Little Rock appoints its next police chief, and everything new is old again
In a blow to reform efforts, Mayor Frank Scott promotes a longtime insider
This week, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott appointed Heath Helton to be the city’s next police chief. Helton has a long history at LRPD. He’s about as insider as it gets, and it’s hard not to see his appointment as a step backward for the department. I’m sure the union is happy.
When Scott first ran for the mayoralty in 2018, he won on a platform that prioritized police reform, becoming the first elected black mayor in Little Rock history.
After taking office, Scott appointed Keith Humphrey, a reformist chief in Norman, Oklahoma. Humphrey then battled three years of criticism, harassment, and racially-loaded rumor-mongering from his critics in the police union and their supporters. Nearly every proposed reform was met with resistance.
When Humphrey retired early this year, he was replaced on an interim basis by Crystal Haskins, another reform-oriented official who was in some ways a protege for Humphrey. But Haskins — perhaps after seeing what happened to Humphrey — soon resigned and took another job. Scott then appointed assistant chief Wayne Bewley as interim chief, but Bewley retired at the beginning of this month. Scott appointed Helton as the interim chief next, then made him permanent chief this week.
Here’s a quick dossier on Helton:
— Helton is a 26-year member of the LRPD. He was promoted to assistant chief earlier this year. According to his resume, he obtained his bachelor’s degree from Central Baptist College in 2018, and then a master’s in criminal justice from Liberty University’s online program in 2020. He has worked as a detective in financial crimes, on the SWAT team, but has more extensive experience in training, formulating policies for the department, and surveillance.
— Helton was a sergeant in charge of training new recruits when officer Josh Hastings joined the LRPD. Hastings was allowed to join the force despite lying about having attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting on his job application. Hastings, who comes from a family of LRPD officers and whose father was a high-ranking LRPD official at the time, received a lot of favorable treatment. A classmate of Hastings’ at the academy would later say in a deposition that his entire class had to re-take a written test because Hastings had failed it — Hastings wasn’t permitted to fail. Helton would have been in charge of the academy at the time. Helton has denied the test story. After accumulating a lengthy disciplinary record, Hastings was finally fired in 2012 after he shot and killed a black 15-year-old, then lied about the shooting.
— While Helton was in charge of training, there was also a recurring problem at LRPD in which officers failed to activate their dash cams prior to incidents for which they were later accused of abuse. The officers would then get a slap on the wrist for failing to activate the dash cam, but the abuse complaint would be dismissed for lack of evidence. In some of these cases, the officer’s account was contradicted by two or more witnesses. In depositions for a lawsuit, an attorney asked Helton if it was possible that this pattern might incentivize officers to turn off their devices just before engaging someone with whom they anticipate using force. Helton replied, “No.” The lawyer followed up — aren’t some officers be less likely to follow the rules if they know the rules aren’t likely to be enforced? Helton replied, “No. I think people tend to make choices on their own.” According to his resume, Helton was later tasked with implementing the department’s new body camera program.
— In 2011, Lt. David Hudson was caught on video violently and repeatedly punching a man in the face while working off-duty security at a Little Rock restaurant. In fact, Hudson had a long history of punching people in the face, both on and off duty. For this incident, Hudson was suspended for 30 days. He later appealed his suspension, arguing — incredibly — that he had no choice but to punch the man in the face because he hadn’t been trained on any other way to handle conflict. Helton — who again was head of training — would later back Hudson’s preposterous argument in a deposition. “I mean, that’s the only thing he was kind of trained to use from. You know, if that was the only thing that he had at his disposal . . . then that’s what he used.” Again, Helton was head of training at the time. The Little Rock Civl Service Commission later overruled the suspension, finding that Hudson was “being punished by the same people responsible for not preparing him.”
— At another Civil Service Commission hearing a few years ago, Helton testified that he opposed the firing of Charles Starks, a white officer found to have violated LRPD policy in 2019 when he confronted black motorist Bradley Blackshire, climbed onto the hood of the car, and killed Blackshire by firing multiple times through the windshield. Humphrey’s decision to fire Starks elicited the union’s anger and become fodder for the lawsuits against him. It also brought barrage of criticism of him from the police union and the city’s old guard.
