CMPD chief addresses releasing racist group chat texts

Channel 9’s crime reporter Hunter Sáenz spoke with Chief Patterson on Wednesday.

She is owning the wrongdoing in an effort to move forward.

In the fallout after the story broke, community activists demanded, in part, to see the years-long text messages sent between officers that included racist slurs and other offensive language.

The chief told Sáenz on Wednesday that she does not know if she’ll ever release the texts.

She told Sáenz that every officer in the group chat was cited for termination and that nobody slipped by.

Chief Patterson said that as far as she knows, nobody in the chat raised any concerns about what was being said nor tried to stop it.

She said each officer sent messages to that group chat.

She believes this was an isolated incident and does not prove a systemic problem in her department.

“It is about accountability with me,” Chief Patterson said. “We recognize, as an organization, the trust with the community is delicate, right now. We want to rebuild that trust. We want the community to know we are here, to serve them, and my personal thing is we are not going to hire or have people on this police department that is going to violate that trust.”

Sáenz: How can you assure the public that this was not just offensive speech and not evidence of a potential pattern of discriminatory policing?

Patterson: That was my No. 1 question when I learned of this: Is this systemic? Is this going on across the police department? And so we approached it from that angle, trying to determine exactly who was saying what, and then checking other officers as well to see that’s on their shifts, that’s their acquaintances, to see if this is being spread across the police department. I was very happy, very pleased to see that it was, and I believe truly that it’s isolated to those individuals. I feel that if there were others, something would have come out by now.

Sáenz: You weren’t chief when these officers were hired - and I want to be fair on that. But looking at what has come to light, what do you believe -- CMPD’s hiring process: In that process, where did it fail to identify this?

Patterson: And that’s what we’re looking at. We’re going back, peeling back the layers, looking very introspectively at the organization, looking at our processes. I was a captain over recruitment when I was here before, and I understand the process and what it looks like. We have a strong process. There are a lot of things that are built in to be able to determine whether somebody’s a right fit for law enforcement. I think in this instance we were under the gun.

Sáenz: There has been, as you know -- your predecessors -- there was pressure to get more officers hired and on the street. Do you think that pressure affected how applicants were vetted?

Patterson: It could have been. I think it could have been. We’re all under pressure. Every police agency in the nation. I have told my team from day one. I say it is about quality, not quantity. Yes, we need to fill vacancies, but we want to make sure that we bring quality people into the organization so that we can, as much as we can, prevent things like this from happening.

Sáenz: You’re in a difficult spot, right now. That’s no secret. How are you restoring trust with a community that may not trust your department?

Patterson: That is keeping me up at night because I love this community and I’ve said that repeatedly. I know that the Charlotte community supports this police department, but right now, they have a right to question us. We’re going to do listening sessions where we hear their concerns, allow them to vent, but also to just continue to be a professional organization -- doing the right thing. We can’t stress that enough.

Chief Patterson said that she trusts the department’s vigorous hiring process. However, she is reviewing it.

She told Sáenz that the vendor CMPD uses for screening applicants recently added questions about implicit bias to its psychological tests that it puts applicants through.