Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So over the weekend Memorial Day weekend been
a news occurred with the ongoing scandal of the police
chief's payoff by the Charlotte City Council. He announced he's
retiring at the end of the year and the settlement
quote unquote, the settlement was really more of a severance package,
you see, and he allowed the settlement to become public
and the city manager did the same. Now I think
they actually lined up this interview on Thursday with Michael
Graff and it published at the Charlotte Optimist and The Assembly.
The ASSEMBLYNC dot com published in both places. It is
a very lengthy article. It took me about half an
hour to read it, but I'm kind of a slow
reader and there's one glaring omission from the report, and
I don't know if it was intentional or not. I'm
not trying to to besmirch or to drag Michael Graff.
I don't know who he is. I thought the piece
was well written and did have a lot of the
information in it, and I appreciate that. But there was,
in my view, there was a pretty big omission, which
is the ethics complaint, the ethics complaint that was filed
against now former Charlotte City Councilman Tark Bookari. That ethics
complaint was filed by the local chapter president of the NAACP,
Corn Mac, and the reporting was from WSOCTV that she
had coordinated with two of police Chief Johnny Jennings's top people,
his right hand in his left hand, I call him
the Chief's hands, and they had worked with Mac on
the language on what she should submit for the ethics
complaint against Bookari. Because Bakari had had this battle with
the chief over the outer carrier ballistic vests for rank
and file cops. That wasn't a dressed anywhere in here.
Did he coordinate with her when she did a Freedom
of Information Act request with the city to get text
messages that were between tarc Bookari and Chief Jennings. How
did she know the keywords to search for under the
Foyer request? How did she get that? I think the
reporting has been that Jennings coordinated with her directly on
that that was not covered. The ethics complaint was not covered.
And that's important because the ethics complaint was a precursor
to the settlement, and the ethics complaint was dismissed by
this city attorney, Anthony Fox, through the interim city attorney,
not the former mayor Anthony Fox, but the interim city attorney,
Anthony Fox, and he dismissed the complaint, but then did
the settlement. And they're now saying, well, see what people
didn't know. Oh, and there's all this inaccurate information out there,
But this is basically a severance deal. That's what this is. Well, yeah,
you know what would have probably advanced this narrative a
lot more quickly. It would have been just to say, hey,
Chief Jennings is retiring and we're paying him out a severance.
We put together an exit package. Why wouldn't you just
do that? Why wouldn't you just do that? But instead
we get the secrecy. The closed session votes we can't
talk about it, threatening people with criminal charges if they
tell anybody about the settlement, which the terms of the
settlement have to be reported. So he amends the separation agreement,
that's what they're calling it, a separation agreement, and he
amends it to waive the whatever is confidential, so now
we can know the details of it. But you don't
have to waive that. See, he says. In this interview,
Jennings says he wanted to share the terms of this settlement.
He wanted to share it because quote, the benefits of
releasing it outweigh protecting my information on a personal level. Yeah,
there isn't any personal information in it. It's an agreement.
And the city says, we're not admitting to anything. We
didn't do anything wrong. Chief Jennings isn't admitting to anything.
You could have just done this as a severance deal,
but you made it into this huge thing, probably because
that's actually what it was. He says. We're all still sorry.
Let me let's start this again. This is a quote.
We're all sitting in a chair with a bomb in it.
We just hope to get up before it goes off.
That's what Jennings relayed to the reporter that a close
friend in the organization often says, this is the Major
Cities Chiefs Association. So the police chiefs recognize that they
are in these large city chief positions and it's not
a matter of if, it's a matter of when you're
gonna get shown the door. And he talks about it
in the piece, and I think he is exactly right
that he's he's got the rank and file morale of
the police that he's trying to keep high, you know,
keep your numbers up, be seen as a cops cop.
