Heather Taylor was quick with a response.
It was last month, shortly after Sen. Roy Blunt announced he would not run for reelection in 2022, setting off a mad scramble for candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties to determine who might become the next U.S. senator from Missouri.
On Twitter, I suggested Taylor, the former president of the Ethical Society of Police. She’s a 20-year veteran of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Metropolitan Police Department. She’s honest as the day is long. She’s tough. She’s media savvy. She can talk about stopping homicides and defunding police in the same sentence with the credibility of a woman who has been at the scene of a late-night shooting, consoling a sobbing mother who just lost a child to gun violence.
Taylor was appreciative of the sentiment. “I’m not capable of doing it,†she texted me. “I have no BS filter.â€
People are also reading…
She’s kinda busy moving on with her post-police career at the moment. But you know who would make a badass candidate for the U.S. Senate from Missouri:
— Tony Messenger (@tonymess)
Indeed, that’s why she is going to be so good at her next job. On Thursday, Mayor-elect Tishaura Jones announced that Taylor, who retired from the police force last year, will be a senior adviser to the public safety director in her administration. That public safety director, on an interim basis, at least, will be Taylor’s former boss, Dan Isom, who was chief of police in ºüÀêÊÓƵ from 2008 to 2012.
It’s worth noting that homicides dropped when Isom was chief, to 113 in 2012 from 167 in 2008. Isom will be the first to tell you that he wasn’t the only reason that happened, but his role, and the data he followed to educate his strategy, mattered. Isom cares about data. That was clear the first time I met him in person, during his tenure as chief. We had lunch in a back room at Lombardo’s. Isom wanted to make sure I was getting a full picture of the data being produced under his watch.
The longtime professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-ºüÀêÊÓƵ has both a master’s and a doctorate from UMSL. When he was a student, he wrote a study about how residents in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region had changing views on high-speed pursuits by police. There was significant outrage over deaths and accidents caused by such policies, but, Isom found, the organizational and political structures in ºüÀêÊÓƵ limit the ability for residents to make much of an impact on police policy.
That persistent ºüÀêÊÓƵ reality is slowly changing, and Isom’s new boss, Jones, is a symbol of that change. She campaigned on changing the culture of the police department, on diminishing the power of its union, which often stands in the way of the sort of change Isom wrote about, on shifting resources to helping people escape poverty, instead of over-policing neighborhoods that have suffered from decades of disinvestment.
One big change with the appointment of Isom and Taylor that will be apparent immediately will be one of attitude, including toward those people who are accused of crimes, and those who are victims, no matter their circumstances. Isom believes that one surefire way to reduce homicides, as I’ve written before, is to care about all murder victims, and “not just the good kids.â€
That quote has resonated with me ever since he spoke it, at a political forum before the mayoral election four years ago. Around that time, I attended another forum, at a coffee shop in an old church building on the city’s south side. It was organized by the nonprofit, and the speakers, all Black, were talking to a mostly white audience about their daily experience living in the city. They spoke of police brutality, of bullets flying, of homicides and trauma.
One woman, a nurse, explained why it is common in the north-side neighborhood where she lives for people to decline to call the police when they see, for instance, a drug deal taking place on the corner involving local teens. That teenager is somebody’s son, somebody’s nephew or grandchild. The woman said that she didn’t want to end up at that boy’s funeral, explaining to his mother, that she was the one who called police the night the boy got shot and died.
It was a powerful bit of humanity that fulfills the thought behind Isom’s statement, and also explains the challenges ahead to the two veteran cops taking charge of public safety at a time when homicides are high — 262 last year — and trust is low.
I trust Taylor and Isom to follow the data, to be brutally honest with the new mayor, and the communities they serve, with where the data leads, and to follow a strategy that gives them an opportunity to change the direction of the trend lines on crime in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. This is no time for a BS filter, and with that as a job description, Jones is off to a good start.