— Helton was also head of the Deadly Force Review Board (DFRB) that investigated the fatal police shooting of a man named James Alvarez. The DFRB is the final departmental word on police shootings in Little Rock. Members of the DFRB review both the shooting itself and whether the subsequent investigations of that shooting by Homicide and Internal Affairs were thorough and fair.
Here’s what happened in the Alvarez shooting, as I reported in the Washington Post in 2018:
In one instance in 2006, several officers responded to reports that a man was acting erratically while holding a meat cleaver. Jaime Alvarez, who was having a mental-health crisis, was approached by 10 officers who, with guns drawn, slowly backed him up against the outside of a church. Alvarez was holding a cleaver, but he had pressed it against his own neck, and hadn’t threatened anyone with it.
Nevertheless, once they had Alvarez cornered, an LRPD lieutenant attempted to shoot him with a Taser, but missed. Alvarez, who, again, to that point hadn’t threatened any of the officers, responded by throwing the cleaver at the officer. The 10 officers then collectively fired 43 bullets at Alvarez, killing him. Police bullets were later found in the church pews and altar. After the incident, the LRPD admitted that the lieutenant who shot the Taser had never been trained to use the weapon . . .
In some cases, LRPD internal investigations have cleared officers without even looking at the relevant department policies. For example, the department has a specific policy detailing how officers are to interact with mentally ill people. But [an attorney] found multiple deadly-force incidents involving mentally-ill suspects in which officers violated the policy, including the Jaime Alvarez shooting. Worse, the homicide and IAD investigations that followed never addressed the officers’ violations of the policy. The subsequent DFRB review of both the shooting and the ensuing investigations also failed to even mention the policy.
[In] 2014, [an attorney] deposed Capt. Heath Helton about the Alvarez case. At the time, Helton was both head of training at LRPD and served on the DFRB. [The attorney] asked Helton why the review board’s reports in that case and others did not mention the protocol that officers are required to follow when they encounter someone suffering from mental illness. Helton replied, “Obviously, it’s easy to Monday morning quarterback a deal, but, you know . . . I can’t testify to what or speak to what they were seeing at that time, so I don’t — I don’t know.”
Of course “Monday morning quarterbacking” is exactly what an entity like the DFRB is supposed to do. The board doesn’t decide if there’s evidence to present to prosecutor that the officer committed a crime — the Homicide investigation does that. It doesn’t determine if an officer violated department policy. The Internal Affairs investigation does that.
In fact the entire point of the DFRB is to provide a broader, more removed review of a death at the hands of police — whether it was legal, if it could have been prevented, and how the department responded to and investigated it. If, as Helton claimed, the DFRB isn’t supposed to “Monday morning quarterback” a shooting, then it only exists to rubber stamp them.
— Helton also served on the DFRB that cleared officers Donna Lesher and Tabitha McCrillis of shooting and killing Eugene Ellison in 2011. Lesher and McCrillis were working private security at an apartment complex when they confronted Ellison, an elderly black man, in his own home, entered his home without a warrant, then shot and killed him. Ellison was not suspected of any crime when the officers confronted him. They claim they had no choice but to shoot him when he confronted them in his home with a walking stick. Ellison also happened to be the father of one current and one former LRPD officer, both of whom would later voice strong objections to the way the investigation was handled. Several other black officers within the department also voiced objections about favoritism shown to Lesher and McCrillis. Some of them were then disciplined for doing so. The city of Little Rock later settled with the Ellison family for $900,000.
— In the summer of 2020, Helton was the LRPD point man for the multi-agency “fusion center” set up to monitor racial justice protests in the city and to track the activists who organized them.
