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COLUMBUS, Ga. — After one of the bloodiest weeks in the memorable history of our city, police officers continue to resign from the department as city officials appear to be relentlessly ignoring the department’s severe leadership issues.
In an interview of Chief Blackmon by WTVM reporter Ashlee Williams on Feb. 20, Blackmon said his department “had not uncovered the recent events to be involved in gang activity" when speaking about the shooting at a gas station on Warm Springs Road that left nine children bloodied from gunshot wounds.
However, in contradiction to Blackmon’s poorly-chosen words, one of the two suspects arrested just yesterday by CPD was in fact a validated gang member.
To this day, throughout his more than two years as chief of police, no strategic approach to address the exponential increase of gang activity within the Fountain City has ever been planned, published, presented, nor implemented by police chief Freddie Blackmon. With an estimated 1,800 gang members in Columbus, the known violent offenders make up 0.9% of the entire city’s population.
This dangerous pattern of failed leadership from Blackmon has continued to be expressed by the officers of the Columbus Police Department, though their serious professional concerns for the safety of our city have continued to go ignored by city officials.
We decided to look into why that might be. Here’s what we discovered.
LEAKED: THE FOUR DOCUMENTS SHOWING CPD’S LEADERSHIP FAILURE
Four professional studies of the Columbus Police Department have shown the leadership failures of chief Freddie Blackmon for years. The results of those studies have been contained in documents held close-to-the-chest by city officials and news media outlets.
Every news agency has these documents, though no one has made them available for public viewing. We believe the public has a right to know.
That’s why we are leaking them for you.
Explore the full story to see the four CPD documents that city officials and news media didn't want you to see.
THE CSU SWOT ANALYSIS CITY OFFICIALS KNEW OF ALL ALONG
Before we begin this article, we need to take a minute to recognize and thank the absolutely heroic officers of the Columbus Police Department. We at the Muckraker are eternally grateful for your continued dedication and service to our city. You guys are in some pretty unfathomable circumstances right now, yet you continue to run towards the things that most people simply pretend do not exist — and you do it relentlessly, professionally, and with distinction. From our heart to yours: Thank You.
If you’re reading this, 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.
Back in 2021, the Columbus Police Department under the command of Chief Freddie Blackmon realized it was having some very serious internal problems. In response, and with the help of Columbus State University’s Leadership Institute, the department conducted a SWOT analysis; a process of evaluating an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Officers involved in the 2021 study provided “votes” for what they perceived to be the department’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Those votes were then tallied and assessed, consolidated, reviewed, and plotted onto a pie chart for each category.
As you read through our commentary of what the document really reveals, it is important — absolutely paramount — that the reader keep in mind that chief Freddie Blackmon had this written SWOT analysis in his personal possession in 2021. We cannot stress that point enough.
Explore the full story to see what the document reveals, as well as how city officials and chief Freddie Blackmon willfully ignored it for years.
THE RETENTION COMMITTEE MEMO CHIEF BLACKMON IGNORED FOR YEARS
An official CPD memorandum from January 2022 shows how the Columbus Police Department’s severe leadership 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 January 2022; it was ignored; and it matches the same information contained in the CSU SWOT report from the year prior in 2021.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
Explore the full story to see the document for yourself along with what it truly reveals about the department’s severe leadership problem.
THE FOP SURVEY CITY OFFICIALS DISMISSED AS ‘RACISM’
After no action was taken by chief Freddie Blackmon nor by city officials to address the department’s serious leadership issues, the officers themselves voiced their concerns through the Columbus area’s chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police.
That voice came in the form of a formal survey of all 232 CPD members of the FOP. That voice indisputably memorialized the extreme severity of the safety concerns voiced by our city’s police officers while under the command of police chief Freddie Blackmon.
As you read through the document of that survey’s published findings and our commentary explaining its content below, it is important to remember that the serious leadership concerns voiced by officers within the document had already been known by Chief Blackmon since 2021. Though the same concerns were clearly identified in two other independent studies that city officials had known of for years, no action was taken to correct the issues.
The document begins by stating that the organization surveyed all 232 of its members who were officers of the Columbus Police Department, which accounted for 73.6% of the entire department overall. In short: the survey included just under three-fourths of every single officer of our city’s entire police department.
