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Journalist Dom Wright interviews West Des Moines Police Officers to get their perspectives on the Black Lives Matter Movement and the department’s response to it.

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Black Lives Matter protests emerged nationwide after George Floyd lost his life while in custody of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25. Floyd is not the only unarmed Black person to be killed while in law enforcement custody.

Throughout the end of May and beginning of June, a number of protests, both peaceful and violent, took place around the Des Moines area in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

On June 2, BLM protesters shared a list of demands with Des Moines police. Protests soon occurred outside of Gov. Kim Reynolds’ house in regard to those same demands. One of the most significant items on the list was that the Iowa State Legislature reinstate the voting rights of all Iowans with felony charges who have served their sentences. Soon after these protests, Reynolds passed an executive order immediately reinstating felon-voting rights in Iowa.

Many in the BLM movement have also started calling for the defunding of police. Defunding the police would mean that funding would be redirected from the police department to other government agencies. Today there are at least 13 major U.S. cities that are defunding their police departments. The country’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, have approved budget cuts. The Austin City Council is the latest to announce a defunding effort, cutting $150 million from the police budget. The Baltimore City Council has eliminated $22 million from their police budget. Other police departments that have received budget cuts include Seattle; San Francisco; Washington, D.C; Philadelphia; Salt Lake City; and Portland, Oregon. The Des Moines and West Des Moines police departments have not been defunded.

During the protests in June, the West Des Moines Police Department was sent to help the Des Moines Police Department manage the protests. Officers worked countless hours protecting protesters, as it is their First Amendment right to protest peacefully. Throughout the summer months, officers worked exhausting 14-18-hour days.

Not all of the protests were peaceful. On May 31, a protest began outside of Target on Merle Hay Road. Like most protests, it started peacefully; officers stood in small groups with their riot shields by their cars outside in the Target parking lot. But eventually, people began to break windows and loot from the Shoe Carnival at Merle Hay Mall. Following the incident, rioters were arrested, tear gas was thrown, and people were asked to disperse.

“When you’re a cop, you swear on oath to protect the Constitution of the United States of America, including the First Amendment,” said Travis Ouverson, assistant chief of police at the West Des Moines Police Department. “Everybody has a right to peacefully protest, demonstrate or express their view. I spent a lot of years protecting people protesting things that I couldn’t disagree with more. You don’t have to like the message or whatnot, but you have to defend it because they’re within their rights.”

“Our three protests went great,” Ouverson said. “We communicated with the organizers; they told us what they wanted to do. For the most part, we said no problem and we traffic controlled. Yeah, it’s an anti-police message; that’s their right. They have the right to express their views; it’s still our responsibility to protect them, and at the same time to make sure everyone is safe. Some of the protests got out of hand in Des Moines. You may not be aware of this, but the people that were destroying property in Des Moines, they were not a part of the movement. They were opportunists that took advantage of an opportunity to be anarchists and destroy stuff. They had nothing to do with BLM; they had nothing to do with the movement. They were just people who said, ‘Hey let’s break stuff’ because there is an element of society that likes to do that stuff too.”

Protests also occurred in West Des Moines. They started as peaceful and remained peaceful. Before the protests, WDMPD communicated with the organizers, and they told them what they wanted to do. The police helped with traffic control and made sure everyone was protected.

“Having a conversation about what’s expected on both sides is always healthy and makes it so that there is no confusion on what we would do or what we expect of them and what they want to try and do and accomplish with their demonstration,” said Jody Hayes, captain of the West Des Moines Police Department.

Following the protests, the WDMPD has gone through a lot to help make themselves better. For example, they have increased training on racism and bias. They also we a simulator that incorporates a compressed air gun, taser, and pepper spray into real-life situations. The simulator is 180 degrees of projector screens that take officers through different situations that could happen to them while on a call. The simulator gives different scenarios where situations need to be de-escalated. Officers then can choose different responses to help them gain control of the scenarios. They even have a device that the officers wear to let them know when they’ve been hurt. The simulation is as real as possible, so fewer mistakes are made out in the field.