— In June of 2020, Helton and then-chief Keith Humphrey were called to testify before the Arkansas legislature about the department’s response to the protests. Humphrey had been criticized by some lawmakers and the police union for marching — along with Mayor Scott — with Black Lives Matter protesters. The chief of the state’s Capitol Police (who patrol government buildings in Little Rock) even accused Humphrey of “passing intelligence” to protesters. Humphrey was berated by white lawmakers. As I wrote for The Intercept last year:
The Capitol Police chief and white legislators spent much of the hearing berating Humphrey for being too deferential to protesters, focusing on his decision to rule out lethal force to defend public property. The Capitol Police chief accused Humphrey of passing “police intelligence” to protesters.
He also referred to Humphrey as “that man” instead by his name or title. When two Black members of the committee attempted to speak up in protest, the white chair gaveled them quiet.
“‘That man’? Are you kidding me?” said Willie Davis, the recently retired Black LRPD sergeant. “They completely disrespected Humphrey. Some of them were addressing Helton, a white captain, as if he were the chief. It was ugly.”
It isn’t Helton’s fault that state legislators and the head of the Capitol Police berated Humphrey. But it’s revealing that they seemed so comfortable with Helton.
— The following October, Helton was one of the 10 command staff officers who signed a public letter attacking then-chief Humphrey for, among other things, running a “dysfunctional” department.
As I mentioned, over the course of his career, Helton has played a huge role in overseeing LRPD training and policy, which he emphasizes throughout his resume. Over the years, policing experts have had some devastating criticism of LRPD training and policies.
First, here are some excerpts from a report last month by Thomas Tiderington, a retired 44-year police officer, former police chief, and former DEA agent. Tiderington is the expert witness for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the department.
— “ . . . the evidence demonstrates that as a matter of unofficial policy and widespread practice, LRPD officers intentionally and routinely violated departmental policies as well as commonly accepted police investigative practices. Even by the most forgiving of standards, practice, and criteria, the investigation by the Little Rock Police Department in this matter was lacking any semblance of a professional and thorough criminal investigation.”
— “The evidence handling practices described . . . during [this] deposition are gross deviations from acceptable investigative practices and police standards.”
— “ . . . the investigative methods used by the defendant LRPD detectives to corroborate the validity of informant information grossly deviates from acceptable police standards.”
— “In my opinion, the need for such a military-style assault on the plaintiff’s home and family was a gross deviation from acceptable police standards and the degree of intrusion was unreasonably high and unnecessary.”
Here are excepts from a report by Jeffrey Noble, a 28-year retired police officer and former deputy chief who now works as a police consultant. This was part of Noble’s report on the department for the Ellison family’s lawsuit.
— “There is substantial evidence that the LRPD had a pervasive pattern and practice of failing to appropriately discipline its officers for serious misconduct including untruthful and excessive force. The LRPD was plainly placed on notice of the danger that these officers posed to community by their actions, yet the LRPD chose to ignore the danger notwithstanding the notice. The repeated failure of the LRPD to appropriately discipline its officers for serious misconduct including untruthfulness and excessive force created an atmosphere where an unprincipled officer could believe that they could commit constitutional violations of individual’s right with impunity.”
— “The LRPD was on notice of deficiencies in their investigative processes, but failed to take action to prevent similar occurrences. For example, the crime scene logs and leading questions by investigators were repeatedly addressed, but the same failures continued to occur.”
For my 2018 article on the LRPD for the Washington Post, I asked Chiraag Bains, former senior counsel for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to review the department’s policies, discipline, and history. Here are a couple of his conclusions:
— “The sheer number of misconduct allegations against some of these officers is staggering. Assuming these allegations are true, there’s a lot here that’s deeply disturbing. The lack of discipline and accountability is almost comical. And it appears to be a diverse array of misconduct, not just excessive force or shootings.”
— On the LRPD’s early warning system, which is supposed to alert the department’s leadership about potentially problem officers: “To have just two interventions after over 700 alerts, and for low-level misconduct, is just drastically out of proportion. It signifies a deep problem in the department. It’s a sign of a broken system.”
— On the aforementioned case of Lt. David Hudson: “To suggest that this longtime law enforcement officer knew of no way to resolve a dispute other than pummeling a man in the face, it just speaks to how broken the system of accountability really is there. It’s just a farce.”