When the FOP presented their findings to city council in February 2022, city officials jointly dismissed the claims and opted to call the voices of 70% of the city’s entire police force ‘racist’ instead.
Those city officials who have continued to make that claim are either mathematically inept and incompetent, or they are making excuses in an attempt to intentionally fool the public. We will leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions on why city officials who have made that claim — like Isaiah Hugley — continue to do so to this day.
Explore the full story to see the document and survey results for yourself, along with our commentary of what it all actually means.
THE JENSEN HUGHES OPERATIONAL ASSESSMENT
In the absence of leadership from city officials, a private group of local community leaders took the initiative to have a world-class study performed on the entire Columbus Police Department — and they paid for the $190,000 study out of their own pockets.
Before we continue, the reader must understand the absolute insanity of it requiring a group of private individuals to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to overcome the purposeful, negligent, ignorant, and racist actions of their city’s elected officials. Let us be absolutely clear: the only reason the Jensen Hughes study was able to force the attention of our city’s elected officials was because those same officials continuously chose to ignore the problem for years, despite three former studies having already brought it to their joint attention. It is absolutely imperative that the reader understand this key chain of negligence.
The word leadership is mentioned throughout the Jensen Hughes report a total of 61 times. One of those instances was in the table of contents and one was in its cover letter. That leaves a total of 59 instances of the word leadership appearing elsewhere throughout the report.
Only one section of the report is dedicated to assessing the department’s leadership, which begins on page 27 of the report. The word is used 11 times within that section. That means the word leadership is used 48 additional times throughout the entirety of the report in all of its various sections.
Let’s take a minute to appreciate what that means.
That means that 48 other additional internal problems of the Columbus Police Department have been identified by none other than Jensen Hughes to be connected, traced, or directly caused by its leadership.
Forty-eight.
For the record, the word “racism” does not appear at all throughout the entire report — because it isn't a factor.
Explore the full story to see the complete Operational Assessment of the Columbus Police Department along with our contextual highlighting of all instances of the word leadership.
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR TO OUR CITY OFFICIALS
“The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands: for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others.” — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, published anonymously in 1689.
In this final part of our six-part series on the documentation we have recently published containing the years-long devolutionary history of our city’s police force, I have found it fitting to properly address the government of our great city on the matters-at-hand, namely: our mayor, Skip Henderson; and councilors Barnes, Davis, Huff, Tucker, Crabb, Allen, Cogle, Garrett, Thomas, and House.
It is my intention to address you all with a polite yet firm sense of tone that communicates my extreme concern for the severity of our city’s current state; a state which our city looks to its leadership to rectify; a state that you as our elected officials have the sole responsibility to maintain.
As one might expect, by-and-large, people do not often risk their reputations by publicly engaging with local topics of political controversy, even if they do in fact truly agree with the sentiments being expressed — especially when they are expressed in the most truthful, relentless, and necessary manners this publication endeavors to uphold.
Nonetheless, our readership metrics continue to show a substantial amount of public support for our recent publications. It is because of this tremendous support that I have elected to pen this letter in hopes of providing a voice for — from what we have measured to be — a considerable number of your constituents who appear to strongly support the methods through which we have chosen to provide that voice.
Explore the full story to see what our editor believes needs to be said, whether city officials like it or not.
THE WEEK AHEAD
The Columbus Police Department has released a public service announcement stating that gang initiations are known to be a likely occurrence throughout this coming week, and therefore strongly advises the public to be vigilant as they go about their everyday life. The department has stated that it is already increasing its patrol presence in the areas it believes to be the most dangerous, though it is widely known that the department may severely lack the staffing required to adequately provide a proper preventative presence.
City council has announced that a “Special Call Meeting” will take place this coming Tuesday, February 28, at 4:00 p.m. While the meeting is technically a “special call,” the precrastination is to allow the council to begin its executive session at the 4 o’clock start, thus preventing the meeting’s lengthy public agenda from extending the meeting past the midnight hour.
Almost all of those public agenda items pertain to the current matters of public safety, community violence, and the chief of police.
Those public agenda items are currently published in the meeting’s agenda packet as follows:
Stay safe. Stay alert. Stay alive.
We hope you have an aMaZiNg week.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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