In the wake of global protests demanding racial equality and police reform, the Springfield Police Department has added a page to the city website to collect department policies and statistics for the public. Listen to the audio for this story here.
The site, called “Where We Stand”, has a list of policies the SPD says keep it more accountable, like implicit bias training for officers and city funding for body cameras. It says chokeholds are banned by the police department, except in so-called “lethal force encounters.”Jasmine Bailey, spokesperson for the SPD, says the department established the page after getting a lot of questions from the public about police procedure.
“We really want the public to know that we’re receptive and that we’re willing to have a dialogue with them, and that we want to educate them on the inner workings of the police department, so we can talk about maybe what we can be doing better as a police department and as a community,” Bailey says.
The site also includes demographic, crime, and complaint statistics. SPD received 33 externally-filed complaints about officers’ conduct in 2019.
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