You know, I'm one of you. I'm going to be
your advocate and all of that. You're my employees, and
I'm going to protect you and all of that. And
then if you don't, then they get mad at you
and they lose confidence in you. And then on the
other side you have activists and they just savage you
if like when there was a police shooting, and they
go after the police, they go after the chief. And
so these are these two competing sort of constituencies, if
you will. And then you add in the politicians, the
city council members. They are also particularly Democrats with the
activist crowd. They are, you know, they are susceptible to
this form of activist persuasion, shall we say, But this
is the analogy. You're sitting in a chair with a
bomb in it, and you're just hoping that you get
up off the chair before it goes off. Jennings is
now getting up. He'll retire from CMPD after thirty three
years of service on January one, twenty twenty six, and
the reporter says, he told me this Thursday Thursday. So
this story came out on Saturday, the twenty fifth Memorial
Day weekend. That date was signed as part of a
widely speculated agreement with the city, which he also released
to me. In a wide ranging three hour conversation, the
embattled but still idealistic CMPD leader discussed the dispute over
outer carrier vests that led to the severance agreement, his
ups and his downs as police chief since taking the
job during the summer of unrest in twenty twenty mostly peaceful,
sometimes fiery. His career as well was covered, his upbringing,
his family, a little fishing. Even notably, he never mentioned
the name of former councilman Tark Bocari referring to him
only by the title. When I asked specific questions about
the year long dispute over whether patrol officers should be
allowed to wear outer carrier vests as part of their uniform.
We took a forty five minute break in the middle
of the interview, during which he signed an amendment to
a settlement agreement that granted him permission to release his
personnel information. The original agreement, which he signed May eighth,
after council approved it in a closed session three days earlier,
included a clause that said he in the city could
not disclose it. He said he wanted to share it
because the benefits of releasing it outweigh protecting my information
on personal level. Again, there was not personal information in there,
just the terms of the severance package, and that is disclosable.
So why did this Why did this gag order clause
or the gag clause? Why did this thing even exist?
Who wanted it in there? Don't know? Did all parties
want it in there? Did somebody object? Seems like some
city council members objected. Three hundred five thousand dollars is
what he's going to get paid out. He says it's
more like a severance package. See, but people have been,
you know, misreporting on it, misstating what it is. Yeah,
well that happens when nobody says what's in it? That's
what happens, all right. If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
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Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
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an app, and it's a website, and it combines news
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground news as they make the media landscape
more transparent. Jerry, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2: How are you hey, I'm great, Pete. I just wanted
to say I heard that he got a twenty five
thousand dollars money a lot for legal fees. Yeah, what
legal fees? There was no attorneys, there was no lawsuit brought,
So what legal fees are they talking about?
Speaker 1: So they do not describe that in detail in the
agreement or in the article, but there is a chronology
in the article, and it says by August twenty twenty four,
Jennings had relented and changed the vest policy. Bakari thanked
Jennings for doing so publicly and privately, but Jennings didn't
let it end there. Wfae's report on the text messages
didn't come out until November, following a public records request,
but by then, Jennings had already retained legal counsel. Okay,
so he hired the lawyer before the text messages were public.
He says, it wasn't about the text messages. I keep
hearing that oh, you know, the chief had his feelings
hurt over some text messages. I'm a former college football player.
I've had my feelings hurt by coaches, but certainly not
by words written down in text messages. It was more
about what happened after. Everybody focused on the texts, but
not the other things. What other things. The push for
me to be fired, the push for the city manager
to be fired, the push for the petition for people
to go online and sign up for my termination or
forcing the manager to fire me. That's what he retained
legal council for.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's just still to me. Feat come on, I mean,
let's be realistic. Twenty five thousand dollars, you know for
for something like that, that's to me, that's ridiculous. I'm
a retired police officer, okay, and that that to me,
that's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry, that's just a lot of money. That is a
lot of it, and that just seems ridiculous to me.
Speaker 1: It's a nice whole number too him. That's a nice
whole number, which is weird for legal fees, legal bills
and such, because they bill you by time, you know,
the lawyers do, and so right, right, and then they
also say that they're going to be that each party
is responsible for paying their own legal fees. So it's
a so it's a twenty five thousand dollars check, but
then Jennings takes the check and then he writes whatever
or he reimburses himself out of that for whatever legal
fees that he paid for or you know, or O's
and so, okay, I seriously doubt that the legal bill
is twenty five k on the button. You know, it
seems like there may be a little bit of padding
on that.
