Spirit of the law

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

By Benjamin R. Bombard

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Before he become chief of the Jackson Hole Police Department at 38 years old, Todd Smith was an art student at Western Kentucky University. He worked as an airbrush artist in Bowling Green, Ky., to pay his way through college, and used some of his earnings to buy a Pontiac Fiero sports car fresh off the lot.
One night, after having a couple drinks at a college party, Smith had a friend drive him home in the Fiero. Long story short, a cop pulled them over in a case of mistaken identity, gave Smith’s friend a field sobriety test and ultimately charged him with driving under the influence. That experience had a deep effect on Smith. It continues to inform both his no bullshit policy on DUIs and his more general approach to policing. “That scared me to death,” Smith said during an interview in his JHPD office last week. “That policeman was not very friendly.”

Smith moved to Jackson Hole in 1990, gave up airbrushing and decided to enter law enforcement, knowing he didn’t want to be that cop - a hard-line, the law-is-the-law kind of cop. His law enforcement methodology is based on common sense, discretion and an understanding that everybody, even the chief of police makes mistakes.
Recent local law enforcement incidents in Jackson Hole have turned the average citizen into a Monday-morning chief of police – analyzing and criticizing officers’ actions in hindsight. JH Weekly sat down with Smith to get his two cents on Tasers, biking under the influence, drugs, bars and awesome pants.

JH Weekly: How do you think the department is perceived in the community?
Todd Smith: It depends on what side of the subject you’re on: are you the victim or are you the suspect? Rarely do you come across someone who’s the suspect and you have to take enforcement action [on someone] who has a positive image of law enforcement. And then there’s the segment of the community who’s highly supportive. I think the bigger group of people is somewhere in between, and it’s really that group that, as chief of police, you have to stay in-tune with.

JHW: And what do you want that group to think?

TS: I want them to think of their police department as a solution to the problems in the community, as a resource. I’m not the guy that believes the harshest penalties are always the solution. I am not the heavy-handed kind of officer. I didn’t police that way personally, and I think that’s the persona I put off to the troops. You ask them to be a lot of things to a lot of people.

We spend a great deal of our time, too, dealing with quality of life issues, your average noise complaint. If you’re throwing a party at your house and it’s disturbing your neighbors, I don’t see you as a criminal, but are you affecting the people next to you in a way that they feel like they now need police intervention? Well, then we need to be able to go fix those problems and not create new problems.

JHW: Police officers respond to a lot of calls that one might assume could be resolved without their assistance, like a loud party or a barking dog for instance. How frequently do people call upon law enforcement when they’re probably perfectly able to take care of it themselves?

TS: It’s human nature to take the path of least resistance. I would say there’s a large number of calls that [could be resolved without the police] if we got back to a time and place where people knew their neighbors and it was OK to call and say, “Do you mind turning your music down?” But don’t misread me, ‘cause some people do. Do I wish we lived in a world where people did that more often? Yes. Because then I think we’d need less law enforcement. There’s a whole gamut of problems that could be solved if people worked amongst themselves to do it. I would relish in a world like that.

JHW: Earlier you mentioned the problems in the community. What are the problems in Jackson Hole, in your opinion?

TS: Well, we’re taking on average between 3,000 and 4,000 calls a month, for service [between both JHPD and Teton County Sheriff’s department]. Maybe 50 percent of those calls are quality of life, whether that’s, I hear a dog barking next door, arguing voices, or car alarms in the middle of the night. Twenty-five percent of the things that we do are proactive. There are DUIs that we see on the road and we feel compelled to make contact with those people. The other 25 percent are more elevated – fights, domestic or sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, child abuse or neglect cases.

JHW: Are there any specific issues that are particularly problematic in this area?
TS: I think the most obvious one would be DUI. We have some of the highest DUI statistics in the state of Wyoming. That’s very predictable, because we’re in a community where people are vacationing. Ya know, when I go to Florida and sit on the beach, I drink a beer. And when people come to Jackson, it’s not unusual for them to consume alcohol.

