Youth advocates say this Fresno program helped build trust in police. What happened to it?
Fresno’s Mayor-elect Jerry Dyer said he plans to form a youth advisory commission when he takes office early next year.
Around five years ago while he was Fresno’s police chief, he did something similar with the Police Department. But the young people who were part of the Police Chief’s Youth Advisory Council say they were left disappointed and with questions.
It remains unclear if the Police Chief’s Youth Advisory Council remains intact today, and current police officials refused to provide any information to The Bee. A key officer involved in the former council expressed a willingness to discuss the subject, but he did not receive permission from his supervisors to participate in an interview.
“I’ve never heard of a youth advisory council,” Fresno police Sgt. Jeff La Blue, the department’s public information officer, said in response to The Bee’s request for various interviews.
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist,” he added.
Dyer chalked the confusion up to a “breakdown in communication.”
While he prepares to take the helm of California’s fifth-largest city, the Police Department he led for 18 years is under the microscope of a newly formed police reform commission, which is examining policing practices and discipline.
At least one of the members who was on the police chief’s youth advisory council, Efrain Botello, is now on the police reform commission. He said the mysterious way the advisory council disappeared is part of a broader pattern in which the police department ignores community solutions. He worries the new police reform commission will be ineffective — based, in part, on his experience with the youth advisory council.
“I think it just speaks volumes to the continuous way the police department goes about it when the community tries to bring change,” Botello said. “They use these moments, it seems, to benefit their own public perception.…In order to bring true change, we believe that the change needs to come from the community and not the police department that we’re trying to reform.”
Ultimately, that diminishes community trust in policing, Botello said. Meanwhile, Dyer insists community trust remains the cornerstone of a police officer’s job.
“The community is going to lose trust,” Botello said. “They’re just going to see that the police are just using moments like this to make it seem like they’re trying to bring change. But really, the change is minimal.”
How youth advisory council started
The idea for the youth advisory council began in a group called Fresno Boys and Men of Color, a group that connects young men and boys of color to mentors and aims to improve their life outcomes. The group has been recognized by former President Barack Obama and is funded through the Youth Leadership Institute and the California Endowment.
The young people in Fresno BMOC in late 2014 and early 2015 discussed the tense relationship between them, their communities and police. They wanted that to change and brainstormed ways to improve that relationship, which produced the idea for the youth advisory council.
“The goal of the commission was to transform the way that police officers interact with youth,” Botello said.
The council was comprised of young people in middle school and up to college. They met quarterly, typically at the Fresno Police Department’s headquarters. Sometimes Dyer attended the meetings, where the young people and police discussed how to bridge understanding between their respective peers.
Sarah Reyes, managing director of communications at the California Endowment, met with Dyer with a proposal to identify a point of contact for the young people so they could build a relationship with that officer. Reyes established a $140,000 grant for the police chief’s foundation that paid the salary for a youth liaison officer plus the costs for travel, meals and special event supplies.
Young people were on the interview panel for the youth liaison officer.
“It would have been very easy for me to have selected somebody and put him in that position, but it was more important for them to select that individual so they had buy-in from the onset — and connectivity from the onset,” Dyer said.
Youth liaison officer
The first youth liaison officer was Mike Martin. By all accounts, he was a perfect fit for the job.
The Bee requested an interview with Martin, who now is a sergeant, but he did not receive permission from his supervisor to comment.
Martin was able to build trust and earn the respect of the young people on the advisory council by listening to them, said Jeremy Miller, one of the young people who helped start the advisory council.
Part of that meant showing up to meetings without his police uniform or gun.
“Mike really had to climb some obstacles,” Miller said. “(Mike) had to now come to the table with a bunch of youth who didn’t really have good things to say about police officers. In that, Mike really had to take time to humble himself and learn how to be involved and create a space where youth who don’t like cops were able to adapt and welcome him in this space.
“…He had to essentially strip himself of power and allow others to just see him as a human being before they see him as a cop,” Miller said.
That set the tone for the advisory council.
Martin established a basketball program and helped steer young people in their career paths, helping one young man become a security guard and another become an officer.
While those things weren’t necessarily the “end-all, be-all,” Reyes said, they were the beginning of a conversation.
Martin received an award for his work and shared what he was doing with the advisory council on a trip to the White House with Dyer and Miller.
“Fresno was seen as a model, not just at the White House level but from other publications and departments,” Reyes said. Agencies from around the country inquired about the program, she said.
“It was almost like we had the whole nation watching Fresno for this interesting space that was created,” Miller said.
