Andre Parker, former star of the Illinois State Police and one-time contender
for the chief of police job in Springfield, has been notified he will lose his
current post as chief of the Richmond, Va., police department when mayor-elect
Douglas Wilder takes office Jan. 1.
Within days of winning a landslide victory, Wilder, the former governor of Virginia, announced he would replace both Parker and Richmond city manager Calvin D. Jamison, saying they had “not got the job done,” according to news reports.
Parker had a 24-year-career with ISP and was assistant deputy director of operations, credited with cleaning up crime-ridden East St. Louis, when he accepted the top cop job in Richmond on Aug. 1, 2002.
But trouble plagued his tenure there from the beginning. David Hicks, the commonwealth’s attorney in Richmond, says Parker was handicapped by inexperience — both his own and Jamison’s.
“The manager who hired Andre had extremely limited experience with anything having to do with public safety, and he passed oversimplifications on to Andre in the recruitment process,” says Hicks, who has been the top prosecutor in Richmond for nearly 11 years.
Furthermore, Parker had never been a chief. Hicks, a basketball fan, uses a sports analogy to describe how this deficit worked against Parker.
“What all basketball coaches will tell you is there’s no substitute for height. Well, being a chief is being a chief. It’s not being another title that’s almost like chief on a temporary basis,” Hicks says, referring to Parker’s stint in East St. Louis. “Richmond’s a very, very tough place to learn on the job.”
Parker, who took some time off work in October to recover from prostate cancer surgery, has been largely unavailable to the media since the election. His department’s media relations unit did not return a call.
An officer happy about Parker’s impending departure established a Web site, www.andreparker.com, to invite other officers to share with potential employers their opinions about Parker. Several comments left on the site echo a speech Parker made in which he promised that, if anyone crossed him, he would “crush you like a bug.”
Parker, who lived in Springfield more than two decades, was asked to consider taking over Springfield police chief in 2003, when former SPD chief John Harris was asked to resign. SPD Lt. Rickey Davis, who, as vice-president of the Black Guardians was consulted about potential chiefs, says Parker is “very intelligent” and would have been a good, tough leader. “Andre is no joke,” Davis says.
However, given the choice between Parker and Don Kliment, his former partner, Davis says he preferred Kliment.
Parker ultimately chose to remain in Richmond, and Kliment became chief in Springfield.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2004.
