Chattanooga police officers are dissatisfied with the department’s leadership, according to an internal survey conducted earlier this year.
The survey found that while most officers were content with the management of their direct supervisors, they gave lower scores to the executive leadership under Chief Celeste Murphy, who was hired from the Atlanta Police Department and took office in April 2022.
Credit: Atlanta Police Department
Credit: Atlanta Police Department
According to results obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the department scored low on communicating and recognizing officers for good work.
Murphy replaced David Roddy, a 26-year veteran of the department who rose through the ranks to become chief in his last four years there. She quickly began reorganizing the department’s leadership.
Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly’s office commissioned the survey to address employee engagement at the department, emails received through an open records request show. Another citywide survey that ended in fall 2022 found similar issues with leadership and communication, records obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press show.
Murphy said the issues can largely be attributed to her coming on as chief from an outside agency and the period of transition and trust-building that came after.
“I came in from the outside,” Murphy said in a phone interview Friday. “Anytime you come into an organization and you’re new, there’s internal equity you’ve got to build and trust, and that’s normal for any work environment, not just here.”
After the results came back, emails received through an open records request show Kelly and his staff grappling with how to address the findings, including training for Murphy and other members of the executive team.
“The central problem, I think, is that police score at the top of the scale on ‘authoritarian’ personalities, which implies at the extremes a need to almost deify leadership — and they are just never going to accept a Black woman in that role,” Kelly wrote to his chief operating officer, Ryan Ewalt, on June 2, records show. “But we have to continue to work the project to improve the morale and address these concerns.”
“That’s my existence.”
Officers who spoke to the Chattanooga Times Free Press said their dissatisfaction has nothing to do with Murphy’s race or gender. She is the first woman to lead the Chattanooga Police Department.
“For Mayor Tim Kelly to see the results of the survey and then state its causation is the officers’ unwillingness to accept an African American woman as our chief is disingenuous, politically self-serving and is designed to be a wholesale dismissal of the survey results,” the Fraternal Order of Police Rock City Lodge, which represents around 300 Chattanooga officers, said in a statement released to the Chattanooga Times Free Press by chapter President Chris Mullinix.
“It is a dismissal of the concerns of the members of the Fraternal Order of Police and is a failure to take extreme ownership of the situation,” the statement said.
Racial and gender bias isn’t unique to Chattanooga or the department, Murphy said.
“I’ve been living that my entire life,” Murphy said. “So I’m not going to label the Chattanooga Police Department with anything that I’ve been going through for my entire life. That’s my existence. I put my energy in doing the best job that I can, regardless of worrying about anybody’s biases.
“I’m not saying that that isn’t absolutely accurate to some degree, but that’s not where my energy is focused,” she said.
Murphy’s moves
The chief made a few moves early in her tenure that officers say cost her trust from rank-and-file employees. In 2022, the year she took the post, the number of internal grievances filed at the department tripled from the two years before, city records show.
Murphy quickly moved to restructure the department, appointing several people to high leadership positions without following the typical promotion process, according to officers.
In law enforcement, hierarchy is an important part of the culture, Ed Buckman, president of Hamilton County’s International Brotherhood of Police Officers Local #673, said by phone.
The new chief added a layer of upper management by introducing the rank of major, used at the Atlanta department where she spent 25 years. Five major positions were created, with salaries of $114,815, city records show – some of the highest-paying positions at the department aside from chiefs.
Officers who spoke to the Chattanooga Times Free Press said that rank is typically used in larger departments and may be an unneeded layer of bureaucracy for an agency of Chattanooga’s size.
No new positions were added to the department, Murphy said, but the new rank reshuffled current officers. The major positions are meant to be a steppingstone between captain and assistant chief, for those looking to get into executive leadership, she said. The department has used the rank of major in the past, under prior chiefs, Murphy said.
“There’s been previous administrations prior to me where there were way more executive positions than we have currently,” she said. “I think that we are proportional, and this is the model that works best for me to be able to get the successes that this department has had since I’ve been here.”
High integrity
In August 2022, Murphy also made waves when she temporarily removed a group of officers from patrol duties because they’d been found to have lied or misrepresented information internally in the past.
The reassignments, affecting 15 officers, came after the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked the department for a list of officers with sustained untruthfulness or misrepresentation allegations. Since the officers could not testify in court, the department said, Murphy put them in roles that didn’t require court testimony.
“It is unacceptable that a case could be jeopardized due to an integrity issue with an officer who was found to have previously misrepresented the truth or filed a false report,” Murphy said in a news release at the time.
The officers had already been disciplined, some several years before, police union representatives said. Many officers said they saw the reassignments as an unnecessary reopening of those cases.
As of June, when the city settled with the reassigned officers, 12 of the 15 had returned to patrol, two were working on reports and one had retired, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported.
