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Regan, Senate Committee Advance State Police Commissioner Nomination
Posted on March 6, 2023
HARRISBURG â The Senate Law and Justice Committee, chaired by Sen. Mike Regan (R-31), today advanced the nomination of Maj. Chris Paris to be the next commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP).
Paris was nominated by Gov. Josh Shapiroand currently serves as the area commander for more than 20 northeastern counties in Pennsylvania with a complement of approximately 1,000 enlisted and civilian personnel.
âMajor Paris has a wealth of experience in law enforcement and has worked his way up the chain of command,â said Regan, who served in law enforcement as the U.S. Marshal for the Middle District of Pennsylvania prior to his entry into public service. âHe began as a state trooper in a patrol unit and now stands poised to be the next commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police.â
Paris has served in his current role as one of four PSP area commanders since January 2022.
He began his service with PSP in November 1999 as a state trooper with Troop K and served in a patrol unit based in Skippack.
Paris began serving in June 2013 as a lieutenant and station commander with Troop R at the Blooming Grove barracks. He was in that position on Sept. 12, 2014, when the barracks came under attack by domestic terrorist Eric Frein. Paris served as station commander during the 48-day manhunt that ended in the eventual capture of Frein, who later was sentenced to death for the attack.
Paris advanced through the ranks of the PSP, becoming a captain with Troop R before advancing to major when he joined the Bureau of Integrity and Professional Standards. Paris again was promoted in January 2020 to lieutenant colonel when he became deputy commissioner of administration and professional responsibility, one of three deputy cabinet secretaries in former Gov. Tom Wolfâs administration who helped the former commissioner run the PSP.
Paris graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Scranton in 1998 before earning his law degree from Temple University in 2004.
âMajor Paris has an impressive record of service during his more than 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police,â Regan said. âAs a strong backer of law enforcement, I have the utmost confidence in his ability to lead the Pennsylvania State Police and look forward to working with him to support the men and women who serve our commonwealth as state troopers.â
The committee through a unanimous, bipartisan vote advanced Parisâs nomination, which now heads to the Senate Rules and Executive Nominations Committee.
https://www.pasenategop.com/news/regan-senate-committee-advance-state-police-commissioner-nomination/
PSP COMMISSIONER
Colonel Christopher Paris
Colonel Christopher L. Paris, a native of Lackawanna County, was nominated by Governor Shapiro to lead the Pennsylvania State Police. Colonel Paris enlisted in the Pennsylvania State Police in 1999, beginning his career as a Trooper assigned to Troop K, Skippack. As he progressed through the ranks, he served in Troop K, Philadelphia; the Bureau of Training and Education; Troop R, Dunmore; the Department Discipline Office; the Bureau of Integrity and Professional Standards; and the Executive Office as the Deputy Commissioner of Administration and Professional Responsibility. Most recently, he served as the Commander of Area III.
Commissioner Paris is a 1998 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Scranton, a 2004 graduate of Temple University Law School, and a graduate of the 267th session of the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Academy. He has passed the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bar exams and is an active member of the Pennsylvania Bar.
Colonel Paris exercises command, administrative, and fiscal authority over the Pennsylvania State Police, which is the tenth largest police agency in the United States, serving a population of more than 3.3 million residents over a 36,000 square-mile area. He oversees a budget of more than 1.5 billion dollars and commands a statewide complement of approximately 6,500 enlisted and civilian employees, which includes an authorized complement of 4,841 State Police Troopers.
muh diversity
Amid policing backlash, Pa. State Police struggles to evolve: âThis is a crisisâ
Updated: Mar. 06, 2023, 11:10 a.m.|Published: Feb. 23, 2021, 5:30 a.m.
Forgive Brian Pressley for staring. Itâs an occupational hazard. The Pennsylvania State Police corporal sizes people up, no matter where heâs at.
If Pressley likes what he sees a quiet confidence, the steel in oneâs spine, the nothing-to-prove demeanor well then, the recruitment supervisor just canât help himself.
