New police chief talks mask mandate, BLM, reducing violent crime

POLL: How safe do you feel in Hot Springs?

Then incoming Hot Springs Police Chief Chris Chapmond speaks at an Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission Get Out to Vote event held June 27 at the Hot Springs Farmers & Artisans Market, about a week before he was formally inducted as the new chief. - Photo by Richard Rasmussen of The Sentinel-Record
Then incoming Hot Springs Police Chief Chris Chapmond speaks at an Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission Get Out to Vote event held June 27 at the Hot Springs Farmers & Artisans Market, about a week before he was formally inducted as the new chief. - Photo by Richard Rasmussen of The Sentinel-Record

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series of interviews with the new Hot Springs police chief, Chris Chapmond, about his goals for the department and how he is dealing with apparent unrest in the ranks that led up to the departure of the previous chief and assistant chief.

Hot Springs Police Chief Chris Chapmond, who officially took on the job July 2, assumed his new role in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought with it new concerns about public safety above and beyond the norm.

Regarding the state and local mandates for citizens to wear masks to help prevent the spread of the virus, Chapmond told The Sentinel-Record they haven't had to issue any citations yet. "Honestly, we haven't gotten a lot of calls about it. The ones that have called us, we explain the way the executive order is written, explain the situation."

He gave the example of a family walking down Central Avenue, noting if they are maintaining social distance from other groups they would not be required to have their masks on.

"That's not something that's enforceable," he said.

"If a business calls and they have an individual that has been asked to leave based on not wearing a mask and they're disruptive then yes, absolutely, we'll respond and address those as they come," he said.

"We're not ignoring the situation, we're just not getting a lot of those calls. We have a very high call volume so it's fortunate we're not getting a lot of those calls just to add to our workload. It would be tough to address that as well as everything else we're doing."

Chapmond stressed, "We believe in it. We believe in wearing masks. We highly encourage it and set the example by our employees wearing them when we encounter citizens of our community. And if there is a situation where we need to respond where someone is putting someone else in danger because they're not wearing a mask we will respond."

He noted every business has the right to refuse service and there are several statutes already in place to deal with such situations, with charges such as disorderly conduct or criminal trespassing, regardless of the mask issue.

Asked about physical fitness requirements at the department, Chapmond said, "I believe in an overall wellness program for employees and officers that goes well beyond physical fitness. Physical fitness is still going to be part of who we are and what we are and truly needs to be part of our profession. You need to be physically fit to do the job.

"But the overall wellness program we're going to develop is much more encompassing," he said. "We've had three officer-involved shootings in the last 12 months. Part of the program is making sure with the officers involved in those critical incidents, that their mental well-being is where it needs to be and that we have multiple layers of mental health help available."

That help may include "peer-to-peer counseling internally, crisis intervention teams, employee assistance programs through the city as well as a spiritual aspect," he said, noting he is increasing the department's chaplain program from one chaplain to three, "to cover all aspects of overall well-being."

Chapmond said he plans to continue the de-escalation training and bias-based police training Jason Stachey, the former police chief, brought to the department a few years ago which "has continued to evolve," noting it's important "to understand we all have natural biases whether we believe it or not and we need to recognize them so we can police the community more effectively."

He said there will likely be federal mandates regarding such issues pushed forward, but "we're already way ahead of the curve on that." He said their training "touches on things that are national conversations right now. We recognized this as an organization four or five years ago and started dealing with it."

Chapmond said he's "very proud" of the department's relationship with the community and noted they don't have issues like other cities because they have the trust of the community. "They know we're doing our job in a professional and ethical manner and that we're properly trained."

Much of this he attributed to "hiring the right people" in the first place. "Our hiring process is very rigid. It's extremely tough to get hired here," he said, noting they go through seven or eight applicants to find one that's qualified and then that person goes through "a gauntlet of interviews and background checks and different psychological tests" to ensure candidates are vetted properly.

"I always say if you hire bad people, bad things happen. If you hire good people, it's less likely that bad things will happen. I want to make sure we're hiring the right people because that way you have a better organization and it creates a better situation within the community and you have less of those problems," he said.

Regarding the Black Lives Matter protests held in Hot Springs after George Floyd, a Black man, died while being detained by a white police officer in Minnesota, Chapmond noted he had already been offered the chief's position at that point and he and the HSPD "were talking back and forth" about it.

"We were dealing with the same issues in South Carolina and tried to have the same approach. You meet with organizers and hear what they have to say and make it a nonconfrontational kind of event. And it works," he said. "It's their constitutional right to protest and voice their opinions and we wanted to afford them that opportunity."

He complimented the job that Capt. William Hrvatin and Cpl. Joey Williams did of reaching out to the event organizers and that "set us up for success during that period of time." He said he felt the HSPD "has enough credibility in our community to be able to have those conversations without seeing what's happening in other areas."

Asked about violent crime in the city, which has seen an increase in the last two years, Chapmond said, "We're a little bit lower than we were this time last year so hopefully that continues forward." He noted they have solved all but two of the seven homicides in the city so far this year.

"We're actively working on those cases," he said, noting they were all "fairly random" and it's often "hard to pinpoint and say this is the one cause of these events." He said they are "exploring other opportunities for partnerships with other agencies to try to address violent crime, and again, we're trying to use technology to get ahead of the curve and identify some trends."

On reducing crime, Chapmond said, "It's very encompassing and requires a lot of different moving parts to actually address that, but we're going to do our part and will be proactively policing the community, exploring different ways to do that more efficiently."

He said the key is intelligence-led policing, noting, "There's a lot of days when our officers out here have the best intentions in the world but when they leave this building and go out to do their jobs, they need to have a plan every day. We're looking at some software to enable us to mine the data that's in our reporting system that's able to catalog it, show us trends and different time frames when we need to be focused in certain areas based on this or that."

Chapmond said he is "a huge proponent" of community policing, but stressed that doesn't mean being "soft on crime." He said the stronger community policing relationships are, the more effectively crime issues can be addressed.

"We're going to continue to work on all that. Hiring the best people, leveraging tech, we're thinking outside the box and I think we're going to be able to get a handle on some things," he said.

Asked if he had ever thought he would return to Hot Springs as police chief, Chapmond said Stachey "is a dear friend of mine and I was never going to compete against him for this job. But I've always told people that if this job came open I would be one of the first ones to apply and so I did."

He said he believes everything happens for a reason and "I ended up in South Carolina for a couple of years which was great, it was good for me. It allowed me to expand my horizons so to speak and put more tools in the toolbox. I had the opportunity to lead a great agency out there and grow an agency and put a lot of things in place there. I was able to hone my skills as a professional and as a chief."

With his previous years of experience at the HSPD and "the relationships I have in place with the community and other law enforcement agencies and officers and then adding to that having that experience in Bluffton, I think it's prepared me very well to come back and lead an agency I love and serve a community that's been so good to me over the years," he said.

"Professionally there couldn't be a higher honor than being asked to come back. Humbled is not even the appropriate word. It's well beyond that. But I'm glad to be home for a lot of reasons."

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