— On the LRPD’s history of not disciplining officers who shoot into cars: “When you have a policy barring a tactic, but it’s accompanied by a complete failure to enforce that policy, you end up sending the opposite message,” said Bains. “The real policy here is that there are no constraints on officers shooting into cars.” Bains gave me this quote in 2018. The following year, Starks would kill Blackshire by firing into his car. Again Helton, who defended the LRPD’s disciplinary history with respect to this issue, would then also oppose Starks’ termination.
Here’s former Baltimore police officer, former SWAT officer, and police consultant Joe Key, who started that city’s first SWAT team, commenting on video footage of a 2016 SWAT raid by the LRPD. The raid was typical of how LRPD served low-level drug warrants at the time:
— “For the life of me, I just don’t know what to say. You only use an explosive entry for emergencies or exigent circumstances. You typically use them to cut a hole in the wall or to get through a reinforced door when the suspect is violent and timing is urgent, like a hostage situation. This shouldn’t have even been a no-knock warrant. This is just wrong. It’s just incredible. If [the suspect] had heard someone outside the door and gotten up to see who was there, he might well be dead.”
I showed the same video to former drug cop, SWAT officer, and Maryland state police officer Neill Franklin the same video. Here’s what he said:
— “I’ve never seen anything like that. I mean, you’re putting everyone there at risk. If someone is on the immediate other side of that door, you’re looking at serious injury — possibly death . . . With the sheer acoustical level of that blast, you’re looking at a temporary loss of hearing for anyone not wearing earplugs. So why are they issuing verbal commands? No one in that apartment is going to hear them. I have a gun by my bed for protection. And I’ll tell you, if they came into my house that way, there would have been gunfire . . . You don’t bring that many guys. It’s just more opportunity for someone to make a mistake, to mishear something and start firing. And as we’ve seen in other instances, when one guy starts firing, they all start firing.”
To be clear, none of these quotes are about Helton in particular. But they are about policies he boasts on his resume of having helped to write and hone, about training he helped design and implement, about investigations of police shootings he helped conduct, and about the department where he has spent his entire career, much of it in leadership positions. So it seems fair to say that his appointment portends a return to the status quo.
Prior to Humphrey, Little Rock had one previous reform-oriented police chief — Lawrence Johnson in the early 2000s. Like Humphrey, Johnson endured really ugly, very public resistance from the police union. After he resigned, he was succeeded by Stuart Thomas, a union favorite who immediately promised to return the department to the “good ole boy system.” Helton probably knows better than to be so explicit about his intentions, but given his record, it certainly looks like business as usual.
In fairness to Mayor Scott, after the campaign against Humphrey, the chief’s job was always going to be difficult position to fill with an outsider. Maybe he was just tired of dealing with all the resistance. When I wrote my long investigative piece on the union-led campaign against Humphrey last year, a number of policing experts told me that at any department, outsiders trying to implement changes are going to fail if they aren’t allowed to bring on their own command staff. In most departments, when there’s a change of administrations, officers from the previous administration tend to either retire or find another job if they don’t agree with the new direction.
But in Little Rock, even high-ranking officers get protection from the police union. So it’s very difficult to fire them. And when Humphrey was appointed, the old guard stayed on, including Helton and two assistant chiefs who wanted Humphrey’s job. That made reform all but impossible. Not only was there strong union resistance, the union itself had several advocates on the chief’s own command staff.
I’d imagine any reform-oriented potential chief who doesn’t have a masochistic streak would steer far clear of Little Rock. So Scott’s options were probably pretty limited. Still, Helton’s appointment comes just as we’re learning more about the department’s rogue narcotics unit, including how they conducted dozens of illegal no-knock raids each year, lied on search warrant affidavits, destroyed evidence, failed to adequately vet confidential informants, and recklessly used dangerous explosives while raiding low-level drug offenders.
Plus, Scott just won reelection by nine points, so the city still does seem to largely support his agenda.
Sadly, Helton’s appointment would seem to mark the end of police reform in Little Rock, at least for now.
Frustrating yet predictable