Whether clad in his state police uniform or in street clothes, Pressley is apt to approach his subject, business card in hand and a simple opening pitch: âDid you ever think of joining the Pennsylvania State Police?â
Itâs the kind of police contact most people would never expect. Making it even more unusual, Pressleyâs recruitment pitches often occur in inner-city neighborhoods across the state, but especially in his hometown of Philadelphia.
Pressleyâs targets are young men and women of color â most of whom might have never thought of joining the state police. In fact, some might harbor deep suspicions about cops, especially after a tumultuous year of social justice protests, Black Lives Matter marches and a tragic roll call of minority deaths at the hands of police.
But on the heels of these momentous events, the state police push to change its culture, increase the diversity of its overwhelmingly white ranks and train its 4,200-plus force on properly handling contacts with minorities is more urgent that ever.
These efforts began well before last yearâs sweeping social justice unrest. But the tumultuous events touched off by George Floydâs May 2020 death under the knee of a white officer in Minnesota only proved how far the 116-year-old institution has to go in order to meet todayâs still-evolving standard for policing. PSPâs top brass acknowledged all of this in a series of interviews with PennLive.
But how do you go about changing Americaâs 9th-largest law enforcement organization?
The answer appears to be very slowly.
Currently, women and minorities make up 13.4% of PSPâs ranks. Thatâs up from 11 percent in 2016. But that number and the PSPâs current 7.2% minority rate still isnât good enough, PSP commanders said.
The 99-member cadet class that graduated at the height of last summerâs police protests and unrest was 88% white and had just one Black male among the ranks of new troopers.
The most recent cadet class, graduated just last month, was more diverse, with 25% of the 51 new troopers being women or minorities, according to PSPâs statistics.
Moreover, many of the new troopers fanning out to all corners of the Keystone State benefited from unique contacts with minority students at Milton Hershey School, another component of the departmentâs diversity and cultural sensitivity push.
Weâre not where we need to be, but weâre taking steps to target applicants,â Lt. Colonel Christopher Paris,deputy commissioner of administration and professional responsibility, told PennLive.
âThese are challenging times,â he added. âThese issues have to be addressed. Itâs a difficult job. Itâs always been a difficult job.â
PennLive sought to interview some of the new troopers who graduated into last summerâs unprecedented police protests to gauge how well they were prepared by PSPâs diversity programs to deal with such unprecedented times. PSP turned down our requests to question its newest troopers.
>muh diversity
âPractices introduce biasâ
PSP was born in 1905 in wake of a different kind of unrest â the âGreat Anthracite Coal Strikeâ of a few years earlier. The job hasnât gotten any easier since then, Paris noted.
Yet, policing in 2021 and beyond might be unlike anything that came before.
âWe have been through tumultuous times before, and this is certainly a crisis,â he said of the widespread push for social justice and equitable policing. âThis is our job to go out there and enforce the law. We are going to take every opportunity we can and every encounter we have to make it the most professional police encounter. Weâre going to work hard at it every day.â
Yet the department is dogged by a problematic track record when it comes to race and policing.
Most recently, the PSP was hit with criticism for having quietly ended its practice of collecting racial data during traffic stops nine years ago. This fact was highlighted in investigative news reports by Spotlight PA in 2019.
Last month, PSP finally reversed course, announcing it would resume tracking race data for its traffic stops. As part of its new collection campaign, which officially began Jan. 1, PSP said itâs partnering with the University of Cincinnati to analyze the race data.
âRegular and ongoing analysis by a neutral third party is a critical part of this program that emphasizes our departmentâs commitment to transparency and continuous improvement,â State Police Commissioner Col. Robert Evanchick said in a Jan. 12 news release announcing the policy reversal.