We do have a relatively high domestic violence problem here. It’s unfortunately common. Law enforcement tends to have a way different perspective on domestic violence than it did, say, in the 80s or even the early 90s. Statistics will tell you that if you don’t intervene, it’s not if you go back but when you go back.

JHW: What about other “DUI” circumstances? For instance, the recent citation of a cyclist for DUI?

TS: Do I want people to ride bicycles drunk? No. That’s not my preference. But if that’s the choice made over driving drunk in a car, then I would choose the bicycle. Should we charge them with DUI? That’s not something I would be interested in telling the troops to pursue. But could that same person potentially get arrested for public intoxication? Yes. I’d rather see a public intoxication arrest than a DUI arrest, because DUI’s have a far-reaching effect on someone’s driver’s license.

So the guy who walks out of the bar and he looks at his bike and he looks at his car, and he says, which one should I do, and his driver’s license is going to be affected either way, why not just take the car home? I want him to take the bicycle.
JHW: What’s your approach to drug enforcement in general? And do you view drugs on a spectrum?

TS: I do. I think it goes back to common sense. I think that, by and large, most people who use marijuana are doing so in the confines of their own homes and limiting that risk to themselves. On enforcement of marijuana, there’s two environments: there’s the person consuming it and the person selling it. The person consuming it, we have a very low-level enforcement approach to. If you have misdemeanor amounts of it, we don’t tend to – not that we won’t ever – but we don’t tend to arrest, solely for that violation. We tend to cite and release.

When it comes to the selling, I treat it more black and white. I believe in a little more hard-line approach to selling drugs versus using, but come on, you can’t be a low-level user unless someone gets [the drugs] to you. I don’t have a solution to that.

JHW: Regarding growth in the community, with the population of the valley cresting 20,000, is crime becoming a bigger issue? Or is it to be understood that as a community grows you’re bound to see more crime?

TS: While our population might be about 20,000 people, that’s your resident base, and not your visitor base. In the peak of the summer, we might be policing 60,000 people. Probably half of what we’re doing is responding to a call from a person who doesn’t live here. I haven’t seen numbers spike or drop for serious crimes here - sexual violence, assault and battery. Those numbers tend to stay pretty consistent across the board.

JHW: What was your take on the case of the Frank Meek’s tasing?

TS: Most of the things you saw in the newspapers [about Meek’s case] were, “You tased a guy because of his registration?” We didn’t tase someone over registration. We tased someone who refused arrest after refusing to get out of their car for 30 minutes. Well, would you have us enforce it that, if we ask you to do something, that it’s optional? I put that to the public.

[Meek] wanted to paint the picture of this Rodney King beat-down sort of a scenario. The Taser was attempted to be deployed one time, and it didn’t work. One of the darts came out and went into his coat, and one never even left the gun. And a Taser doesn’t work with one [dart]. You have to complete a circuit or it doesn’t function.

JHW: So what, to your knowledge, happened that night?

TS: In our “Tasing 2010” case, I’ll show you exactly what happened that day. What you have to understand is, when you pull the trigger, there’s a timer on [Taser guns]. They only last five seconds. And there’s a computer chip in here. So you can’t say, I only did it once, or I only did it twice, or I did it for one second. It’s all on the microchip, and you can see everything once you plug the gun into the computer.

So, boom. The officer fires the Taser. Only one dart comes out. So, no effect. The officer went over and realized only one dart came out, and the suspect is seated in the car, clenching the steering wheel. So the Taser had no effect on him. The officer drops the gun. It falls on the ground. He takes a hold of the guy who’s resisting, and they come out of the car and they go to the ground and [Meek] hits his face on the ground and gets a black eye. He’s not giving his arms, he’s resisting.

