Before this year, Topeka resident Ariane Davis wasn’t one to organize protests or take center stage at community events.
But following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, something changed.
Davis said in the past, most of her calls for justice were relegated to social media. Then, she watched the 8-minute, 46-second video — captured by a bystander on May 25 and circulated on social media — in which Floyd took his last breath.
“When you see those types of stories play out on social media where you watch someone take their last breath, I think it’s unsettling for anyone — especially hearing him cry out, essentially begging for his life and crying out for his mom,” Davis said. “I felt like that was my child on the ground.”
Her frustration had been building for years, as she repeatedly saw news of people who looked like her — people who looked like her children — being mistreated, beaten or even killed by police officers.
It was time for her to act.
“It was really my mentor that had a conversation with me,” Davis said. “He saw me speaking about injustices throughout my social media, but he said: ‘What are you doing besides coming to your social media and talking about it? What actions are you putting into place? What are you personally doing to make this situation better?’”
His words resonated, and within days of Floyd’s death, Davis had organized the “Stand Up for George Floyd Rally,” which was held May 30 at the Kansas State Capitol.
She had hoped a handful of people would turn out to support the cause. The protest drew hundreds.
“I didn’t realize the response I was going to get from that,” Davis said.
Since the May 25 rally, her work hasn’t stopped. Davis has attended other protests in Topeka and Lawrence and began partnering with such area agencies as the YWCA of Northeast Kansas and the United Way of Greater Topeka to pursue social justice initiatives.
Much of that work has focused on addressing police conduct and advocating for criminal justice reform.
“The doors have opened for me to really do some good work within our local community,” Davis said.
Pushing for change
Calls for police reform are echoing across the country, as cities from Los Angeles to Minneapolis encounter protesters demanding racial justice and an end to police violence.
And Topeka isn’t immune from the action.
How reform might be achieved, though, is where activists’ calls vary. Some are calling for additional training for police officers. Some say we need to “defund the police” and redirect that money toward social programs. And still others argue that’s not enough.
“That’s the word of the moment right now — ‘defunding the police,’” Davis said. “My interpretation of that is not so much defunding the police because I think they are so necessary within our community. … I think that there needs to be more funding, though, when it comes to the mental health side of it.”
Topeka Mayor Michelle De La Isla has a similar view.
“Defunding the police,” De La Isla said, “means that you are ensuring that those dollars you’re allocating to militarizing police departments in many cases are used rather for things such as treatment, for mental health awareness, for ensuring that we have enough social workers and interventions in our community that would allow us not to have to depend on police officers to do interactions that should be socially based.”
Anne Flynn, deacon at Grace Episcopal Cathedral and a member of the Topeka Justice Unity & Ministry Project, said she considers the phrase a “political trigger.”
Carl Frazier, also a Topeka JUMP member and pastor at New Hope and Love Community Church, agreed. He said defunding the police isn’t their goal.
“That’s not what we want, but we do think that there needs to be some type of reform, some type of change,” Frazier said.
Flynn and Frazier spoke to The Topeka Capital-Journal on Thursday not as Topeka JUMP representatives but as concerned community members and activists who are also involved in justice-oriented work with other organizations, such as the Topeka Center for Peace and Justice.
“I think it’s very important that we show the community that we are one voice,” Frazier said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Black or white, what church you go to, what denomination. … Now is the time for us to come together, to have one voice and say ‘There needs to be a change. The change needs to be made today.’”
Shawnee County Commissioner Kevin Cook argues the push for change has to be authentic, should be community led and can’t be temporary.
“Authenticity is going to be the key to actual police reform and improvement of the relationships,” Cook said. “It can’t be paternalistic. It can’t be coming in and trying to solve a perceived problem in a community and then being gone the next year. It’s going to require a commitment from both people that live in the community as well as the (law enforcement) participants to work to re-establish, or establish, those bonds of trust.”
Concrete action
Davis would like to see the Topeka Police Department place greater emphasis on community policing.
“When we talk about community policing, you know, where are you at?” Davis said. “Are you in your cars, or are you knocking on doors and getting to know the people that you’re serving? Are you meeting that grandma? Are you meeting that mother, the children? Are you connecting with those children to where they feel safe? I don’t see that happening as much as it should.”
She also thinks officers could use additional de-escalation training, and she wants taxpayer money directed toward nonlethal tools, rather than firearms.
“I think it starts from the very beginning, introducing them to the academy and really setting correct expectations up front,” Davis said. “Also, different tactics other than pulling your weapon as a first response. Is there something else that you can utilize like stun guns, something else that’s nonlethal?”
Frazier also has a laundry list of items he, Flynn and their organizations have been reviewing. Some of the issues could be implemented locally, while others might have to be taken up at the national level.
Frazier said they’d like to ban the use of chokeholds, ban no-knock warrants, end qualified immunity for law enforcement, establish a national register of police officers with histories of misconduct, require data collection on the use of deadly force, require deadly force be used only as last resort, establish standards for dealing with individuals with mental health issues, mandate uniformed police officers use body cameras, and institute a national standard that police departments seek public grants to reimagine policies.
A couple of those issues are being considered by the Topeka City Council.
