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COLUMBUS, Ga. — This is the third article of a six-part series by Muscogee Muckraker covering the four Columbus Police Department documents we leaked in part one. If you’re new to the topics covered in this series, you can get caught up through our previous works here.
Yesterday, we took a detailed look at the first of those documents, diving into the details of a SWOT analysis performed on the department in partnership with Columbus State University. The findings of that document revealed severe leadership issues and a genuine lack of trust within the department all the way back in 2021.
Today, we’ll be looking at a document from January 2022 that shows how those issues continued to go ignored by police chief Freddie Blackmon and our city’s officials. As we go through what the document reveals in our commentary below, it is absolutely imperative that the reader keep in mind that this information was known by Chief Blackmon and city officials in Jan 2022; it was ignored; and it matches the same information contained in the CSU SWOT report from the year prior in 2021.
Nothing was done to address these continuously-voiced identical leadership concerns for years as our city’s police department continued to rot from the inside-out, though our officers continued to answer the call and put out for our city anyway, despite the atrocious leadership conditions they were — and still are — forced to work within.
The next time you're out-and-about and you see an officer on patrol, please thank them for what they do every day for our city. We’d bet it really would mean an awful lot to them.
Here’s the document and our commentary below explaining what it reveals.
CPD RETENTION COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATIONS
After the officers’ concerns continued to go unanswered, an internal retention committee was formed within CPD to identify ways the department might keep more of its officers on the force. The results of that committee’s findings were then published in a seven-page memorandum addressed to Chief Blackmon himself.
THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT
As city councilwoman Charmaine Crabb (District 5) put it during the Feb. 14 meeting, the memorandum begins by discussing items of a less-consequential nature to the immediate public safety threat faced by the city — and she was entirely correct in her words:
“Included in a memo to the chief on 1-30 of ‘22 (Jan 30, 2022) from a Corporal of the bureau of Administration Services, laying out steps that should be taken. I know that some of these have been taken — the low-hanging fruit (gestured air quotes emphatically with both hands) you know, has been taken care of.”
Those low-hanging fruit include a handful of items that could be addressed quickly, and some of them actually were.
In paragraph seven of the memorandum, for example, it was identified that the use of antiquated leather gun belts was now impractical for the modern officer and that new load-bearing vests should be implemented as a uniform item instead. That change was implemented in August 2022, with officers now sporting their load-bearing duty vests.
Pay compression was also largely fixed, though the timeframe of the fix’s implementation was “too little, too late” for the hundreds of experienced senior officers who had already left the department. The city’s new pay plan sought to address this issue, though its implementation has been far from perfect.
While speaking out of both sides of its mouth, the city also sought to implement educational incentive pay for its officers — though the way in which the city actually did so indirectly caused a new form of pay compression in-and-of-itself.
To provide further context on how low-hanging these fruits really are relative to the core of the department’s collapse, the category also involves the department’s updated “beard policy” and having officers who live in Alabama be permitted to take home their patrol cars.
While these items are in fact rather important for the day-to-day morale of officers — and they absolutely should be implemented — they are not even remotely of the same level of severity as the more serious issues contained in the retention committee’s memorandum.
Charmaine Crabb was right in her words.
NO TRUST
The memorandum goes on to discuss the retention committee’s findings of micromanagement and severe leadership issues within the department being a significant factor in the hindrance of officer retention.
In the opening lines of paragraph 5 of the memorandum, the retention committee states:
“There is no trust or transparency within our department.”
This, of course, had been known by chief Freddie Blackmon in writing for at least one year, as it was also contained in the SWOT report on the department published by Columbus State University in 2021. However, no plan or action was organized nor implemented to address this extremely disturbing reality.
Trust, in any martial agency such as a police department, is the single most important factor — amongst the troops, from the troops to their leadership, and from leadership to the troops. The very fact that this single item remained unaddressed and uncorrected for an entire year is perhaps the single-most disturbing item identified within the retention committee’s memorandum, bar none.
