Little Rock’s Black Police Chief and the Campaign Against Reform

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just how strong are the forces arrayed against police reform — and how far are they willing to go? In April 2019, Keith Humphrey was appointed police chief in Little Rock, Arkansas, a Southern city with a fraught history of racial division. Among the growing number of Black police chiefs, Humphrey came in with a mandate from the new mayor to implement reforms and curtail abuses. Almost as quickly as he set about to do that work, the city’s “old guard,” the police union, and even cops under Humphrey’s own command struck back. The aim, to many observers, was simple: to oust Humphrey.

This week on Intercepted: Radley Balko joins The Intercept's Ali Gharib to talk about Humphrey’s ordeal. Then Balko speaks to Little Rock civil rights attorney Mike Laux and former LRPD Lieut. Johnny Gilbert Jr. Balko, an award-winning journalist and columnist at the Washington Post, is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces” and co-author, with Tucker Carrington, of “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	I'm Ali Radib, a senior editor with the intercept.
0:41.0	The Little Rock Police Department has been driven by internal strife.
0:47.5	Things have long since been tense.
0:49.6	Like many southern cities, race plays a salient role in historical and present day Little
0:53.9	Rock.
0:55.9	So when a new black police chief arrived in town and began implementing reforms, things
1:00.0	boiled over.
1:03.6	Today on Intercepted, we're going to tell you the story from Arkansas.
1:07.7	About Little Rock Police chief Keith Humphrey and about the tremendous pressure and backlash
1:12.0	she's getting from the city's old guard, including from inside his own department.
1:16.4	A dozen of his own officers have sued him.
1:20.2	Internal complaints are too numerous to count.
1:22.7	And then there are media leaks and whisper campaigns.
1:25.9	The allegations range from a supposed affair to harassment to retaliation.
1:31.6	Late last year, the intercepted a deep dive into this.
1:34.7	The story of Humphrey, the campaign against him, the city's police union, and the decades
1:38.9	of fraught history that informs all of it.
1:41.5	Our investigation found that most of the allegations against the chief collapsed under scrutiny.
1:46.4	So far, Humphrey is hanging onto his job, but his antagonists aren't giving up.
1:52.4	This story was the culmination of a year and a half of reporting by Radley Balco, an
1:56.8	ace journalist and author who's been on the police beat for a long time.
	...

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