We need to know where we're being effective or not effective, or where we're being less than trustworthy in the eyes of the public.

And so we wanna be as transparent as possible and show that, hey, we're doing the right thing, and if you think we're not tell us where we can improve.

- The Amarillo Police Department was not among departments from which the Stanford Policing Project has requested traffic stop records, but it puts out an annual racial profiling report based on traffic stops and their outcomes.

APD did not receive a complaint about racial profiling in 2019.

According to the most recent report available.

That year, APD made more than 37,600 traffic stops.

- I won't say that my experiences with officers has been extensive.

And I would just say it's been 50/50.

50% I think should have been better and 50%, you know, very cordial and decent.

When I was, I was about 16 and my grandfather is from new Orleans.

So we would, we go to Mardi Gras like it's kind of like a family reunion.

This one Mardi Gras, there were Caucasian people sitting on police cars.

People were just hanging out.

So I had an uncle that sat on one and for some odd reason, the police didn't like that and they just came over there and start roughing him up right there in front of us and calling him all kind of names.

- Do you believe the incident with your uncle was racially motivated?

- I do, they didn't say anything to any other person there but us, so yeah.

- This year, Black Americans' confidence in police dropped to a new low since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.

Just 19% of black adults polled, expressed confidence in police, compared with 56% of white adults.

That's down from 36% for Black adults and 60% for white adults in 2013, at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement.

- I can definitely say for the city of Amarillo, I know that we have our challenges just like other cities do.

And so I just believe that, especially with Chief Drain and now Chief Birkenfeld, what they have done throughout their tenures or their service for the city is they've tried to be proactive.

And so like in the death of George Floyd what they tried to do is say, what can our police department, what can we teach our police officers not to do?

What can we learn from this incident?

My job as a council member is to oversee and watch what continues to go on.

And as incidents come up, you know, we wanna make sure that Chief Birkenfeld is addressing those incidences and that we as a council are being made aware of them because citizens are gonna come to us first before they come to the chief.

- I think in Amarillo, we don't really have that testimony.

As far as that we see a lot of police brutality and I'm grateful for that.

Do I see, what's the word I'm looking for, when you I may be prejudged often, but as far as harming me I don't see a lot of harm, but it still hurts all the same for me to be looked at just because of the color of my skin and, or because I live on a certain side of town.

I don't belong over there.

And when I get stopped or pulled over by officer those moments hurt.

But as far as seeing a lot of brutality, I don't think we have that here, that problem here in Amarillo.

I would like to see it more diversified and would like to see more people of color or minorities being police officers.

- Of the Amarillo Police Department's 334 sworn officers, only seven are black.

- We really need our department to look a little more like our community.

And I think that when we have people of color, when we have more women in law enforcement it really enriches our organization because of the knowledge that they bring and the different backgrounds that they bring and the different perspectives on law enforcement that they bring.

So that is one of my major goals.

We recently established a recruiting team within just the last month.

And it's a little different concept than what we've done in the past we've always had recruiters but we've not looked at it as a team concept.

The team is very diverse and again it was volunteers, but it's people who came to us, some newer officers especially who said, hey, I wanna help recruit.

And so we're very hopeful.

I've told them their marching orders are to look in every corner of Amarillo, make sure that we're not missing out on opportunities for recruitment.

- I've known probably five, young men right now that want to go into the field of law enforcement.

But because of everything that's going on right now, they're afraid of the backlash.

- Jackson and Potter County Constable Idella Jackson are unrelated colleagues in law enforcement.

As officers of color, they hold unique perspectives.

- You know, unfortunately on my black peers consider most of them, not everybody, look at me as a traitor.

They feel that if you were African-American descent why would you work in a field they considered the enemy?

And law enforcement is not the enemy, we're here to serve and protect.

Overall, officers, are awesome officers, it's just we have those bad apples.

- How does what's happening today make your job harder?

(sighs deeply) - Well, we have to, always be mindful of - that everyone is looking at us in a bad way, no matter what, no matter how many good things we do as a community service officer, or we out there doing stuff at the community.

And we're showing people that, we can work together.

- We have a target on our back.

and a lot of my family's like please be be safe out there because the one incident in California, where the gentleman just came up, ambushed the two officers sitting in their vehicles, he don't know they background, he don't know if they were bad officers, he just saw him in the unit and they was in uniform and he just started firing inside their patrol units.

So it is a dangerous time out here for us all even when we were officers of color or just officers period so.

- You've got to, second guess, you've got to reassure, that what you're doing matters - As protests grew in 2020, so did calls to defund the police.

- My perspective is if a person means that we should cut our police force then we're gonna have to cut services in a big way.

The majority of our funding is salaries, it's paying people to do a job.

So if we cut our budget, we're cutting people and then we're cutting services.

But I think the more important issue is how can we fund additional services like mental health services?

That's probably our biggest in the Amarillo area maybe even in the country is the mental health services and getting people the help they need.

I'm really proud of what Amarillo has done over the last 12 years.

In 2007, we started a Crisis Intervention Team and our Crisis Intervention Team has police officers who are set aside from answering normal calls.

And they focus on mental health calls and their job is to find the right resource for that person who's in crisis.

- Defunding the police, to me, means taking some of the funds that were used to maybe to militarize a police department, instead of using funds to militarize a police department we can use those funds to revitalize some of the communities that the police are policing.

I do not believe that we should do away with policemen because it would be chaos, and that's ridiculous.

- This whole concept of defund the police that just doesn't make sense to me.

I can't, I cannot fathom it.

You know, we want our police to be trained, we want our police to be able to provide essential services in communities.

We want them to be properly funded so that they can invest in the proper training needed, in order to fulfill the requisite duties of their esteemed positions.

You can't expect that if you defund them.