And [the Taser] is laying on the ground. So [Meek] is on his face, he’s on his belly, doing the pull the hands, not giving his hands. This is all happening for about 30 seconds. And one officer hands the stun gun to the other officer and says, “Man, I’m going to stun you if you don’t give us your hands.”

[Meek] starts giving his hands, so the [officer] puts [the stun gun] back on the ground so he can do the handcuffing. Well, then the guy jerks his hand away again. So [the officer] reaches down and grabs [the stun gun]. He turns the safety off and he does this. [Smith pulls the trigger on the stun gun, acts as if applying the stun gun to the suspect (using a manila folder as a stand-in) for approximately one second.] Sets [the stun gun] on the ground. Picks it up, and touches him again.

JHW: And so the gun is going off for only five seconds?

TS: Correct. What [Meek] ultimately got was maybe one or two seconds at the beginning, maybe one or two seconds at the end, with a pause in between a five-second cycle. And the computer report supports that. Two five-second durations: one when he initially pulled the trigger, and it didn’t work. That was five seconds of nothing. And then the other five seconds when [the officer] used it again. So [the officer] used the Taser as a stun gun and not a Taser, getting no pain compliance, just giving a titty-twister to remember.

JHW: Talk to me about the bars in town. Is any particular bar a trouble spot? Say, the Town Square Tavern, maybe?

TS: I actually want to say that the Virginian has the largest number of calls for us to go there for problems. The Town Square Tavern had the largest number of calls for fights. The Cowboy Bar had the highest number of self-initiated calls for “Please come here and check an ID.” The Virginian had [no ID check calls], and Town Square Tavern had none. I don’t draw any conclusions that the Town Square Tavern is more problematic than any other bar.

And public intoxication can be a great tool to solve a lot of problems related to bars. Quite frankly, without it, you can double the number of serious things that happen, because you weren’t able to intervene earlier and use a low-level tool to do that.

JHW: With elections coming up, there’s talk of Town-County consolidation. What would that mean for the police department?

TS: There’s been talk since I got here about that. Merging the two together isn’t as simple as waving a magic wand and saying, poof, done. There are some statutory issues associated with that. You can’t not have a sheriff’s department. You can not have a police department, but police departments tend to handle the bulk of calls.
You see that book with the Town seal on it? [Points up at a row of binder books crammed next to each other.] The Jackson Town Municipal Code? Those are the things you can’t do in the Town of Jackson that you can do in [Teton] County.

They’re building codes, fireworks, things the city government said, we need to have greater restrictions than what the state statutes say. A sheriff doesn’t enforce municipal code. If all you have is a sheriff’s department, there’s no one left to enforce [municipal code], which is fine if you don’t want them.

JHW: You’ve been in the position of chief of police for a little over a year. Have you tried to institute any changes in that time?

TS: One of the things I’ve tried to focus on is having a lot of unity with the sheriff’s department. An example is, we took over policing of the airport just about the time I got this job. We did that without hiring any additional personnel. That created a shortfall of people to work night shift here. The sheriff and I worked together to come up with a schedule that used personnel from both departments to police the airport.

The sheriff and I have also tried to create policies and procedures that gel. Because often times when you call 911, it’s not two guys in black or two guys in brown that show up, it’s one of each. We want to have the same expectations of police officers and sheriff deputies that complement each other.

[Smith later pointed out that he is making efforts to replace the department’s gas-guzzling Chevrolet Tahoe trucks with more fuel-efficient Ford Tauruses.]

JHW: What are your goals going forward, both personally and for the police department?

TS: I want to leave the police department better than I found it, in all aspects: public reception of the department; knowing that people enjoy working here; that we’re transparent; that it’s OK to complain and to support.

I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and know I made more good decisions than bad. I’m going to make a few mistakes along the way, but maybe the greater measure being how I deal with those mistakes.

I also want people to know that this is their police department. I want them to tell me what they want from us.

JHW: How do people do that?

