ATLANTA — At a recent meeting of the Atlanta Citizen Review Board, which examines allegations of abuse by members of the Atlanta Police Department, Chief Darin Schierbaum reiterated his commitment to transparency, saying he had to be able to hold himself responsible for the department.
“There’s no guessing game. I’ve got to be able to hold myself accountable. I have to be able to hold more of the department accountable,” Schierbaum said on April 11, while discussing reviews by the ACRB.
During an extensive question and answer session with members of the board, Schierbaum said they should be able to “expect promise and transparency from our offices.”
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Members of the ACRB asked Schierbaum about his philosophy on officer discipline.
Answering, Schierbaum said that everyone there knows that “not anyone should wear the uniform,” saying that for every 5,000 applications to join the Atlanta Police Department, only 100 get to the training center, and on average, only 70 will graduate.
He said his goal is to be able to address discipline and maintain public trust through their training.
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Schierbaum said that the department was working on ways to report to each other, and that both organizations were still working to complete a draft of an agreement for more explicitly defined steps of the review process when complaints come to APD and ACRB about officers or cases of alleged abuses.
As far as disciplinary actions within APD and recommendations by ACRB after an investigation, “We know if we look statistically, the agreement rate between the department’s investigating process and the ACRB, if there’s been a violation, is very high.”
The review board also acknowledged how difficult officers’ jobs are, saying it was important to ensure a situation is handled correctly, but that officers who do their jobs the right way should be complimented, “because that doesn’t happen enough either. It’s not an easy job, and there can be a lot of challenges in different ways.”
However, in the same vein, the board member said it was important to address perceptions of bad attitudes of officers when they interact with the public.
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