Police watchdogs insist traffic stop data could be key in detecting potential racial bias, helping expose any penchant for pulling over motorists for âdriving while Black.â
Within the minority community, PSP has long been the subject of allegations of racial profiling, according to Kenneth Huston, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the NAACP. Huston told Spotlight PA in part: âWith the Pennsylvania State Police, there seems to be this narrative that they are racial profiling.â
The ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a 2019 federal lawsuit alleging troopers were violating the law by stopping and holding people solely because they were Latinx. And in 2017, PSP paid $150,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a Latino man who alleged he was profiled by troopers and arrested on false charges.
An even more troubling bias may be revealed by what happens after a trooper pulls over a driver of color.
Spotlight PA obtained state police traffic stop data that had been gathered and analyzed before the department stopped collecting those stats back in 2010.
The statistics, which had been analyzed for PSP by the University of Cincinnati, showed troopers were roughly two to three times more likely to search Black or Hispanic drivers than white drivers after pulling them over. Yet, the greater percentage of searches of people of color yielded a far lower success rate for finding contraband, compared to the less frequent but more fruitful searches of white drivers.
Chris Burbank, who left 25 years as a cop and police chief behind to become a national reform advocate for the Center for Policing Equity in New York, told PennLive this PSP data suggests a classic case of systematic police bias.
In short, Burbank says many of the problems of policing inequity are rooted in the âpractices and proceduresâ of the institutions, not necessarily the biases of individual officers.
âWe constantly want to change the officers,â Burbank said. âThatâs the easy route. Blame the officers: If they just werenât racists. But we have been doing these things (anti-bias trainings and the like) for years. They are not new and novel. They have taken on a lot of different names, but they havenât changed the outcome.â
What could trigger what Burbank called a âhuge changeâ would be to evaluate and overhaul all those long-standing police procedures that have resulted in officers, whether Black or white, searching minorities at a far higher rate than whites.
Burbank notes minorities in America are 8 times more likely to be asked for a âconsent searchâ when stopped by police. Yet the greater frequency of minority searches yields a lower success rate of finding contraband, compared to the less frequent searches of whites, he said.
Burbank pegged the success of minority searches at a national rate of around 3 percent, compared to an average success rate of 25 percent for whites searched by police.
The difference, according to Burbank: Officers typically conduct far more observational police work before asking a white person to consent to a search, compared to minorities.
âThe police work is better,â Burbank said of those white searches.
With far too many minorities, he added, âPolice simply pull up and say, âWhat are you doing tonight? Do you have any drugs in the car? Do you mind if I search?â Itâs just the nature of the game. Iâm not trying to condemn my former profession. But thatâs how it works.â
To really alter what Burbank called these negative police contacts, department practices, policies and procedure must evolve, not just the officers.
âWe treat racial bias as a hearts-and-minds issue,â Burbank said. âWe want to change everybodyâs hearts and minds, so they donât feel this way. Systematically, the policy, practices and procedures have much more influence. Policing practices introduce bias.â
Even hiring many more troopers of color, as PSP is attempting to do, is no guarantee of ending bias, so long as bias-producing police procedures remain in place, Burbank added.
âBlack and minority officers practice this, too,â he said. âThe policing practices introduce bias.â
A far more profound and far-reaching change for departments with disparities in minority search rates, such as those suggested by PSPâs own stats, would be to eliminate the practice of asking drivers for consent searches altogether, Burbank said.
Either thereâs probable cause, or there isnât, he said.
Short of that, Burbank said police departments should mandate that âfully informed consentâ be obtained before every supposedly voluntary search. This means a standardized reading of Fourth Amendment rights informing the driver he or she is free to decline the officerâs search request with no repercussions, whatsoever.
More broadly, citizen complaints about state police officers and civilian employees are tracked by PSPâs Bureau of Integrity and Professional Standards. In 2019, the latest year with available stats, there were 1,686 complaints, 637 initiated by citizens. Of those, 43 citizen complaints resulted in full-scale internal affairs investigations. (Any allegation of trooper or civilian employee misconduct triggers such an IAD probe, PSP says.)