TS: I try to make myself available to talk. Every Friday, I meet with a group of business owners to talk. Also, I try to put myself out there. I want you to know who I am before you know I’m the chief of police. I put my pants on just like you do.
JHW: Yeah, but I’ve got some pretty awesome pants, man. C’mon.

TS: But you hear what I’m saying, though. I just try to do more good than bad. There’s things in this job that stress me out and things that make me prideful. When we put people in jail that hurt kids – that’s a good day. When we arrest somebody who’s maybe a good person but made a mistake – I don’t like that. Is it sometimes necessary? Yeah it is. We talked about discretion earlier, and that’s the key: it’s knowing when to and when not to. JHW

JH Weekly: How do you think the department is perceived in the community?

Todd Smith: It depends on what side of the subject you’re on: are you the victim or are you the suspect? Rarely do you come across someone who’s the suspect and you have to take enforcement action [on someone] who has a positive image of law enforcement. And then there’s the segment of the community who’s highly supportive. I think the bigger group of people is somewhere in between, and it’s really that group that, as chief of police, you have to stay in-tune with.

JHW: And what do you want that group to think?

TS: I want them to think of their police department as a solution to the problems in the community, as a resource. I’m not the guy that believes the harshest penalties are always the solution. I am not the heavy-handed kind of officer. I didn’t police that way personally, and I think that’s the persona I put off to the troops. You ask them to be a lot of things to a lot of people.

We spend a great deal of our time, too, dealing with quality of life issues, your average noise complaint. If you’re throwing a party at your house and it’s disturbing your neighbors, I don’t see you as a criminal, but are you affecting the people next to you in a way that they feel like they now need police intervention? Well, then we need to be able to go fix those problems and not create new problems.

JHW: Police officers respond to a lot of calls that one might assume could be resolved without their assistance, like a loud party or a barking dog for instance. How frequently do people call upon law enforcement when they’re probably perfectly able to take care of it themselves?

TS: It’s human nature to take the path of least resistance. I would say there’s a large number of calls that [could be resolved without the police] if we got back to a time and place where people knew their neighbors and it was OK to call and say, “Do you mind turning your music down?” But don’t misread me, ‘cause some people do. Do I wish we lived in a world where people did that more often? Yes.

Because then I think we’d need less law enforcement. There’s a whole gamut of problems that could be solved if people worked amongst themselves to do it. I would relish in a world like that.

JHW: Earlier you mentioned the problems in the community. What are the problems in Jackson Hole, in your opinion?

TS: Well, we’re taking on average between 3,000 and 4,000 calls a month, for service [between both JHPD and Teton County Sheriff’s department]. Maybe 50 percent of those calls are quality of life, whether that’s, I hear a dog barking next door, arguing voices, or car alarms in the middle of the night. Twenty-five percent of the things that we do are proactive. There are DUIs that we see on the road and we feel compelled to make contact with those people. The other 25 percent are more elevated – fights, domestic or sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, child abuse or neglect cases.

JHW: Are there any specific issues that are particularly problematic in this area?
TS: I think the most obvious one would be DUI. We have some of the highest DUI statistics in the state of Wyoming. That’s very predictable, because we’re in a community where people are vacationing. Ya know, when I go to Florida and sit on the beach, I drink a beer. And when people come to Jackson, it’s not unusual for them to consume alcohol.

We do have a relatively high domestic violence problem here. It’s unfortunately common. Law enforcement tends to have a way different perspective on domestic violence than it did, say, in the 80s or even the early 90s. Statistics will tell you that if you don’t intervene, it’s not if you go back but when you go back.
JHW: What about other “DUI” circumstances? For instance, the recent citation of a cyclist for DUI?

TS: Do I want people to ride bicycles drunk? No. That’s not my preference. But if that’s the choice made over driving drunk in a car, then I would choose the bicycle. Should we charge them with DUI? That’s not something I would be interested in telling the troops to pursue. But could that same person potentially get arrested for public intoxication? Yes. I’d rather see a public intoxication arrest than a DUI arrest, because DUI’s have a far-reaching effect on someone’s driver’s license.

