Sacramento’s incoming police chief, Daniel Hahn, hopes to bridge the divide between the city’s Black community and its police department.
Several recent incidents have damaged relations, such as the July 2016 police shooting of Joseph Mann, a 50-year-old Black man who was homeless, mentally ill and armed with a knife. More recently was the April 2017 incident in which a Sacramento officer brutally beat a 24-year-old Black man named Nandi Cain Jr., who argued with the officer after being stopped for jaywalking.
Hahn, 49, is currently the police chief of Roseville, Calif. and is known for being involved in community policing initiatives while working in Sacramento. He was officially hired as the city’s next police chief July 28 and is scheduled to be sworn in Aug. 11.
In a phone interview with the Amsterdam News, Hahn acknowledged that his race will allow him to address some situations more easily than if he wasn’t Black, but he dismissed the notion that he was hired solely because of his race as “sort of insulting.”
Even though his race and connections to Sacramento will allow him “in the door” during racially charged situations involving the police and the Black community, he said those factors won’t matter much if he’s not doing a good job.
Hahn emphasized that having a police department that treats all citizens fairly is much more important than his race.
“If I don’t accomplish that, me being Black isn’t going to mean a thing,” said Hahn. “They’re going to kick me out of the door they just let me in.”
Hahn frequently mentioned the importance of community policing, saying that there are people in certain neighborhoods in America that feel that they receive unequal treatment from the police.
“Right now, I believe that if you’re in certain neighborhoods, in any city in this country, you believe that law enforcement cares about that other neighborhood,” Hahn said, “and the people that live there believe they care about your neighborhood and [its residents]. That’s what they think. As long as they think that, that isn’t fair and so you’re going to have problems as long as that exists in that matter.”
Hahn also said that he was against arrest and ticket quotas after being asked about a report from The Sacramento Bee that showed many more Black residents were ticketed for jaywalking than non-Black residents, even though Black residents up 14 percent of the city’s population.
“We shouldn’t be writing tickets to write tickets,” Hahn said. “Tickets are one of the tools that we have to make safer streets or whatever it is you’re writing tickets for. So really the end goal is to make something safer or people safer and so tickets aren’t always the best way to do that.”
Hahn said every ticket or arrest should have a purpose behind it and that police should think about whether or not arresting someone is always the best solution after they’ve committed a crime.
“If what’s best for this community is to talk to you for a while and mentor you for a while, and then let you go back to your parents, then that’s what I should be doing because I should I have purpose in mind,” said Hahn.
Hahn also pointed to implicit bias rather than “actual all-out racism” as the cause for recent incidents between the Black community and the police. He said it is important for officers to be trained to recognize their implicit biases and recruiting to be better.
Hahn emphasized that he doesn’t believe that only Black officers should be put in Black neighborhoods, and that although racial diversity in policing would help, there shouldn’t be “diversity for diversity’s sake.”
“I can hire a Black officer tomorrow and he might be a horrible officer, so that’s not going to help,” he said. “If he or she is bad, it doesn’t matter that they’re Black. If they’re bad, they’re bad. So if I’m hiring a Black officer, they’re going to be good. I’m not hiring them just because they’re Black.”
Hahn described his career as something that happened “by accident.”
“I was going at a community college here in Sacramento to get a degree in business, and a friend of mine talked be into taking a criminal justice class because it would suffice for a general education requirement and he told me it was easy,” said Hahn, a Sacramento native.
Whenever Sacramento police recruiters came to the class, Hahn told them he wasn’t interested and kept handing them back their applications.
But after finding out that the job paid more than his job at a local mall, Hahn decided to take up what he thought at time would be a temporary career. He planned to eventually move on to business and teaching, but 10 years into his law enforcement career, the community relations aspect of his job motivated him to stick with policing.
Hahn was a police officer in Sacramento for more than 20 years before becoming the first Black police officer employed by the Roseville Police Department. He became Roseville’s first Black police chief in March 2011.
When asked about his experience as a Black police officer, Hahn said his career had been “extremely rewarding” in ways he never would’ve guessed when he was growing up Sacramento. He explained that police officers weren’t popular in his neighborhood when he was growing up and the community’s “view of what police officers do or could do was pretty limited because we just saw them arresting people and giving tickets out.”
He continued, “So when I say it’s a very rewarding career, it’s in ways that I never even guessed could be had in law enforcement [such as] teaching at a school and doing things with families and just the more holistic things you could do as a police officer. Maybe if I had known those things, maybe I would’ve wanted to be a police officer. I don’t know, but nobody ever saw those things—at least I didn’t.”
However, the job does come with challenges, from both the Black community and his fellow officers.
“I’ve probably been called ‘Uncle Tom’ more times than I can count,” Hahn said. “I’ve been told I ‘work for the man’ more times than I can count, ‘You ain’t my brother.’ It’s not a popular career in our community, so sometimes you get some pushback.”
Hahn mentioned how, early on in his career, his training officer would often call him “boy” and “stupid” and even tried to get him fired several times.
“So there’s been challenges like that,” Hahn said. “There’s been, in my opinion, different times where opportunities weren’t allowed, [and] comments here and there.” But Hahn maintained that he received good mentorship from his peers throughout his career.
When asked about current relations between the police and the Black community, Hahn described the situation in less than glowing terms. While acknowledging that some exceptions exist, Hahn said that in general, relations were “not good.”
Pointing out how similar the factors behind past riots against the police, such as the Watts Riot of 1965, were to modern riots, such as the Baltimore Riot of 2015, Hahn said it was “a shame” how, after all this time, America still hasn’t been able to resolve its race issue, especially when it came to policing.
“In my opinion, it’s quite frankly, a little embarrassing—not just on law enforcement’s behalf—that we as a community or we as a society haven’t done something about that,” said Hahn.
Hahn also said that he hoped that his generation and future generations are able to improve community-police relations so that, when his children reach their 40s, “they’re not having the same conversation that we’re having right now.”