ER IN PHX, SU Sylvia Moir, with their new Interim Chief of Police, Jeff Glover, who is set to serve until October 2021.
“A lot about policing and the conversation about policing has changed just in this year, ever since the murder of George Floyd,” Ching said in an AZFamily article after Moir’s resignation. “Those discussions and protests going on around the country have really sort of changed a lot of people’s thinking about what will be necessary to successfully move forward. It was my assessment that while we made a lot of progress that at this point I felt new leadership was needed.” Glover is the first African-American chief of police in Tempe’s history with a background of serving as the governor-appointed commissioner on the Arizona Commission for African American Affairs and was a national board member for the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. With these credentials, city officials say Glover’s presence on Tempe’s police force will create major change within the department and community while BLM supporters merely see his presence as a facade for the city’s public image. “It seems like Arizona is playing politics where they think just because they have a person of color or a black person in power that it’s going to change the policing system and the way it works. It doesn’t matter what color a cop is, they’re a pig. That means they’re inherently violent and they’re a part of a systemically racist, anti-black system,” Miriam said
Overall, regardless of Tempe City Council’s efforts in producing police reform, Black Lives Matter advocates do not see the switch in police chiefs as an improvement for Tempe PD. “The system of policing is rotten, so putting a clean individual into a rotten system will eventually cause them to rot as well, because of policing’s rotten core,” Miriam said. “So, unless this new police chief is going to respond to the community’s request to defund, to disarm and to reinvest money into forms of public safety, then he won’t be any better than the last police chief, Sylvia Moir, who was a liar and a crook.” Despite everything surrounding Black Lives Matter here in the valley, BLM proponents have a bright outlook on the movement as a whole and hope that the change they’re fighting for will take root in America’s future. “I think it’s beautiful what is going on around the nation seeing what has been the largest uprising around the world and in the U.S. with the BLM movement and the BLM protests. My only hope is that this does become a movement, and not a moment in time, where the demands BLM is calling for will become a reality,” Miriam said.
By Ella Ho Ching
9
