Residents can voice their opinions on the current state of the Columbus Police Department by contacting their city council members.
COLUMBUS, Ga. — With the escalation of violent gang-related crime weighing heavily on the minds of more Columbusites than ever before in recent memory, many are looking to the hard-working and valiant officers of the Columbus Police Department for solutions.
Those solutions should be coming from police chief Freddie Blackmon — though his favorite line of “let me get back with you on that,” hasn’t provided them.
A MAYORAL RECOMMENDATION
Two years ago, a nation-wide search was conducted to find a new police chief for Columbus after long-time chief Ricky Boren retired after 49 years of service on the force.
Mayor Skip Henderson then personally recommended Freddie Blackmon — a Columbus native, graduate of Kendrick High School, and current CPD officer — to take on the role.
“We felt like the police department, that employees of the police department, and the citizens of Columbus deserved the most qualified individual available,” Henderson said at the time.
Before Blackmon’s name was put forth for department chief, his career seemed up to par for many — on paper. From his start as a beat cop in 1986, Blackmon rose through the ranks of Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, and finally Major in 2014. His senior roles included investigating officer-involved shootings, employee misconduct, and intelligence analysis.
In November of 2020, Blackmon donned his new title and took over the department as Chief of Police.
THE RECKONING BEGINS
Henderson’s recommendation quickly revealed itself to have been questionable at best.
Within Blackmon’s first year as chief, violent crime rose throughout Columbus at rates that far outpaced the rest of the country. City manager Isaiah Hugley’s famed excuse of “it’s happening everywhere,” doesn’t cut it.
In 2021, the city suffered an unprecedented 70 homicides with an astonishing 181 reported shooting victims. With a population of 205,617 people, that left Columbus with an unfathomable homicide rate of more than 34 per hundred-thousand residents (called per cent mille, or pcm).
For context, the U.S. homicide rate as a whole that year was just 6.9 pcm.
Within his first year on the job, Blackmon’s policing leadership had produced a city that now had a homicide rate five times higher than the rest of the country.
For further context, if Columbus were a country itself, it would have been ranked the 11th highest homicide rate in the entire world, right behind Nigeria (10th, 34.5 pcm); and South Africa (9th, 35.9 pcm).
The violence would only continue to get worse in the year ahead, despite the thankfully lower number of dead from the city’s still-increased number of shootings.
The city endured a record-breaking 196 shooting victims last year in 2022; an increase of 8.28% from the 181 victims of 2021.
DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT
On March 15, 2022, two Columbus police officers filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the city, Mayor Henderson, Chief Blackmon, and the city’s human resource director Reather Hollowell.
The suit alleges that Blackmon was using race and gender as a determining factor for promotions within the department, specifically alleging that Blackmon sought to achieve a “predetermined balance of race and gender” regardless of the officer’s actual merit:
“Plaintiffs allege that Chief Blackmon discriminated against them by denying them promotions in seeking to achieve and maintain a predetermined racial and gender balance … Plaintiffs bring claims of race and gender discrimination pursuant to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the lawsuit states.
Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Blackmon lowered both the educational and time-in-rank promotion requirements to allow certain hand-picked officers of a particular race and gender to be eligible for promotion, while other more qualified officers were overlooked due to their own race and gender.
The city and its private civilian legal representation have continued to deny the allegations, simply stating that the claims are “without merit.”
The lawsuit, DOWE et. al. v. COLUMBUS CONSOLIDATED GOVERNMENT et. al., is case number 4:22-cv-00059 in Georgia Middle District Court. It is currently awaiting a completion of discovery next month on March 14, with dispositive motions due by no later than April 28, as ordered by the honorable U.S. District Judge Clay D. Land on October 26 of last year.
NO CONFIDENCE FROM FOP UNION
During a city council meeting in February 2022, the city’s local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police made a presentation.
That presentation revealed that 84% of Columbus police officers who were FOP members did not believe that Blackmon was capable of doing his job as chief; specifically that they do not believe Blackmon has the ability to treat officers fairly, ensure their safety, nor reduce crime.
Those 219 officers account for 70% of the entire Columbus Police Department; seven out of ten CPD officers formally stated through their union that they had low confidence in Blackmon’s ability to lead the department.
The FOP is a national union-like organization consisting of more than 364,000 sworn police officers across the U.S. The organization serves as “the voice of those who dedicate their lives to protecting and serving our communities,” and is “committed to improving the working conditions of law enforcement officers and the safety of those we serve through education, legislation, information, community involvement and employee representation.”
In short: if the FOP is stating that 70% of an entire police force doesn’t believe their own chief is capable of leading the department, you ought to darn well listen.
In response, many officials who have no background in policing attempted to simply dismiss the FOP’s claims as “racism,” paying no mind to the fact that many of the officers stating Blackmon was incompetent were of a non-white race themselves.
