Residents had questions for Newport's police chief finalists. This is how they responded.

The two candidates in the running to become Newport's next police chief sat on a forum Thursday evening and discussed what improvements could be made to the Newport Police Department and what they saw were the major public safety issues facing the city.

The decision falls to City Manager Joseph Nicholson, who will choose between interim Chief Ryan Duffy and Lt. Michael Naylor, sometime relatively soon according to Communications Manager Tom Shevlin. One of the two men will fill the shoes of former Police Chief Gary Silva, who officially retired in February.

Improving community relations

The city issued a survey asking residents about their top public safety concerns and what they would like to see from the incoming police chief. The survey, which ran from April 9 to April 30, garnered about 173 responses, 78% of which were full-time residents and 84% of which were white. This reflects the demographics of the city, Shevlin said.

“Police-Community Relations” ranked as the most important public safety issue cited by over half of the survey participants. As such, many of the questions posed in the moderated section, which was moderated by longtime resident and former City Councilor Keith Stokes, focused on how the two potential chiefs might build the police department’s relationship with the community.

While both said the department needed to do more to engage with the community, the two had slightly different approaches. Naylor expressed a need for the department to be more public-facing, both in-person through neighborhood beat officers and online by strengthening the department’s presence on social media. This way, he said, the public will get to know the individual officers on staff.

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“I get mad at myself when we drive around and we don’t get out of the car,” Naylor said. ”I get insulted when you ride by and wave at someone and they don’t wave back to you. I say to myself, ‘They don’t know me.’ They stopped knowing us. Somewhere along the line, we stopped knowing our community. We’ve got to get back to it.”

Naylor said getting back into the community and increasing the department’s presence online could also help with recruitment and improving the diversity of the city’s police force.

Duffy, on the other hand, said the department should collaborate more with the community and build partnerships that could strengthen the trust people put in the police. He pointed to the department’s new partnership with Rhode Island Outreach, a mobile mental health service that helps those suffering mental health crises, and recent conversations with Conexión Latina over improving the department’s outreach to Spanish speakers, as examples of the department’s efforts throughout the forum.

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“I think building trust within the community is extremely important,” Duffy said. “I look at trust within the community as the police and the community having a joint bank account, and it’s very important that with every positive interaction that the police have, that is a credit in the bank account.”

Both Naylor and Duffy also touched on the need to be transparent with the community. Former City Councilor Susan Taylor asked the two candidates how they would respond to angry questions from residents or journalists following an incident involving an officer, such as the situation captured on a viral video last year where officers shoved a bystander while performing an arrest. Duffy pointed to the aftermath following George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer three years ago, saying the silence from police chiefs across the country on the issue was the wrong approach.

“I think part of that silence has to do with that the chiefs of police understand that the incident needed to be investigated,” Duffy said. “If we were to have a local incident here, the chief of police, if I’m in that position, I will answer questions and part of those answers will be that the incident is under investigation and to assure and be transparent about what that investigation is.”

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The two both supported revising the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights to allow police chiefs greater power to discipline and speak to the public when one of their officers has been accused of misconduct.

Addressing public safety issues

While the top public safety issues listed by residents from the survey were disorderly conduct, excessive noise and motor vehicle violations, Duffy and Naylor had their own top priority safety issues they wanted to address. Duffy said although the city has a strong narcotics division, the city still struggles with opioid overdoses. Naylor, however, said the police department was missing out on having a financial crimes unit, arguing that several residents are taken advantage of by scammers and the police department could have the tools to track bad actors down.

“I don't want to see someone taken advantage of,” Naylor said. “I really want to stay on top of that. I want our community to know that if someone calls you and scams you, or someone steals your banking account information, we want to help you. If we jump on it right away, we can solve that crime.

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Where Duffy, Naylor and survey respondents agreed the most was the need to enforce traffic violations and improve traffic safety. Naylor commended the police department’s ability to manage traffic even with the city hosting massive events, such as the Newport Folk Festival, but said speeding has become a major issue. He said he has worked with Nicholson to implement speed reduction programs and speed cameras to curb the issue. Duffy, meanwhile, said he was most concerned about pedestrian and bicycle safety, as pedestrians and bicycles were involved in 37 traffic accidents over the course of 2022.

Additional administrative ideas

Duffy and Naylor also agreed on two administrative topics: grants and term limits. Among the list of improvements the candidates wished to make to the department, both Duffy and Naylor argued the city and police department needs to be able to take advantage of more grants, citing the need for a grant writer for the city in general.

Additionally, while Naylor said he personally thought the 12 years Silva sat as Newport’s chief of police was too long, both he and Duffy argued the position should not have term limits.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport police chief finalists answer questions at community forum