When compared to all citizen contacts by troopers, the 43 misconduct investigations equate to a ratio of one citizen complaint investigation for every 45,806 citizen contacts. In 2018, this ratio was one citizen complaint investigation for every 32,482 citizen contacts.
The 2019 statistics are based on a total of 1.97 million citizen contacts with state troopers for the year. Of those, just over 1 million were âassigned police incidents,â and 966,416 were traffic-related, according to the PSPâs most recent annual accountability report.
In 2020, despite the widespread police protests, trooper-citizen contacts had been trending sharply down, mainly due to coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions throughout parts of last year. (The PSPâs full 2020 report is due in late April).
Corporal Brian Pressley
Corporal Brian Pressley, Recruitment Services Section Supervisor, Pennsylvania State Police.
The recruiter
The push to change the department remains in high gear.
A major part of meeting this social justice moment is ensuring troopers who meet the community during police encounters actually look like the community they patrol, PSP officials said.
This is where recruiters like Cpl. Pressley come in. Heâs a product of a North Philly housing project, and he once held world views similar to those of the young minorities he targets as future state troopers.
âI grew up in an underserved community in the city,â he said in a PennLive interview. âYou pretty much saw Philly PD. You never saw state police. For state police to come into underserved communities and explain what we do, itâs just huge.â
Huge, Pressley says, because it holds the power to change the lives of successful recruits, while transforming the state police.
Those new troopers obtain an instant ticket to the middle-class courtesy of PSPâs $63,000 starting salary. Meanwhile, their presence on the force helps re-invent and invigorate the identity and culture of one of the countryâs oldest and biggest statewide law enforcement institutions.
Itâs a win-win. And Pressleyâs the perfect person to proselytize PSPâs recruitment message because of the profound impact becoming a trooper has made in his own life.
âIt is the best career decision I ever made,â he said. âThis is not a position for me. This is a life-changing thing for me. I would recommend it to anyone. It will bless them, their families and generations to come.â
Still, Pressleyâs career choice often comes as a shock, especially when heâs back home and hanging out in Philly.
âI get that a lot: âYou are so nice. I didnât think you would be a state trooper,ââ Pressley said, recounting reactions after he reveals his job in social situations. âWe are nice,â he tells them. âBut we have a job to do.â
Even at the height of the police backlash last summer, Pressley said he never took heat from family or close friends in the inner city for being on the âwrong side.â
âIt just hasnât been an issue,â he said. âAll my friends and family respect me. They donât see me in that light, because they know who I am.â
Selling the job to other minorities in urban settings like Philly is another matter. It requires constant and consistent effort, which is why Pressley says he never misses an opportunity.
He repeatedly returns to his roots and keeps a keen eye out for potential trooper talent, regardless of the situation.
As for what catches his eye?
âAn individual with a good attitude,â he said. âHonestly, thatâs what Iâm looking for. Attitude will take you far. Can you smile? If youâre smiling, you probably like people. You canât protect and serve if you donât like people. Positive disposition is what Iâm looking for. Physical shape is always great. It is a physical academy,â he added of the PSPâs military-style, 1,100-hour training marathon.
When Pressley spots that special something, he doesnât hesitate. âLet me talk to you for a second,â he tells his target. âI have an opportunity maybe you never thought about.â
Simply spotting talent isnât enough, however.
PSP is constantly stepping up its efforts to ensure its minority applicants follow through by taking the entrance exam, then showing up for their 28 weeks inside the residential cadet academy in Derry Township.
To do this, PSP has plucked a page from college football recruiters, making home visits to meet the candidateâs family, especially mom, then making follow-up phone calls and texts throughout the intake process.
âYour house is a sacred place,â Pressley said. âIf we can get in your house, thatâs intimate.â
Instead of a single test date, PSP now schedules a weeks-long exam window at multiple locations across the state. This, so good candidates arenât eliminated right at the start.