Speaker 2: No, I agree, I agree, Pete, and I appreciate you
covering it. Yeah, that's great because I got a lot
of friends that's still working there and that are very
upset with this situation with Chief Jennings.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, a lot of a lot of residents, non
law enforcement are upset about it also. And I think
the FOP is they're they're proceeding today right there. Online
voting began yesterday and there in person voting began today
for the no confidence vote in the in the chief.
But now he's going to be retiring, So I mean,
you know what different, right, but I mean it is
you're laying down the Marker. So at least you're conveying
the sentiment of you know, the FOP, So there is
that there is a benefit of doing so, Jerry, I
appreciate the call, buddy, thank you. Thanks for your service.
Speaker 2: Too, Yes, sir, thank you, Peter.
Speaker 1: Take care. Yeah, So this to me was an interesting
part of the story, the TikTok, not the app but
the chronology, the timeline. See, it's so many So much
of journalism is about just keeping track of what happened
and when right, just keeping a calendar, keeping a timeline
of this stuff so you can see the way the
story develops over time.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: The chronology is very helpful. Again, it omits the part
about the ethics complaint, and I almost wonder if there
was something going on there with the legal fees that
was connected to the ethics complaint. But I don't know.
Did he consult an attorney on the defamation charge, like, oh,
I'm going to sue for defamations, I'm going to go
and get a consult with an attorney. Maybe you had
to pay a twenty five thousand dollars retainer or something.
I don't know. When Jennings took the job in twenty twenty.
He continued a long running department rule that restricted patrol
officers from wearing the outer vest carriers or ballistic vests
over the uniform unless the officer had a medical exemption.
The three previous police chiefs all had the same policy.
They believed the vests did not align with community oriented
policing philosophies, which attempt to bridge gaps between officers and
the people they serve. Jennings had made customer service central
to his administration, and he kept the uniform policy. He said,
that's not the look that I want for our police department.
But Councilman Bokari, who represented South Charlotte until April, as
well as the local FOP, believed all officers should have
the option to wear them, and this was not a
new position for them either. Bakari had been advocating for
the vests for more than two years. He often cited
research that showed the vests improved officer comfort and conversations
with officers who said that they wanted the vests. And
so he tries to put it in the budget, he
doesn't get the votes. Chief Jennings opposes it. It's an
aesthetic decision, that's it. Like, oh my gosh, I'm so
intimidated because this officer is wearing a vest with stuff
on the outside of it. Ah, you know, like this
is that was the argument. I don't buy it. By
the way, I don't buy it. So then August rolls around,
they're in there, they do the budget. Then August hits
Bokari has now gone public with this campaign. He can't
get the budget money from the city council, who rely
on the chief to say no, don't do it, so
they basically make the chief the public face of the
no policy. Bakari raises me, honey, privately, gets a bunch
of vests donated, and then the chief relents and says, okay,
if anybody wants them, they can request him. And then
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Got a message here from Amy in Wonderland on Twitter
it's a peat tweet. Do the Charlotte City Council. I
need to actually have somebody brand that for me, so
I have a little stinger it's a peat tweet or something. Anyway,
do the Charlotte City Council and Chief Jennings truly expect
anybody to believe this severance story is anything but a
cover up, especially at this point. How many weeks has
it taken them to come up with it? So I
think this was drawn up, well, the package was drawn
up back on May eighth, and or yeah, or well
I guess he signed at May eighth because it was
drawn up on May fifth or something. City council. This
is what they approved. So and they call it general
I'm sorry, Uh yeah, General Waiver, Release and Separation Agreement.
And then they have the the amended version which says,
you know, mutual confidentiality is deleted from the title such
that it is now titled non disparagement. And this is
pretty standard in contracts when people are leaving. It's like,
don't talk any crap about me, and I won't talk
any crap about you, you know. And apparently, according to
Jennings in this interview, he had been looking to retire
for a while and he didn't even need to take
the job. This was another part of it. It's like,
I mean, I understand this is part of his thinking
on this stuff, and maybe he's a little salty about it,
like I didn't even have to be here. Was that
movie Clerk's right where he's like, this is my day off,
I don't have to be here. So and maybe he
just he comes across as kind of salty about this.