So the guy who walks out of the bar and he looks at his bike and he looks at his car, and he says, which one should I do, and his driver’s license is going to be affected either way, why not just take the car home? I want him to take the bicycle.

JHW: What’s your approach to drug enforcement in general? And do you view drugs on a spectrum?

TS: I do. I think it goes back to common sense. I think that, by and large, most people who use marijuana are doing so in the confines of their own homes and limiting that risk to themselves. On enforcement of marijuana, there’s two environments: there’s the person consuming it and the person selling it. The person consuming it, we have a very low-level enforcement approach to. If you have misdemeanor amounts of it, we don’t tend to – not that we won’t ever – but we don’t tend to arrest, solely for that violation. We tend to cite and release.

When it comes to the selling, I treat it more black and white. I believe in a little more hard-line approach to selling drugs versus using, but come on, you can’t be a low-level user unless someone gets [the drugs] to you. I don’t have a solution to that.

JHW: Regarding growth in the community, with the population of the valley cresting 20,000, is crime becoming a bigger issue? Or is it to be understood that as a community grows you’re bound to see more crime?

TS: While our population might be about 20,000 people, that’s your resident base, and not your visitor base. In the peak of the summer, we might be policing 60,000 people. Probably half of what we’re doing is responding to a call from a person who doesn’t live here. I haven’t seen numbers spike or drop for serious crimes here - sexual violence, assault and battery. Those numbers tend to stay pretty consistent across the board.

JHW: What was your take on the case of the Frank Meek’s tasing?

TS: Most of the things you saw in the newspapers [about Meek’s case] were, “You tased a guy because of his registration?” We didn’t tase someone over registration. We tased someone who refused arrest after refusing to get out of their car for 30 minutes. Well, would you have us enforce it that, if we ask you to do something, that it’s optional? I put that to the public.

[Meek] wanted to paint the picture of this Rodney King beat-down sort of a scenario. The Taser was attempted to be deployed one time, and it didn’t work. One of the darts came out and went into his coat, and one never even left the gun. And a Taser doesn’t work with one [dart]. You have to complete a circuit or it doesn’t function.

JHW: So what, to your knowledge, happened that night?

TS: In our “Tasing 2010” case, I’ll show you exactly what happened that day. What you have to understand is, when you pull the trigger, there’s a timer on [Taser guns]. They only last five seconds. And there’s a computer chip in here. So you can’t say, I only did it once, or I only did it twice, or I did it for one second. It’s all on the microchip, and you can see everything once you plug the gun into the computer.

So, boom. The officer fires the Taser. Only one dart comes out. So, no effect. The officer went over and realized only one dart came out, and the suspect is seated in the car, clenching the steering wheel. So the Taser had no effect on him. The officer drops the gun. It falls on the ground. He takes a hold of the guy who’s resisting, and they come out of the car and they go to the ground and [Meek] hits his face on the ground and gets a black eye. He’s not giving his arms, he’s resisting. And [the Taser] is laying on the ground. So [Meek] is on his face, he’s on his belly, doing the pull the hands, not giving his hands. This is all happening for about 30 seconds. And one officer hands the stun gun to the other officer and says, “Man, I’m going to stun you if you don’t give us your hands.”

[Meek] starts giving his hands, so the [officer] puts [the stun gun] back on the ground so he can do the handcuffing. Well, then the guy jerks his hand away again. So [the officer] reaches down and grabs [the stun gun]. He turns the safety off and he does this. [Smith pulls the trigger on the stun gun, acts as if applying the stun gun to the suspect (using a manila folder as a stand-in) for approximately one second.] Sets [the stun gun] on the ground. Picks it up, and touches him again.

JHW: And so the gun is going off for only five seconds?