“After the Minnesota incident, for example, as we saw in the picture that went nationwide , they were on his neck,” said Sergeant Ryan Anderson of the WDMPD. “We don’t teach anything around the neck. That hasn’t been taught in Iowa since the early to mid-90s. In June we held a training where we brought everyone in on their training days, and all us DT instructors got together on how we’re going to handcuff properly while in the prone position. We are teaching them to be nowhere near the neck.”

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Q&A with Jody Hayes, WDM Police Captain

Q: Why did you want to join the law enforcement industry?

When I was trying to choose a career, I was deciding between being an architect and a policeman. I chose policeman number one because I’m an active person, and I didn’t want to sit behind a desk; I wanted to be outside. I rode with a couple of officers, and every day was different. I got to see other people and help different people, and that’s what brought me into the career.

Q : What steps has the WDMPD been taking regarding the nationwide protests?

We have done training on basis-based policing, racism and all that since I’ve been here. Obviously, it increased a bit over the past year with everything that happened, but we do the same thing we’ve always done. We serve people, we protect people, and we deal with whatever the situation is no matter race, religion, color, male, female, whoever they are; we’ve always done the same thing.

Q : How is the department responding to police brutality and racial profiling?

Training. A big part of it is training. We’ve had so much training and awareness ,and were looking at the other conditions and other examples, that have happened in other places, and we’re learning from those. So, it’s just advanced training bringing people in. We’ve had an advisory board brought in made of only African-American folks that have come in to look at our policies to see if we do have some things that need to be adjusted or if they believe that they are unfair to different races, religions or people, and we just got done with that. It was almost a three-month process to be able to do that so it created relationships, it let them see what we were doing with our policies, and it let them have input to what their police department is doing in their community.

Q : How have the protests impacted the police department? How has it impacted you personally?

Obviously, because of the protests, we’ve helped other agencies around because a lot of times, they don’t have enough officers to handle it. So when there is a protest in Des Moines, Clive or West Des Moines, we help each other. So, our overtime has gone way up. The cost has gone way up for the city to have to deal with that. Not only in payroll, but we’ve had to get other items that we needed—different safety things for us. We’ve had to buy more shields for the people who were throwing stuff at us stuff like that, so all that drives the cost up. As far as me personally, since I’m the commander, I have to do the operations planning, so I have to be here as well. So it’s not only the work piece; it’s the professional piece. I got into police work to help people, so a part of it hurts my feelings that people think that every cop is bad. They think that I’m a bad cop, and I’ve dedicated 31 years of my life to doing this. I’ve lost soccer games with my kids. I’ve lost all of the holidays because I had to work them; we don’t get those times off. I work in crappy weather. You know, we put up with a lot of stuff, and for people to blanket us with a stereotype that we’re all corrupt and all bad is hurtful. It kind of makes me mad that people are just throwing me into a group saying that just because you wear that badge, you’re a corrupt cop and you’re bad. Not everybody does that, but the ones who do… we get a lot of negative publicity. Essentially the people that are doing that are not giving me a fair shot to judge me as a person; they’re judging me as a group that they’ve already put a label on.

Q : As a cop, what is one thing you wish people could know or understand about what’s going on?

Educate yourself on all the facts before you make a decision. We all know that in every profession that there are going to be bad employees. The police profession is no different. Never group anybody into one big pile. I don’t care if it’s color, sex, religion or if it’s occupation. If you are taking a group of people and putting a stereotype on them, it’s wrong because you’re not judging them as an individual. If there is a corrupt police officer, the good police officers want them to be identified and dealt with just as the public does because they make the rest of us look bad. So, if we got a bad apple, good, get’em. Make sure you know the facts before you judge them as a bad apple, and then if they are, they deserve what they get. There is no good cop out here that is going to condone racism, brutality or the use of too much force. We are just not going to do it because we’ve all been trained. We know what’s right and what’s wrong. We don’t condone that type of behavior.

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Simulator Experience