LYING TO THE MEDIA
The same paragraph also went on to provide an example of how Blackmon continued to erode that trust, stating:
“Recently the Chief was on the News and stated we were 30 Officers short and all beats were covered.”
This is now known to have been an absolute lie from Blackmon, which his officers of course knew the second those words came out of his mouth. The memorandum continues by setting that record straight, calling Blackmon out on his spoon feeding of misinformation to our local media:
“Units are splitting multiple beats and each shift is short 30 officers.”
Let’s break that down again and take a second to appreciate the extreme malice and unprofessional nature of what Blackmon did, and then was subsequently called-out on in a formal piece of department correspondence by a committee of his own officers:
Chief Freddie Blackmon lied about the department’s staffing issues — to the media — in front of his own officers, who knew he was lying, and then Blackmon continued to wonder why no one under his command trusted him to lead the department. To top it off, his own officers put that in writing to him through an official memorandum, which Blackmon then ignored, did nothing about, and never took ownership for the very item of distrust that he himself caused.
MICROMANAGEMENT
The memorandum continues by mentioning how Blackmon’s policies were micromanaging the reporting structure of the department’s supervisors, stating:
“Reports are coming back to supervisors due to small minute reasons that are irrelevant to the report or a supervisors decision is second questioned and they are forced to change the outcome.”
To put that into perspective, it was identified in writing in January 2022 that Blackmon was micromanaging the department’s mid-grade supervisors by driving them absolutely insane with irrelevant changes to the wording of their own police reports, at a level so severe that it was altering the outcome of investigations. That is utterly insane.
Nonetheless, no action was taken by Blackmon nor our city officials to intervene, and officers continued to resign in droves as the department's core staff of experienced officers decided to no longer deal with Blackmon’s lack of leadership and communication skills.
WHAT GOT YOU HERE WON’T GET YOU THERE
To further the context of how severe the leadership issues were identified to be, the memorandum states:
“The command staff has seemed to have forgotten where they came from. Policing has evolved over the years and the command staff has forgotten what it is like to ride a beat.”
Again, this was communicated to Blackmon in writing through a formal memorandum from a committee specially-formed to improve officer retention — and Blackmon did absolutely nothing to even take accountability for his own actions, let alone implement any measurable changes to rectify them.
A REAL CROWD PLEASER
Additionally, the memorandum called out Blackmon for placing public image above his officers’ dignity by forcing them to waste valuable time addressing frivolous complaints against officers that clearly were not worthy of merit:
“Quit trying to please the Public. Too many times citizens complain (about) an officer with a ridiculous allegation or something irrelevant and instead of telling the citizen to kick rocks, it is entertained. This causes the officers to feel like the command staff does not support them. This in turn causes a lack of trust.”
We aren’t sure the department’s own retention committee could have been any clearer to Blackmon. Those words seem fairly plain and specific to us.
The very fact that this needed to formally be put into writing and explained to Blackmon as if he were a kindergartener is kind of the entire point here. Are we seeing the theme yet?
CALLOUS BEHAVIOR
The memorandum continues with the same sort of things that should not require explanation to a man in the literal command of a city’s police force:
“Treat people like people and get to know your employees and listen to what they have to say. Employees don’t believe the command staff cares or understands what they are going through or what they have to put up with. Supervisors and FTO’s who are not happy with their job also have a negative impact on the officers they supervise and train. Officers need to see the command staff at roll calls and on the beat. Top ranks have never understood the impact of policies they have ordered.”
Remember: none of this was new information to Blackmon and was at least the second time he had formally received this feedback in writing. All of this had already been known since Columbus State University’s SWOT report on the department was conducted the year prior in 2021. However, Blackmon chose to ignore these same issues then, and he continues to ignore these same issues to this very day.
OUT ON A LIMB ALONE
As we stated above, trust is the single most essential factor in the leadership of any martial agency — and Blackmon had already eroded any ounce of it that may have existed within his very first year as chief.