TS: Correct. What [Meek] ultimately got was maybe one or two seconds at the beginning, maybe one or two seconds at the end, with a pause in between a five-second cycle. And the computer report supports that. Two five-second durations: one when he initially pulled the trigger, and it didn’t work. That was five seconds of nothing. And then the other five seconds when [the officer] used it again. So [the officer] used the Taser as a stun gun and not a Taser, getting no pain compliance, just giving a titty-twister to remember.

JHW: Talk to me about the bars in town. Is any particular bar a trouble spot? Say, the Town Square Tavern, maybe?

TS: I actually want to say that the Virginian has the largest number of calls for us to go there for problems. The Town Square Tavern had the largest number of calls for fights. The Cowboy Bar had the highest number of self-initiated calls for “Please come here and check an ID.” The Virginian had [no ID check calls], and Town Square Tavern had none. I don’t draw any conclusions that the Town Square Tavern is more problematic than any other bar.

And public intoxication can be a great tool to solve a lot of problems related to bars. Quite frankly, without it, you can double the number of serious things that happen, because you weren’t able to intervene earlier and use a low-level tool to do that.

JHW: With elections coming up, there’s talk of Town-County consolidation. What would that mean for the police department?

TS: There’s been talk since I got here about that. Merging the two together isn’t as simple as waving a magic wand and saying, poof, done. There are some statutory issues associated with that. You can’t not have a sheriff’s department. You can not have a police department, but police departments tend to handle the bulk of calls.
You see that book with the Town seal on it? [Points up at a row of binder books crammed next to each other.] The Jackson Town Municipal Code? Those are the things you can’t do in the Town of Jackson that you can do in [Teton] County. They’re building codes, fireworks, things the city government said, we need to have greater restrictions than what the state statutes say. A sheriff doesn’t enforce municipal code. If all you have is a sheriff’s department, there’s no one left to enforce [municipal code], which is fine if you don’t want them.

JHW: You’ve been in the position of chief of police for a little over a year. Have you tried to institute any changes in that time?

TS: One of the things I’ve tried to focus on is having a lot of unity with the sheriff’s department. An example is, we took over policing of the airport just about the time I got this job. We did that without hiring any additional personnel. That created a shortfall of people to work night shift here. The sheriff and I worked together to come up with a schedule that used personnel from both departments to police the airport.

The sheriff and I have also tried to create policies and procedures that gel. Because often times when you call 911, it’s not two guys in black or two guys in brown that show up, it’s one of each. We want to have the same expectations of police officers and sheriff deputies that complement each other.

[Smith later pointed out that he is making efforts to replace the department’s gas-guzzling Chevrolet Tahoe trucks with more fuel-efficient Ford Tauruses.]
JHW: What are your goals going forward, both personally and for the police department?

TS: I want to leave the police department better than I found it, in all aspects: public reception of the department; knowing that people enjoy working here; that we’re transparent; that it’s OK to complain and to support.
I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and know I made more good decisions than bad. I’m going to make a few mistakes along the way, but maybe the greater measure being how I deal with those mistakes.
I also want people to know that this is their police department. I want them to tell me what they want from us.

JHW: How do people do that?

TS: I try to make myself available to talk. Every Friday, I meet with a group of business owners to talk. Also, I try to put myself out there. I want you to know who I am before you know I’m the chief of police. I put my pants on just like you do.
JHW: Yeah, but I’ve got some pretty awesome pants, man. C’mon.

TS: But you hear what I’m saying, though. I just try to do more good than bad. There’s things in this job that stress me out and things that make me prideful. When we put people in jail that hurt kids – that’s a good day. When we arrest somebody who’s maybe a good person but made a mistake – I don’t like that. Is it sometimes necessary? Yeah it is. We talked about discretion earlier, and that’s the key: it’s knowing when to and when not to. JHW

Courtesy photo
Police Chief Todd Smith


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