For Little Rock police, residency rule floated again

City director cites concerns in U.S. over killings of blacks

Graphs showing the Makeup of Little Rock Police Department
Graphs showing the Makeup of Little Rock Police Department

For the second time in just over a year, a Little Rock city director plans to ask the Board of Directors to adopt a residency requirement for police officers.

Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix said the recent police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota prompted her to bring back a proposal to require that Little Rock police officers live within city limits, which failed in a vote last year.

The city’s police union, the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police, has already come out in opposition to Hendrix’s effort, with President Tommy Hudson saying Friday that the organization is strongly against it.

“It’s something that gets a burn in my saddle every time they bring it up. It’s insulting to our membership when she does,” Hudson said, referring to Hendrix.

“She goes on this rant that she thinks officers are going to have more appreciation for their job living in the area they work, but what she doesn’t take into consideration is the amount they are getting paid, for them to live in the houses they live in outside the city, they wouldn’t be able to live in those houses inside Little Rock because it’s too expensive. And there’s also the problems with the school system,” said Hudson, who lives outside the city.

He noted that the last two Little Rock officers to be killed in the line of duty, both friends of his, lived in other towns, yet they still died in service to Little Rock. Those deaths were in 1995 and 2002.

“For [Hendrix] to say we have more appreciation if we live in city limits, that’s just something that attacks their legacy and it irritates me,” Hudson said of the two officers who died.

Hendrix didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday on her desire to have another vote on police residency.

Last week, she requested that city staff provide her data on the race, gender and city of residence of every Little Rock Police Department employee.

Results provided by the city show the majority of department employees are white men and that most employees live outside Little Rock.

Of the department’s 528 police officers, 183 live in Little Rock and the remaining 345 live in 32 other towns. That amounts to about 35 percent of police living inside the city.

Just more than 81 percent of the department’s officers are men, and almost 65 percent are white. There are 165 black officers, about 31 percent of the department. Fourteen officers are Hispanic, four are Asian and two classify themselves as “other.”

Hendrix, who is black, brings up race relations far more often than any other city director, many times saying she isn’t afraid to have tough conversations on race. She has at times accused the board of voting along racial lines, with the three black city directors and seven white city directors being on opposing sides.

On June 16, 2015, City Director Kathy Webb, who is white, joined the three black city directors — Hendrix, Doris Wright and Ken Richardson — in voting for a residency requirement for officers.

The other directors, all white, voted against the ordinance. They are Joan Adcock, Brad Cazort, Gene Fortson, Lance Hines, Dean Kumpuris and B.J. Wyrick.

The 2014 deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the subsequent attention to police killings of blacks, prompted Hendrix to bring forth the ordinance proposal last year, she said at the time.

The proposal last year would have required only new police hires to live within the city, and it would have made them ineligible for continued employment if at any time they moved outside city limits.

City Manager Bruce Moore, who is black, was strongly against the residency requirement.

Some high-profile Little Rock residents, including Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, who is black, spoke in favor of the residency requirement last year.

Others, like police Sgt. John Gilchrist, opposed it, saying Hendrix was doing what officers can’t — profiling.

According to a 2014 analysis by FiveThirtyEight.com, 15 of the nation’s 75 largest city police forces had a residency requirement for officers.

Among those cities are Memphis; New Orleans; Jackson, Miss.; Cincinnati; Boston; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia, and Chicago. FiveThirtyEight, led by statistician Nate Silver, compiles or creates data to report on a variety of topics usually related to political news.

In speaking last year in favor of a residency requirement, Griffen pointed out that officers carry the only lethal authority in the community.

“The idea of allowing people who are virtual strangers to a community to come in and have the greatest power in the community should be immediately apparent to anyone who believes in representation of democracy,” Griffen said. “Secondly, we have to ask the question, do we want police officers to be neighbors or occupiers?”

Pastor and attorney Rickey Hicks, who is black, spoke against the requirement and said it’s just as disingenuous to say a white officer from Cabot would be less fair as it is to say a black man would be more prone to criminal behavior.

“Generalizations about people are wrong whichever way they go,” Hicks said last year.

Police Chief Kenton Buckner, who is black, said the state of the Little Rock School District prompts many of his officers with school-aged children to live outside the city.

He said it was already hard enough to recruit people to the profession and that adding a stringent residency requirement would make it even more difficult to find qualified officers.

“[The job] is a difficult sell when every other day you turn on CNN and there are negative things going on in our profession,” Buckner said at the time.

It’s unclear whether Hendrix will bring forth the same ordinance as she did last year. She didn’t say when she would propose another ordinance, only saying it will happen “in the future.”

Last year, several city directors who opposed the mandate said they were in favor of instead adopting incentives that would encourage all city employees to live in Little Rock.

Richardson suggested providing take-home cars or housing assistance to police officers who chose to live in the city.

At the time, about 150 of the 177 officers who lived in Little Rock didn’t have takehome cars. To provide those, Moore estimated it would have cost the city more than $7.7 million in immediate purchase costs at $51,709 per car, not counting ongoing maintenance.

Offering extra personal days to officers and firefighters who live in the city would also be costly, Moore said, because it would require providing overtime to others to cover the shifts.

A cheaper incentive would be to offer a $100-per-month housing allowance for employees who were city residents. With health care and pension costs added, the city as of last year would have had to pay about $430,400 a year to offer that incentive.

Other options mentioned were one-time closing costs of up to $2,000 toward purchasing a home within the city or up to $1,000 to cover a deposit and first month’s rent for a Little Rock home.

While all of those options were discussed in June 2015, they’ve never been brought up again at the board level.

Hendrix had also brought forth a police residency ordinance in 2012, but it was voted down unanimously with even Hendrix voting against it, saying she wanted to take more time to research the issue.

In January 1994, the city board voted to require that all city employees live within the city. Adcock and Hendrix served on the board at the time and both voted in favor of the policy.

That mandate was rescinded in December 1995, after nearly two years of debate on the subject.

By that time, Wyrick was serving her first term on the board. She proposed, as a compromise, a policy that says that if two candidates are equally qualified, the city resident will get the job. That passed, and the policy is still in effect.

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