Councilman Spencer Duncan has sponsored a proposal to ban the use of no-knock warrants. Action on that proposal, though, was postponed after representatives from the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police expressed concern with the ordinance shortly before Tuesday’s city council meeting. The issue is expected to be taken up again this Tuesday.
Council members are also looking to craft a law that would ban the use of chokeholds.
Topeka Police Chief Bill Cochran recently told The Capital-Journal his department doesn’t use chokeholds or no-knock warrants, but council members and the mayor argue those protocols should be cemented in legislation to prevent future police chiefs from rolling back the policies.
“If it’s good policy today, it should be good law tomorrow,” Duncan said.
He would also like to see the city council eventually look at two other issues when it comes to training and preparing officers for the line of duty.
“I absolutely believe we have to take a closer look at the psychological evaluations that we give and how much we take a look at violent tendencies, racial biases in those evaluations,” Duncan said. “We currently do a little bit of it now, but I think it could probably be increased.”
The second item he hopes to consider is setting a standard that police training include an educational component about the history of racism and police power in the United States.
“I think a young officer today who’s coming into the academy needs those reference points,” Duncan said.
Councilwoman Christina Valdivia-Alcala has also pushed recently for the creation of an independent citizens review board to examine allegations of police misconduct.
The city currently has an independent police auditor who reviews claims of misconduct, but Valdivia-Alcala said she doesn’t trust the existing review process.
“I do not have faith in an IPA, an independent police auditor, that is taking information solely from an investigation that has been done by police, about police, given to him and then he, in turn, looks at that and other evidence and agrees or doesn’t agree,” she said. “As I stated in the city council meeting, that is us investigating ourselves.”
Valdivia-Alcala said the fatal 2017 shooting of Dominique White by two Topeka police officers damaged the relationship and trust between local police and the community.
“Changes that have been made since that time, while may be good intentioned and have outside people associated with them,” she said, “still are not at the level, to me, that reflects: ‘We hear you, citizens of Topeka, Black folks of Topeka, biracial folks of Topeka, poor folks of Topeka. We hear you. We understand that there is some change in order, and so we are going to go about this by doing A, B, C and D.’”
Details about how to organize a citizens review board and who would sit on it still need to be determined, Valdivia-Alcala said.
She also said the role and power of police unions — including unions representing law enforcement here in Topeka and Shawnee County — need to be considered moving forward.
“There are good folks that work at the police department,” she said, “but I understand until we can deal with the unions, the majority of this will fall flat because there will be no consequences for the actions and the abuse of power.”
‘Interconnected’ issues
According to local elected officials and activists, policing is a single point in a much broader pegboard of social inequities.
“What we’re looking at is not just one issue,” Valdivia-Alcala said. “When you’re looking at systemic inequity, you are going to see increases in crime — some valid, some not valid.”
She said poorer neighborhoods in Topeka still suffer from the effects of redlining — a tactic prominent across the country in the 1930s that allowed financial institutions to deny people of color access to mortgages and loans.
“Redlining was race-based divesting from certain parts of the community because people of color lived there, Black folks lived there,” Valdivia-Alcala said. “They would deem these areas ‘declining’ or ‘hazardous’ so you don’t lend. As of 2020, these communities, which still have a multitude of minorities living in them, are still dealing with the repercussions.”
Repercussions include lack of access to affordable housing, disparities in health and health care, deficient school funding, and dismal employment opportunities in those areas.
“We know that if we have a community that has more stable housing, the benefits are all over the place,” said Councilman Duncan. “Kids do better in school. We know that our communities are less blighted. We know that crime is reduced.”
Commissioner Cook says the community should also place greater emphasis on issues of mental health, addiction treatment, and education and workforce development — and he knows it would take commitment from many different entities to make it happen, as “every issue is interconnected,” he said.
According to Duncan, local governing bodies have a duty to ensure programs are in place to combat those issues and curb recidivism.
“It’s up to us to look at those underlying causes and start to address them, versus just, ‘Hey police, go deal with the problem,’” he said.
It is up to community members, he added, to hold him and his fellow elected leaders accountable.
“I wish I could make all this change happen next week at our meeting. I can’t,” Duncan said. “What I can do, and what I expect people to hold me accountable for, is I will continue to work on it, not let it go away from the public conversation.”
Hope for the future
Frazier is hopeful change will occur and cites the roughly 25 diverse congregations that make up Topeka JUMP as evidence that people with different opinions can find common group.
“That gives me hope that we can come together on issues of social justice to love one another and agree that these are issues that we need to talk about, that we need to change,” he said.
Flynn sees it as her civic duty — as an advocate and as a faith leader — to fight for justice and work toward “beloved community.” Becoming too partisan, she said, is where the trouble lies.
“Jesus was political,” Flynn said. “It’s a tenet of my faith to be involved in community action, which is political. What I need to refrain from is partisan statements.”
Davis says she’ll keep fighting, too.
“I want my kids to have a legacy that’s built on love and inclusivity and diversity, so when they grow up, they’re able to live in a world that doesn’t look at the color of their skin,” Davis said. “If I can make that difference to where my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren never have to see anything like this as they grow older, then I know that I’ve done my job.
“That’s what this is about. I’m fighting for their future.”
