A veteran Miami police officer with two decades of experience dealing with the media and community leaders will take over as police chief in Ferguson, hoping to help the St. Louis suburb heal as it rebounds after the fatal 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.
“This has been a long and strenuous process, but we believe Major Moss is the right choice,” Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III said in a statement. “We understand the past 18 months have not been easy for everyone, but the City is now moving forward and we are excited to have Major Moss lead our police department.”
Ferguson’s city manager, municipal judge and Police Chief Tom Jackson all resigned within days of the report. The Ferguson City Council just two weeks ago agreed to a settlement with the Justice Department that calls for major reforms in the city’s criminal justice system.
“Our officers have worked extremely hard to implement community policing and community engagement in their daily practices,” Seewood said in the release. “Mr. Moss is the right man for the job to continue those initiatives.”
He also said he was mistreated by two police officers when he was a young teenager in Miami. He said he was about 14 and walking home from an after-school job cleaning a bank when an officer pushed him against a wall, frisked him, searched his belongings “and no sooner than he arrived he left,” Moss said. He said the encounter left him “scared and embarrassed” and is among the reasons he became a police officer.
He joined Miami police in 1984, steadily rising through the ranks. He worked for a time in the homicide unit, according to his LinkedIn page, before taking over media and community relations 20 years ago.
He was among 54 candidates for the top police job in Ferguson, a St. Louis County town of about 20,000 residents. Other finalists were Frank McCall Jr., chief of nearby Berkeley, Missouri; Mark Becker, a former FBI agent who recently resigned as police chief in East Chicago, Indiana; and Brenda Jones, who was fired as police chief in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 2013 but won a lawsuit alleging race and gender discrimination.
Moss was scheduled to retire from the Miami department in September.
Ferguson’s leadership was mostly white at the time of Brown’s death. But the new city manager, municipal judge and police chief are all black men. The city has also begun an effort to recruit more black officers to its department.
“I want to hear their story. … I think that will remind me of the task at hand,” he said.
source: WTOP.com