Martin was the youth liaison officer for a couple of years before applying for a promotion and being reassigned. After that, another officer applied for and was hired as the youth liaison officer. But, it wasn’t the same.
“Michael Martin is a special person,” Dyer said. “He established a rapport and connection with those students and with our youth. When he went to another assignment, I think it was very difficult for anybody to replace him and have that same level of success.
“I would have loved for Michael Martin to stay in that position forever, quite frankly,” Dyer said. “But I also know that he wanted to advance in his career, and he did.”
When Martin left the position, so did that relationship he built with the young people on the advisory council, Reyes said.
“The young people had mistrust already with the police department,” she said. “They had trauma and abandonment, and seeing Mike walk away — they struggled through that.”
Martin now works as a sergeant in the police department’s central policing division.
Funding and leadership support dwindle
Without Martin, the direction the police department steered the youth advisory council seemed to shift away from the original intent, youth advocates said.
“It almost felt like the police department was forcing this narrative of like, ‘OK, this is why youth should understand our work. For me, it felt like a recruiting tactic to try to get more youth to be interested in becoming police officers,” Botello said.
Plus, the funding was running out, and the police department devoted less and less resources to the program.
The funding from the endowment was always meant to taper off as the police department started matching and eventually taking over the funding for the youth liaison officer position, Reyes said.
So as the funding was cut by half, so was the work of the youth liaison officer.
In an interview with The Bee, Dyer said the police department couldn’t fund the position because of the recession when the department cut 150 officers.
But in 2018, right around the three-year mark for the youth liaison officer position, Mayor Lee Brand’s budget added 21 new police officer positions, increasing the department’s ranks to 825 sworn officers. The mayor’s proposed budget said that was the highest police officer staffing level since 2010. The budget was later amended to add five additional officers.
The 2019 police department budget maintained the 830 positions.
“I felt like Chief Dyer didn’t prioritize it. He was OK with the wins he was getting and the relationship as long as we were funding it,” Reyes said. “What the young people experienced was a pulling back of support. The chief started not showing up to meetings. Their voice wasn’t being lifted as it had in the past. There were a lot of different things that were not working. That was sad to see because there had been such strength in that.”
Dyer said he started transitioning the youth liaison officer duties to student resource officers on school campuses in an effort to reach a larger population of young people. Eventually, the Police Chief’s Youth Advisory Council evolved into youth advisory councils on each school campus.
“I wanted to focus on all parts of Fresno, so I would have students from Roosevelt, Sunnyside, Edison, Fresno High, Hoover — every single school had representation on these advisory councils,” he said.
“For those of us in government leadership positions, it’s really important that we receive a broad perspective from our youth, and not necessarily just from a handful of people who serve as youth leaders,” Dyer said. “It’s important to hear the voices of all the other students on the high schools.”
The Bee requested interviews with Fresno police student resource officers to discuss how the youth advisory council operates now, but La Blue, the police public information officer, said they wouldn’t have any information about the council.
After the youth liaison position was phased out, Botello said he approached Dyer at a public meeting to ask him what happened to the youth advisory council. Dyer told him it still existed but operated out of a different department.
“For me that was really discouraging and almost insulting just to not get any report back,” Botello said.
Dyer chalked it up to a breakdown in communication.
“How that communication breakdown occurred, I couldn’t tell you,” Dyer said. “It’s very apparent there was some sort of breakdown in communication.”
Missed opportunity
Miller said the way the youth advisory council was handled created more unneeded tension between the police department and young people.
“It really kind of just became a missed opportunity to do something great here,” Miller said.
The dissolution of the type of youth advisory council that he helped build was “devastating,” Miller said.
But there’s a good lesson to learn from Martin’s success in the role of youth liaison officer, Miller said. He saw a change in the way his peers interacted with Miller.
“It speaks to the importance of how we come together and meet each other in a safe and respectful space, and that person who has power letting go of that and whatever that title is and meeting people where they are,” Miller said.
On Dyer’s part, he said he learned the importance of including young people’s voices in decisionmaking processes, and he hopes to do that by creating a youth commission when he takes the city’s helm as mayor.
Reyes said the situation proves why police departments should invest in young people: it would build trust and relationships and ultimately lead to a decrease in police shootings of young men of color.
“You can’t expect, in this day and age, for the heavens to part and things to change,” she said. “There is no channel open for young people at Fresno Police Department, and there used to be, but there’s none today.
“And it was by their choice, not the community’s choice.”