He believed it was his duty on behalf of other
current and future department leaders in the city to stand
up to a public pressure campaign mounted by Bakari. See
he's looking at it like the next chief that comes in, right,
he's gonna he's gonna be dealing with, you know, whatever
norms have been adopted under my watch. So he's like,
I'm gonna push back against this because, as you know,
I talked to Pat McCrory the other day about this,
and he said they always had this rule of let
the chief be the chief, let him do his job,
don't micro manage the police chief, right, And so this
is what Jennings seems to be channeling, this idea let
me do my job. And I'm saying no vests back off,
and then Bookari's like, well, no, I'm going to, you know,
do a very public campaign. I'm going to raise the
money and I'm going to basically turn cops against the boss.
And then it worked, and that's what the chief was
trying to stop from happening. And then after he relented
and let them have the vests, that's when he then
hires a lawyer, and I suspect that's when they started
to try to go after Bookary with an ethics complaint.
And then when that didn't work, he said, I'm gonna
sue and I'm gonna quit. I guess that's what happened.
He says, I want to make sure that when you
hire a leader to a certain department within our city,
then let them run the department. And then the reporter.
This is over at the Charlotte Optimist as well as
the assemblyanc dot com, and the piece is written by
Michael Graff. It's in some ways, excuse me, it's in
some ways a story as old as time. I don't
know if it actually is, but anyway, an exemplary public
servant rises in the ranks only to encounter frustration in
dealing with the politics of the top job. The more
public the disputes became, the more he stowed internally over
how he spent thirty three years in policing only to
end up in the chair with the bomb. Right, That's
the analogy he gave earlier in the interview. Later, he
mentioned multiple times in our conversation Jennings did that he
could have made more money if he had just retired
when he became eligible five years ago, or if he
had left for a private sector job. So he keeps
saying this, like, I didn't have to take this job, right,
but you did. This is like people who run for
office and then, you know, complain about all of the
the problems and the impact that the job has and
oh there's so much downside, all of this stuff. You know,
But you asked for the gig, right, you asked for it.
You didn't have to take this job you wanted to take.
To take the job, he apparently was also offered the
police chief job down in Greenville, South Carolina, but he
took the chief job here. And he says he could
have collected his pension in Charlotte and then taken that
job in another city. Okay, Like that's that's not our fault,
that's not the taxpayer's fault. You you made your choice.
You had Arlotte or Greenville, and you chose Charlotte. You
wanted to be the chief of this department. He talked
about how he saw former well then Chief Rodney Monroe
say that a CMPDEE officer would be charged with voluntary
manslaughter in the death of Jonathan Ferrell or Farrell in
September twenty thirteen. While people in the community praised Monroe
and his investigators for acting swiftly, the chief lost the
faith of many rank and file officers. Later, three years later,
police Chief Kerk Putney he handled a different police killing differently.
This was the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, and Putney
kept emphasizing that Keith Scott had a gun, contrary to
social media lies, it's not rumors, they were lies. Putney's
blunt perspective and defense of his officers helped with police morale,
but it brought significant criticism from community members who filled
city hall calling for his resignation. And then, of course
you have the death of Saint George Floyd in Minneapolis,
and Jennings was shadowing Putney during those protests in twenty twenty,
and so he saw like the way the two different
chiefs handled these types of explosive situations, and he was like,
I want to try to try to thread the needle.
I got to try to balance this. So that's where
he's identifying these pressures that are coming from his employees
and then the community activists, and it sounds like a
lot of those are the people that made his life. Hell,
he said, I tried to have that blend. How do
we regain community support, how do we keep morale? How
do we keep our officers doing the job that they're
here to do? Right? So, like this is the challenge
that is the politics of being a big city police chief.
It is a political role, and it sounds like he
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got an email here from Thomas who says, I've been
kind of following this story and I guess they are
really going to pay off this loser. Ha. I think
they already did. Of course they are. They are the
one party government. Insanity like this is why we moved
out of Charlotte twelve years ago and why after eleven
years of service, our son resigned from CMPD. One party rule,
all their lies and Charlotte's crazy politics makes our move
to South Carolina look better and better every loving day.
