Police Chief Harris Talks Making Mistakes, Recruitment and Pretext Stops

During the day Pasadena Police Chief Eugene Harris keeps track of his mistakes.

Harris makes check marks on paper and writes down his errors as the days goes on and then at the end of the day he goes back and examines where he went wrong.

“I look to see how many check marks are there to let myself know that I’m going to make mistakes, and to keep myself grounded,” Harris told Pasadena Now.

“But the measure is, do you take accountability for those mistakes or do you try to put those mistakes on somebody else or justify them to someone else?”

But the idea is not to be perfect, Harris knows mistakes are inevitable.

“I’m going to make mistakes,” Harris said. “I know that’s going to happen. The difference is I’m going to tell you I made the mistake.”

But it’s just as easy to track the good things Harris is doing.

The six-month police chief requires his officers to walk the streets of Pasadena and meet people. That type of community engagement is required to advance in the department.

“We did an evaluation of all of our processes, the internal affairs process, the administrative review process, everything up to and including promotions,” Harris said. “So the first thing

I did was I looked at our promotional process and our evaluation process and I said, what’s distinctly missing is there’s no requirement for community engagement.”

“You’re not going to get promoted if you’re not doing it right. If you’re competing against people and all things being equal and you’re doing community engagement, you’re getting the job.”

And although Harris cannot promote any higher in the department. He is doing his share of walking the community and meeting people. 

“I go out there every weekend and you’ll hear me on Saturdays on the radios, ‘I’m on my block walks.’ I shake hands and introduce myself. That is the key to creating community and bringing the community back, talking about things and getting to know who people are,” Harris said. 

Harris leads a department of 365 sworn and non-sworn police officers. In the past six months, he has promoted 14 police officers, the majority of which have been Black and Hispanic. 

The department continues to have extremely low use of force incidents.

In an analysis of 16,000 traffic stops, there were just two instances of force resulting from those traffic stops.

But still there is work to be done.

Before Harris ever came to Pasadena, longtime veterans retired, taking years of institutional knowledge with them, including 30-year veteran Sgt. Victor Cass, who left the department last week.

Harris did an analysis on pending and expected retirements in the department when he first came to town and discovered that in the next two or three years 20% of the officers in the department will retire. 

That doesn’t include officers lateraling to other police departments or law enforcement agencies. Traditionally, those officers don’t announce plans to move until they have the new job.

If the analysis holds up, the department will face a vacuum in three years. 

There will be a lot of new officers in the front end of the department that will have been with the department for two-to-five years and a limited number of post 20-year veterans higher up in the department. 

Harris has already instituted a recruitment policy calling on officers to visit their alumni institutions to find the next generation of Pasadena police officers.

That next generation will see continued changes to policing, including more technology like ShotSpotter and continued debates on pretext stops and other decades old policies.

“The reality is you’re never going to know whether a stop is a pretext stop or not,” Harris said. “We gave it that name. But the Supreme Court has upheld over and over and over again that the frame of mind of the officer isn’t relevant because no one can read the officer’s mind in evaluating the stop.”

Traffic stops are important to public safety.

Earlier this month, Pasadena police officers were called to the area of Claremont Street and Wilson Avenue about 4 a.m. where they found a man sleeping in a U-Haul truck.

After officers asked the man to exit the vehicle they discovered a loaded handgun in his waistband. In the vehicle officers found an AR-15 rifle, a set of body armor and two loaded high-capacity magazines. 

“If you look at the rationale behind the legislation and the legislative intent, there’s a reason why we can’t drive around with broken lights. There’s safety that’s involved in that. There’s a reason why they require two license plates, one in the front, one in the back. There’s a reason for that. There’s a legislative intent.”

Harris said that technology should be used to the fullest to record stops and hold officers and motorists accountable. 

“My feeling is that we’re better served teaching our people how to be more effective using the technology, to be more transparent, making sure that we have body worn cameras that are automatically activated. Let’s get those things done so that the stops are always recorded and we can see what happened.”

According to Harris, people are confusing wall stops with pretext stops.

“Let’s say you have a drug enforcement group or you have a task force or plain clothes detail, conducting an investigation. They’ll need a stop made. So they’ll call black and white over and stop them for some vehicle code violation. But it’s really stopping them because of the furtherance of that investigation. That’s a wall stop permitted by law.”

Harris said the department continues to promote filing complaints for residents that feel mistreated and many times brings the civilian and the officer together to watch video of traffic stops together in a patrol mediation setting.  

“We can talk together and then solve the problems,” Harris said. 

This is the second of a two-part series. For the first installment, click: Chief Harris Talks Transparency After Six Months in Pasadena