Shortly after becoming a police officer in the northern English town of Hull in the 1980s, Django Sibley realized that patrolling without a gun meant “consensual policing.”
His favorite place was the town’s public housing tenements, and Sibley said he quickly learned that people responded better to persuasion than to threats of force or arrest. Although de-escalation had not yet become mainstream in law enforcement, Sibley recalled spending most of his days working on it.
Mr Sibley said he tried to persuade people to act in their own interests instead of taking a “more coercive” approach.
“Usually you have to deal with violent situations by taking the time to listen to people and get to know them,” he said.
Those early lessons have stuck with Sibley, 52, since he moved to Los Angeles more than 20 years ago and recently became executive director of the civilian commission that oversees police departments and investigates officer-involved shootings. remains.
Sibley, who started his new role in September, said his experience has given him a unique perspective on when police should draw their weapons and take action.
In his new role as executive director, Sibley will serve as a liaison between the LAPD and the commission, which acts like a corporate board of directors by setting policy and providing direction to the department. do. He will also advise on one of the commissioners’ most important roles: weekly deliberations behind closed doors on whether police shootings and other serious uses of force were appropriate.
He said working in U.S. law enforcement opened his eyes to the challenges of policing a country unlike Britain, which is full of guns. Even a routine phone call can quickly go south with the presence of a firearm, he said.
Guns were a rarity in Hull, where Sibley spent his childhood. After his family moved away briefly when he was a teenager, he returned to join the police force. The seaside town 150 miles north of London is experiencing an explosion of crime and drug use after the collapse of the local fishing industry and decades of economic decline.
Sibley believed he could make a real difference because he understood what worked and what didn’t for local law enforcement.
It was “actually wisdom I gained from watching police fail in places where I lived,” he said.
Health problems forced him to leave the field and take a desk job. He decided to go back to school, enrolled in graduate school at USC in 1999, and was hired by an oversight agency that helps monitor the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. In 2004, he was hired as a special agent in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of Inspector General, which serves as the investigation and audit division of the Police Commission.
Sibley was eventually promoted to lieutenant in charge of all serious police use-of-force investigations, including shootings.
The total number of police shootings is down nearly a quarter from the same point last year, but Mayor Karen Bass has made reducing lethal force one of her law enforcement priorities. Los Angeles Police Department officers have shot at people 27 times so far this year, killing 11 people and wounding nine more.
Critics who attend the commission’s weekly meetings at police headquarters often accuse the bodies of being a “rubber stamp” of the department’s violence against citizens. They argue that the board too often reaches decisions that are “in line with policy” in cases where the officer’s own aggressive behavior escalated the conflict.
Sibley said he understands that some of the group’s critics are frustrated, but they don’t necessarily see progress toward reform.
Sibley’s hiring comes amid a major shake-up in local police leadership, including the appointment of Jim McDonnell as Los Angeles Police Department chief and Nathan Hockman as Los Angeles County district attorney. While Mr. McDonnell’s immigration record has faced scrutiny and Mr. Hockman has been criticized for his move to fire his predecessor, the special police shooting prosecutor, Mr. Sibley’s hiring has gone largely unnoticed. For many years he kept a low public profile, operating primarily behind the scenes and gaining a reputation as a tough but fair investigator.
When he joined the Office of Inspector General in 2004, it was a dramatically different moment for the Office and the police force as a whole. Although the Los Angeles Police Department was operating under a federal consent decree in the wake of the Rampart corruption scandal, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and a series of controversial actions across the country that sparked a national debate about the use of police officers Police shootings were still years away. of power.
“I think it’s fair to say that the Los Angeles Police Department at that time was pretty resistant to inspector general oversight,” Sibley said.
Despite continued resistance, the LAPD has since made some progress on “training, standards and policy,” he said.
In the year he joined the inspector general’s office, there were 144 significant use-of-force incidents citywide, including police shootings.
“Right now we’re well below 100 cases and have been for many years,” he said, noting that the department has averaged 60 to 70 similar cases in recent years. “It’s essentially half what it was 20 years ago.”
Years of experience in the Office of the Inspector General taught him the importance of closely monitoring police officers’ “risk factors” and the need for supervisors and supervisors to intervene before fatal consequences occur. .
Mr Sibley said when he started working in Hull in the 1980s, British police were already working on deferring reports to social services. “It was a concept that I was already familiar with, but perhaps underutilized here,” he said.
“I learned the importance of building good relationships with the people living in my neighborhood,” Sibley said, by guarding the town’s public housing.
It also taught him patience, especially when he “keeps dealing with the same situation over and over again.”
He left the force to complete a bachelor’s degree in Liverpool, where he lost public trust under a stop-and-frisk strategy after the 1980s uprisings, fueled by high unemployment and police discrimination. I wrote a paper on the efforts of British law enforcement agencies to recover. It primarily targeted young black men.
Sibley has witnessed similar concerns during his time in the United States. He said the protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 were a reminder that “you can never take your eye off the ball with the use of force.”
He said “one horrific use-of-force incident” could erode the long-established relationship between police and the community.
Sibley’s former boss, then-inspector general Mark Smith, resigned in April after being named an independent monitor of police reform in Portland, Oregon.
A new inspector general is expected to be named in the coming weeks.
The five-member commission has been down by one member for several months since former commissioner William Briggs resigned.
Briggs, an entertainment lawyer, said he pushed for Sibley to become the commission’s executive director, calling her “mentally unstable and even having a bad temper.”
“I always found him to be thoroughly prepared and extremely knowledgeable, especially on issues surrounding the use of force,” Briggs said.
Mayor Bass replaced Briggs with former Superior Court Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon on the committee after her original candidate was withdrawn from consideration. A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Sanchez-Gordon grew up in East Los Angeles after serving as an elementary school teacher and federal public defender. She was elected to the bench in 1997.
