Gag order on Wichita police chief finalists is cause for alarm | Opinion

If the city of Wichita wants to inspire public confidence in its search for a new police chief, it’s going about it all wrong.

We’ve learned that finalists for the job were instructed not to do any interviews with the local media and refer all calls back to the city manager’s office. More disturbing than that, we learned it from the finalists, not from the city.

We’ve also learned that members of the selection committee that narrowed the choices to two had to sign nondisclosure agreements.

You may be thinking “so what?”

My answer would be this: We don’t try to interview these finalists for key government jobs for fun. We do it because you need to know as much as you can about the people who might be making major decisions that affect your lives. Gag orders and NDAs don’t hurt the paper, they hurt you.

City Hall is deliberately and unapologetically standing in the way of your access to information. That’s contemptible and unacceptable.

In a written response to questions from The Eagle about the gag order, city spokeswoman Megan Lovely wrote:

“This is standard operating procedure for the City’s hiring process. The City and consultant want to ensure that each candidate has equitable coverage and access to the public ahead of the public forum . . . The City is committed to ensuring equitable media opportunities for both candidates.”

Lovely followed that up with the suggestion that we check the candidates’ “public LinkedIn profiles (and) social media” for information about them.

First off, the suggestion that a newspaper should rely on social media for its information on finalists for a high-level government job would be laughable, if it wasn’t so insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved, including the finalists, our staff, and you, our readers.

Second, it’s way beyond government overreach for City Hall and its consultants to think they get to dictate what constitutes “equitable coverage” of government actions. See First Amendment, United States Constitution for reference.

And the part about this being “standard operating procedure” is both a lame excuse and a bald-faced lie. If it’s a city policy, it’s one they just invented.

The last time the city hired a police chief, our reporter Tim Potter interviewed Gordon Ramsay, the Duluth, Minnesota, chief who got the job, and Jeff Spivey, the Irving, Texas, assistant chief who didn’t.

When City Manager Robert Layton was hired, then-City Hall reporter Brent Wistrom traveled to the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, Iowa, to talk to him and other community stakeholders about the job he’d done there.

I flew to Texas to report on another finalist, former Corpus Christi City Manager George “Skip” Noe. Coincidentally, Wichita Assistant City Manager Scott Moore was a finalist for Noe’s former job and I did a guest appearance on a local radio show telling Corpus Christi what I knew about Moore.

That’s the way it should be.

The decision on a new police chief is too important to leave to confidential interviews by a relative handful of local movers and shakers and a stage-managed public forum, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Botanica.

The city has set aside a half-hour before the forum for a media availability, so the TV reporters can get sound bites for the nightly news.

But that’s about all that’s going to be good for.

Thirty minutes, two finalists, three or four stations and the newspaper; do the math and you can see the depth of coverage that allows.

That’s not good enough.

The selection of a police chief is one of the most important decisions the city government will make all year, potentially the most important.

It’s a department with deep-seated problems, some of which killed citizens and others that involved racism, sexism and homophobia in the ranks. Just to name a few:

▪ The swatting death of Andrew Finch, an innocent man killed by an officer responding to a faked emergency call. The officer who fired the shot was promoted after the department buried a “skip letter” that revealed he had said he intended to tell the Finch family to “get over it” if he ran into them on his private security gig at their neighborhood Walmart.

▪ Text messages among members of the SWAT team shared racist memes and texts, including messages supportive of the Three Percenters, a self-styled militia that advocates for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

▪ Cedric “CJ” Lofton, a 17-year-old foster child suffering from a mental breakdown, died in custody after being held to the floor for 40 minutes by workers at the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake Assessment Center. It was later revealed that a Wichita Police officer altered his answers on a form so that the teen would go to the juvenile lockup instead of the hospital where he belonged.

▪ A police sergeant “slapped the ass” of a female officer who was in restraints during a training exercise. Police managers tried to demote the sergeant, but were overruled by Human Resources Director Chris Bezruki. A demand letter — the precursor to a lawsuit — by two current and one former deputy chiefs alleges Bezruki has a way-too-cozy relationship with the police union and retaliated against them for arguing for the sergeant’s demotion.

In each of these instances, City Hall tried to minimize and excuse blatant misconduct until it came to public light. Each case involved hiding critical information from the press, the public and at times, even other city officials.

The new police chief will inherit these and other problems, known and as-yet unknown.

And he — both finalists are male — will be working in a City Hall that’s more concerned about how things look than how they work.

How the finalists have dealt with similar issues in the past and how they’d address Wichita’s problems is something you have a right and a need to know.

Frankly, this process is already so tainted by the city’s bonehead decisions that the best thing to do would be start over. But that would look bad and therefore, it’s highly unlikely.

Here’s our promise: We’ll do whatever we can to paint you an accurate picture of who these finalists are and what they’ve done or not done — regardless of whatever walls City Hall tries to build around them.

It’s who we are. It’s what we do.