All we can say is Charlotte and enjoy the ride.
You are paying for it. So in this article at
the Assembly, Johnny Jennings said that he had considered not
taking the job five years ago, and that in April
of last year, twenty twenty four, he was planning to
announce his retirement, but he had not settled on a date,
and then there was the murder of the four law
enforcement officers, including a CMPD officer, in East Charlotte while
they were trying to serve a warrant. So he told
his wife he wanted to delay his retirement to see
the city through this tragedy. He says he hopes releasing
the agreement himself will help with public trust. It will, Yes,
it will, which is why I said, y'all should do it.
The chief could do it, City council could do it.
They should have done it. Everybody should have done this.
Y'all should have done this from the beginning. But the
way you went about it did not inspire trust, particularly
when you have council members that are at the time
came out and we're talking about the way this was
done and what is it for and not being made
aware that an ethics complaint was filed and dismissed. May.
He's still haven't address that, He says. He wants to
be clear that he is retiring because it's time to retire,
not because of all of this. He could have retired
in twenty twenty, he says, but he stayed on. He
planned to retire in twenty four and stayed on. He
already has his next career lined up, and he planned
to step into it earlier this year, but will stay
on for seven more months to assis assist with the transition.
Despite the lingering controversy and reputational damage see once again,
show me the actual harm. But we don't get that
we get. According to the agreement, the City of Charlotte
denies any and all of the allegations ever made against
them by Jennings, including but not limited to the allegations
set forth in this dispute and dispute that they are
in any way liable to Jennings for anything or for
any reason. So they're saying none of that's true. We
don't agree to any of it, and none of this.
All the parties acknowledge and degree that the allocation of
the funding is made for purposes of settlement and is
not intended to and should not be deemed an admission
of any liability for any such damages. The City of
Charlotte specifically denies any liability whatsoever. Right, but we don't
know what you're even denying because we didn't get any
kind of a lawsuit filed. We don't have any information
about why this was needed, why you came to this agreement,
he says. I'm not worried about myself. Where I became
enraged is the effects that it has on my wife,
the effects it has on my kids. That to me
is the effect that I don't know people realize, or
if they realize it, then they don't care. Now this,
I totally understand this part. I completely understand this. It
is always harder on the family members, family members of politicians,
you know, high ranking government officials and the like, media people.
It's always like people say stuff about me all the time,
and I don't care they. I don't know why people
constantly mistake me for somebody who gives a rip about
their opinion of me. I do not care. Right, you
can call me the names, you can say all this
stuff and It doesn't matter to me, but it matters
to the people that love me. They don't like that
very much. And then sometimes they get attacked. And when
you are in the police chief position, right, it's tough
on that family. So I totally get it, and I
sympathize with him on that, and you get to a
point where it's like, you know what, this isn't worth it.
The juice is not worth the squeeze on this. Totally
understand that. This was towards the end of our conversation.
By then, it had become a parent that Jennings hasn't
spent the past year in a conflict over tactical vests
or transparency or interviews. He was facing down a new
breed of confrontation and policymaking, a theater of online comments
and optimized headlines that ran counter to his nature. He
was ill suited, for better or worse, to tangle with
his media savvy opponents online. And I guess he's talking
about Tark Bakari and whatever army Bakari was able to
marshal in order to get the tactical vest policy changed.
I guess I don't know what all what messages the
chief was getting from whoever was trying to do the
pressure campaign. But that's that's politics, man.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 1: I'm at a loss to understand why. I guess this
is surprising, he says. I've never treated people like that,
And to publicly try to defame someone through social media,
through the media, through any of that, I just think
there's too much of that that goes on in our
world nowadays, and it's a shame. Again. I don't know
that you were defamed nobody, Like after the vest issue
was settled, when you said, okay, we can let the
cops have the vests that were funded through private donations.
At that point, it all went away. I saw nothing
ever since then in any media about any of this
stuff until the text message report came out in November,
and then that didn't make the chief look bad, it
made Bokari look bad. So like I just I don't
understand what the actual harm was. All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
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while I'm gone.