“There’s no need to rehash that, we’re past that,” Murphy said. “I’m making sure that this department is held accountable and that we’re honest and the level of integrity is high here. So, there’s no sense to rehash something that is already closed. That’s done, there’s nothing more there.”
Survey results
Around a third of the department, 34% of sworn and civilian employees, completed the 12-week survey, according to city data. Questions went out to employees weekly between January and March, Ewalt, with the mayor’s office, said.
“It was about a 30% participation rate for those surveys. It’s not indicative of the entire department,” Murphy said. “You’re going to always have a percentage of your department that you just have to work a little bit harder to make sure that they see you for who you are.”
Murphy said she’s gotten more positive feedback when talking face-to-face with officers than the survey shows.
Thirty-nine percent of Chattanooga’s public works employees completed a similar survey. Public works scored higher on employee knowledge and motivation than the Police Department, and more of its employees would recommend working there, the survey found.
The surveys were conducted by Huntsville, Alabama-based Rippleworx, which in 2022 won a $19,900 contract to perform assessments of police and public works employees in Chattanooga, city records show.
Chattanooga officials decided to conduct the surveys to address employee engagement and satisfaction, emails obtained in the records request show. Police and public works were chosen to be surveyed as the two largest departments in the city, Ewalt said by phone Friday.
“I want to make sure this relationship and program does not fall through the cracks,” Kelly said in a May email to staff members. “It is the ONLY thing, in retrospect, that got Chief Murphy’s attention and brought her to the table to address the internal issues, and I don’t want to lose momentum there.”
Kelly said in the same email that the city’s community development and parks and outdoors departments “need similar medicine.” The mayor was out of town and unable to comment this week, city spokesperson Kevin Roig said in a text.
“Check engine”
Survey results provided to the Chattanooga Times Free Press in response to an open records request are limited, showing only aggregated summary results for three main categories: knowledge, motivation and organization.
The department scored a 15 on knowledge, 13 on motivation and 1 on organization. On a question asking how likely employees are to recommend working there, police employees ranked their job a 3 while the city’s public works department scored a 36.
According to Rippleworx, which conducted the survey, scores over 0 are categorized as “all good,” while over 50 is “excellent.”
Negative scores either indicate the need for urgent action (-100 to -50) or a “check engine” warning (-50 to 0), based on the rubric.
Attorneys for Chattanooga said exact data on survey responses could not be released because they use an algorithm owned by Rippleworx for analysis. Written responses to open-ended questions could not be released, attorneys said, because they are held by Rippleworx “and not in the custody and control of the city.”
Representatives for Rippleworx did not respond to requests for comment.
The police department scored in the “check engine” category in several areas, the lowest being recognition at -39, survey results obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press show. None of the results dipped into the “urgent action” category, results show.
Executive leadership was scored -39, and communication from executives received a -27. Peer and management communication was given a score of 46, according to the results.
Asked if they feel they have a voice in the department, survey participants marked an average of -28.
“I am still trying to figure out my place in the department,” one respondent answered to an open-ended question, according to a presentation about the results obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “My voice currently does not carry any weight.”
Other open-ended responses included in that presentation called for the removal of the chief and other executive staff and for a cultural shift to support lower-ranking officers.
The survey identified strengths as well as weaknesses. Relationships, purpose and empathy within the department received high scores.
Looking ahead
Rippleworx told officers in the results presentation that it was working with the Chattanooga mayor’s office to provide training and leadership “for all leaders at CPD.” Leadership training content from West Point was also made available to all employees, the company’s representative said during the presentation.
Buckman, the local International Brotherhood of Police Officers president, said he’d like to see the department solidify a vision for its work — something that previous chiefs, he said, have done openly.
“Bring the people that are affected in, cast your vision, gather that feedback and maybe you get even a better idea of a blind spot,” Buckman said by phone. “Or if nothing else, at least they feel like their voices have been heard.”
Murphy said she’s open to any recommendations to come from the survey.
Ewalt said he feels the department has been coming to terms with the “new normal” of Murphy’s leadership in the months since the survey wrapped up in March. The mayor and his leadership team, Ewalt said, have full confidence in the new chief.
“A lot of these things didn’t start with me,” Murphy said. “The culture of any police department, but specifically here, there’s always voids of communication that you have to address.”
Before the survey, Murphy said she met with all the department’s units to identify areas that have been neglected and voices that weren’t being heard. That work continues, more intentionally now in light of the survey’s findings, she said.
“I still think that there’s the potential for success,” Buckman said. “The Chattanooga Police Department, and the leaders that are currently in their seats, if they want to succeed they can succeed. But they can’t do it in a vacuum.”
Contact Ellen Gerst at egerst@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6319.
Credit: Chattanooga Times Free Press
Credit: Chattanooga Times Free Press
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