The memorandum drives this point home in perhaps the most vivid sentence of this entire literary series:
“Officers do not have faith in their leadership and they are afraid to do their jobs for fear of being left out on a limb alone.”
It is utterly incomprehensible how such a serious finding through a formal committee’s official report remained unaddressed by the most senior of our city’s officials since January 2022.
We will let the absence of our elaboration speak for the extreme severity of this particular item. We cannot underscore this enough.
Nonetheless, it still remains unaddressed to this day.
SIT DOWN, BE HUMBLE
The retention committee memorandum very bluntly summed-up its discussion of Blackmon’s lack of leadership ability. Pay very close attention to the words of this statement, and remember that this was published in formal correspondence addressed to Blackmon himself:
“Agency leaders need to humble themselves and realize that we do have a problem. They have no confidence because the Chief tells everyone there is no problem. If he can’t acknowledge that there is a problem to fix and give honest information to the public, then officers will leave for a stronger leader. People become police officers to help the public fairly and equally. They can not do that with their hands tied behind their backs. Be proactive and not reactive.”
ADDITIONAL ITEMS
The memorandum contains several other items of extreme importance, though this article is already longer than most readers are likely willing to endure in a sitting. Those other items drew attention to how Blackmon's disintegration of the department’s patrol sectors forces officers to be unable to respond to calls in a timely manner; the lack of an effective system for vetting the calls received by the department to avoid responding to non-emergencies and issues that should be handled by other non-police agencies; the lack of a judge being on-call and available after-hours to sign warrants required for time-sensitive investigations; the lack of a lateral transfer program to attract officers from other police agencies to come and work for CPD; the lack of internal advisory boards for each bureau of the department; the lack of appreciation for officers; the fact that officers do not feel safe working their beats; and last, but not least:
The insane notion of Blackmon recommending that officers move to working 12-hour shifts to make up for the department’s extreme staffing shortages — which he himself lied to the press about by pretending the staffing shortages didn't exist.
BLACKMON’S RESPONSE TO FINDINGS
So how did Blackmon respond to all this? Well, it surely was anything but “proactive.”
Blackmon responded to the findings of the department’s internal retention committee — which was formed to determine why officers were leaving the department under his command — by disbanding the committee completely and ignoring its findings.
According to officers of CPD who have confidentially reached out to the Muckraker, this was allegedly because the findings of the report contradicted decisions Blackmon had previously made on how to run the department.
While the “low-hanging fruit” had been implemented through legislative actions and minor policy changes that only required the jotting of a pen and the spending of money, the findings that required action by Blackmon himself regarding his leadership of the department; the everyday operations therein; the morale of officers; and the mutual trust that must exist had all been entirely ignored.
THE BOTTOM LINE
All of the information contained within the memorandum regarding chief Freddie Blackmon’s lack of leadership ability — as well as its effects on both the officers of the department and the department as a whole — had already been known for an entire year prior to the memorandum’s publication.
It was ignored in 2021. It remained ignored in January 2022. It still remains ignored today.
Due to the strength and importance of the following few paragraphs, we’re going to end this article in the same way as we did yesterday:
“To this very day as of this article’s publication, no strategic plan has been conceptualized, written down, published, delivered, presented, implemented, nor measured or assessed to impact change on the items mentioned above.
Instead, officers of the Columbus Police Department continue to resign, specifically naming a lack of leadership ability in chief Freddie Blackmon as the reason for their departure. As a result, the city continues to go largely under-policed as the extremely hard-working, valiant, and brave men and women of the Columbus Police Department continue to run towards the monsters our city officials seem to pretend do not exist.
These officers continue to answer the call anyway, day-in and day-out, eight days a week — so that you don’t have to.
They are all entitled to outstanding leadership — and our city officials ought to provide that leadership.
Perhaps our city officials ought to remember that.
Be sure to stay with us as we continue this six-part series on The CPD Files: The Four Leaked Documents That Show CPD’s Leadership Failures.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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