All of itâs working to increase the number of women and minorities in the state police ranks, albeit slowly.
Transformation may be coming
Lt. Col. Paris noted that during the 2018 candidate testing cycle, some 11,000 applicants had signed up, including more than 4,000 who were women or minorities. But just 25% of those latter applicants showed up for the entry test.
Now, PSP gives the exams at up to eight civil service testing sites across the state, holding testing dates over a number of weeks. The result is 47 percent of women and minority applicants now take the entry exam.
âWe are trying to be sensitive to all of those things,â Paris said.
These efforts have inched the needle forward in terms of PSPâs diversity. But an opportunity to turbocharge the transformation of the trooper ranks could be coming in the near future. It dates back to a hiring boom coinciding with the 1994 federal Crime Bill. Among other things, the now-controversial law flooded states with federal cash to hire cops.
Now many of those troopers will be opting to retire in the coming years, according to Paris, perhaps clearing the way for many more candidates of color.
A changing of the guard could be coming.
But even PSPâs stepped-up minority recruitment and increased candidate of color support will come up short if the enrolled cadets donât make it through the academyâs 28 grueling weeks to graduation.
In the most recent class to graduate, nine Black males entered the academy as cadets, yet only five emerged as troopers, PSP stats showed. Hispanic males dropped from five cadets to just two grads. As a result, the percent of white cadets at the outset of the class went from 67.5% all the way up to 74.5% of graduating troopers in January.
Finally, thereâs a racial disparity at the top of PSPâs command. The departmentâs most-recent demographic stats show that minorities make up 7.6% of troopers, but just 5.9% of corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains and majors.
While his department is far smaller, Carlisle Police Chief Taro Landis said itâs a mistake to underestimate the institutional cultural change of having minorities in command of a police force.
Landis and Sgt. Dave Miller, who heads the departmentâs office of professional standards, said a new tone has been set, both within and without, since Landis became Carlisleâs first-ever Black chief back in 2017.
âMy very presence changed the scene,â Landis told PennLive. âPeople want to see people who look like them who made it through the organization. We do a lot more community outreach than we did before.â
Within the ranks, the standard is clear, Landis said: âBe professional and be accountable. Thatâs how we do it.â
These expectations are constantly reinforced by randomly reviewing Carlisle officersâ body camera video, then using footage of the various police-community encounters as powerful teaching tools. The real-life scenarios are both positive and negative, revealing what to say and do in various situations â and what not to.
âWe take everything we go to, and we turn it into a lesson,â said Landis, who acknowledged his department is but a fraction of the size and scope of PSP, where his wife once patrolled as a trooper.
These days, the hands-on Chief routinely roams the Carlisle community and quietly observes his officers in action.
âI can drive around and watch what is going on,â he said. âI ask a lot of questions. Thatâs a constant.â
As a result, both Landis and his department are still changing.
âIâm learning stuff every day,â he said. âIâve been Black a long time, still it never ceases to amaze me some of the interactions we have in the community.â
One thing hasnât changed, according to Landis: To really connect with the community, it pays to visit every Black church and Black barber shop.
âThatâs where you find out everything,â he said.
Itâs a rich resource PSP has been tapping, too.
Within PSPâs ranks, cultural sensitivity, contact de-escalation and bias-awareness training continues from top to bottom â the brass right down to street-level troopers.
These troubled times call for nothing less than a full-court press, Lt. Col. Paris said.
âThe core function of the job is going to be handling this crisis,â he said, referencing the police backlash thatâs outwardly eased but hasnât dissipated. âWe are trying to do the job the right way. We donât do it perfectly every time, and itâs not to say we canât do it better.â
This is why PSPâs resolve to evolve amid todayâs ever-changing law enforcement landscape has no end in sight.
https://www.pennlive.com/crime/2021/02/amid-policing-backlash-pa-state-police-struggles-to-evolve-this-is-a-crisis.html