Wane Hailes, the president of Columbus’ local NAACP branch, was quoted as saying, “They meant to embarrass the chief of police,” claiming that the multiracial and diverse pool of 219 veteran police officers somehow were only motivated to oust their chief because of his skin color, ignoring the officers’ cited reason of Blackmon’s failed leadership ability.
The officers — who make up roughly 70% of the city's entire police department — would continue to have their voices ignored. Other city officials also publicly used the excuse of “racism” to dismiss the 219 officers who were deeply concerned with Blackmon’s leadership ability.
Both Mayor Henderson and City Manager Isaiah Hugley both dismissed the claims, publicly stating they believed the officer who gave the presentation must have had some personal vendetta against Blackmon — completely ignoring the 219 officers whose voices were being presented.
Hugley in particular then went on to claim “racism” as the reason, further demonstrating a lack of regard for the voices of 70% of the entire Columbus police force. Hugley gave a long-winded lecture of the history of black police officers in an attempt to dismiss the claims through an emotional race-based plea.
“Chief Blackmon … I want you to know that I stand with you,” Hugley said, “I have never witnessed such treatment of a police chief in 37 years.”
Instead of heeding the voices of 219 Columbus police officers, city officials continued to dismiss their votes of no-confidence as somehow merely being “racist.”
Blackmon himself attempted to dismiss the claims against him as being race-based, which probably didn’t help to win over more confidence from the 70% of his department that cited his poor leadership ability as the reason for their dismay.
“They didn’t just start over night … They didn’t just start when I became the chief of police, Blackmon said in response.
However, data from a third-party study of the department would later show that Blackmon was in fact likely to be the cause.
JENSEN HUGHES STUDY
In the face of extreme rising rates of violent crime coupled with a complete lack of official action from the city’s government, a private group of prominent local business owners and community leaders anonymously pooled hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to hire a well-reputed private firm to conduct a world-class study of the Columbus Police Department.
That firm was none other than Jensen Hughes. The firm’s extremely well-reputed track record includes investigating the Memphis and Louisville police departments after the death of Breonna Taylor, as well as the Minneapolis police department after the death of George Floyd.
Over the course of eight weeks, the firm conducted an operational assessment of the Columbus Police Department to identify underlying problems and provide insights on how to solve them.
While the initial results of the study are technically confidential in nature, Mayor Henderson has stated he intends to make the final copy of the report publicly available.
A preliminary copy of that confidential report has become widely circulated anyway. The results therein have been shockingly revealing, to say the least.
The largest observable metric through which the department’s internal problems have manifested is in the insanely low rates of officer retention. From 2016 through the present, the department has had 400 officers walk off the job; an average of 49 officers per year.
Since Blackmon took over as chief, that yearly average nearly doubled to 84 officers quitting in 2021.
While the department currently has a mere 118 patrol officers, the report states it should have an additional 196 for a total of 314; the department is missing 62% of the patrol officers it should have to keep the streets of Columbus safe.
The firm’s report also found issues that coincided with the FOP’s stated concerns from back in February of 2022, specifically that Blackmon micromanages his workforce, does not permit officers to have the autonomy required to do their jobs effectively, and communicates poorly throughout the entire department.
The report cites that officers had a “general feeling of distrust” towards Blackmon, again naming his poor communication skills as a reason behind their lack of confidence.
Poor morale, incomparably-low pay, and a genuine sense of Blackmon’s poor leadership were the three repeated themes throughout the more than 130-page report.
Not having a gang unit whatsoever didn’t help, either.
The complete disregard for providing special units and task forces with the personnel and equipment required to do their jobs sure didn’t, either.
As a result, officers have left in droves, as fewer and fewer officers were willing to work such a dangerous job under the shameful conditions in which they were forced to serve under Blackmon’s command. In turn, fewer officers were able to patrol, and more Columbus residents were shot to death throughout the city as violent crime continued to rise.
This really isn’t rocket science, and it really is as simple as it sounds: in the Profession of Arms, bad leadership gets people killed.
When that goes ignored by city officials who would rather brush it off by claiming the “race card,” you wind up with homicide rates that topple those of third-world countries.
Policing isn’t a social experiment. Violent thugs will continue to exploit the good people of our city until our leadership fixes the problems — of which the police department is but one of many.
THE 196-VICTIM QUESTION
With a continuous escalation of gang-related violence resulting in 196 people shot in Columbus last year — one out of every thousand residents in the city — there is a single set of questions that beg to be answered:
And, perhaps the most important question overall that is blatantly self-answered by the findings of the $190k privately-funded study:
Has Chief Blackmon broken the Columbus Police Department?
Residents can voice their opinions on the current state of the Columbus Police Department by contacting their city council members.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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