Three Mobile City Council members say they are disappointed with the first round of police department promotions carried out under a new hiring and advancement process the council paid roughly half a million dollars to put in place. The dispute sets the council’s spending priorities against the administration’s personnel outcomes, and it has turned a routine round of rank promotions into a public argument over whether the city’s most expensive civil service reform has delivered what was promised.
The city hired Colorado-based Booth Research Group last December to overhaul promotion protocols previously handled by the Mobile County Personnel Board, with diversity in the police and fire departments cited as a key goal. The contract was sold to the council as a solution to a long-running problem: a promotional system that, whatever its procedural fairness, had produced command ranks that did not reflect the composition of a majority-minority city. Diversity was not an afterthought in the decision — it was the stated reason the council agreed to spend the money.
When the department announced the promotion of 27 officers under the new process, council members Fred Richardson, Levon Manzie and C.J. Small sent a letter to Mayor Sandy Stimpson expressing what they called their “disdain and disappointment” with the results. The letter argued that despite supporting the Booth contract in good faith, the council members now believe the city may be worse off on diversity than before. For three members who represent districts where confidence in the police department has been an ongoing civic issue, the first results of the reform they funded read as a step backward rather than the correction they had promised constituents.
The letter came shortly after Police Chief James Barber announced a restructuring of command-level positions, including swearing in former Prichard police chief Lawrence Battiste as assistant chief. Battiste brought a decade of experience leading a neighboring city’s department to the second-highest post in Mobile’s police hierarchy, a resume that made the appointment defensible on merit alone — but the circumstances of the move drew the council’s scrutiny anyway.
The previous holder of that role, Joseph Kennedy, moved into a newly created civilian chief-of-staff position and took a pay cut from $110,000 to $65,000 in the process. The council’s letter described the assistant chief appointment as a “political spoil,” language that signaled how deeply the council members questioned the administration’s motives. From the council’s perspective, the restructuring looked less like reform than like the rearrangement of senior leadership around political considerations — with the department’s most senior African American commander absorbing the cost in salary and standing.
The Numbers Behind the Dispute
Of the promotions overall, 11 officers moved from officer to corporal, seven from corporal to sergeant, five from sergeant to lieutenant, two from lieutenant to captain and two from captain to major. The distribution follows the standard pyramid of a police hierarchy, with the largest numbers at the entry ranks and only a handful of appointments carrying command-level authority. It is that top of the pyramid — the four promotions to captain and major — where the council’s criticism concentrates.
Barber said roughly a third of those promoted were African American and that eleven promotions overall went to candidates from diverse backgrounds, including women, though none of the four highest-ranking promotions went to minority candidates. The chief’s defense rests on the distinction between volume and rank: by the raw count, the department’s argument goes, the new process produced a mixed field of promotions that reflects the department as it exists today, whatever the composition of its upper ranks.
Barber attributed that gap to a limited pool of minority candidates who tested for the captain rank, saying the results reflected the eligible pool rather than the process. The explanation returns the argument to the structure the council paid to replace: if few minority officers reached the ranks that feed the captain’s exam, a promotion process can be procedurally neutral and still reproduce a homogeneous command staff. Council members counter that fixing exactly that pipeline was the point of the reform.
Barber defended the changes as consistent with a strategic plan he laid out when he became chief in 2013, arguing that the restructuring and the new promotion process are parts of a single modernization effort rather than separate decisions that happen to favor particular officers. Under that reading, the command reorganization was a leadership decision the chief was entitled to make, and the promotion results were the output of a tested, professional process — not a political product to be judged by its demographics alone.
The dispute also exposes the limits of the council’s leverage over the police department. The council controls the budget that funded the Booth contract, but appointments and promotions rest with the mayor’s administration and the chief. A council letter — even one carrying the pointed language of “disdain and disappointment” — is a statement of political pressure rather than a formal check, and its practical effect depends on whether the administration responds with changes to the next round of promotions.
What Comes Next
The stakes of the argument extend beyond one promotion list. The department’s ability to recruit and retain minority officers has been a persistent challenge for Mobile and departments across Alabama, and the composition of the command staff is among the most visible signals a department sends about who can rise within it. A reform process that produces diverse promotions in volume but not at the top gives critics on the council an easy argument that the money changed the paperwork without changing the outcome.
For the Booth Research Group contract, the first round of results will now be measured against the promises made when the council funded it. Assessment-based promotional systems — the model the Colorado firm was hired to build — are generally defended on grounds of professionalizing decisions and insulating them from patronage, but the council members’ letter makes clear that procedural cleanliness alone will not sustain the political coalition behind the half-million-dollar investment. The next rounds of promotions, particularly at the captain and major ranks, will be watched closely by all three signatories.
The reorganization’s personnel details continue to draw attention in their own right. Battiste’s move from Prichard to Mobile reunites a veteran chief with the department where he began his career, and supporters of the appointment note that the city gained a command officer with sitting chief experience for its second-ranking post. Kennedy’s shift into the civilian chief-of-staff role — and the steep pay cut it carried — has become the council members’ shorthand for the reorganization’s real costs, and the newly created position itself raises questions about how the department’s leadership structure will function with both an assistant chief and a civilian chief of staff in place.
Mayor Stimpson’s administration has so far stood behind the chief’s decisions, framing both the restructuring and the promotions as the department’s business conducted under a legitimate process. That positions the dispute as a standing tension between the council and the administration rather than a single moment of conflict — with three council members on record questioning the outcomes, a chief defending his plan, and a reform contract whose next results will either validate or deepen the disagreement.
For Mobile residents, the argument matters most for what it signals about the department’s direction. The city’s police force patrols a community where the relationship between officers and neighborhoods has been the subject of sustained civic attention, and the ranks that set that tone are the ones now being filled. Whether the new system can produce a command staff that looks more like the city it serves — and whether the council’s criticism translates into adjustments before the next promotion round — will determine if the half-million-dollar reform becomes the fix the council bought or the disappointment its letter describes.
The history behind the reform explains why the council members feel entitled to their frustration. Before the Booth contract, promotional decisions flowed through the Mobile County Personnel Board, a merit system that governed hiring and advancement for the county’s larger public employers. The board’s process was designed to shield personnel decisions from politics, but over the years it produced promotional outcomes that successive city administrations acknowledged did not move the department’s leadership closer to the community’s demographics. Replacing that system with an assessment-based model was billed as the way to fix the pipeline — testing candidates on actual command competencies rather than written scores alone.
The council members who signed the letter have been among the most consistent advocates for that change. Richardson, Manzie and Small each pressed for the contract with the expectation that a redesigned process would widen the pool of candidates reaching the upper ranks, and each has a constituency with a direct stake in the result. Their letter to the mayor is, in that sense, a report card issued by the reform’s own authors — the argument being not that the new system was a mistake, but that its first results failed the test it was hired to pass.
The numbers will be parsed for some time. Eleven of twenty-seven promotions going to candidates from diverse backgrounds is, by volume, a mixed result that the department can defend; zero of four at the top ranks is the figure that fuels the council’s case. Roughly a third of the promotees being African American tracks with the department’s current composition rather than the city’s, which is precisely the gap the diversity goal was meant to close over time. Both sides are describing the same list; the argument is over which number is the measure of success.
What the dispute does not yet include is any formal challenge to the promotions themselves. The council members’ letter is a political document, not an appeal, and the promotions stand unless the administration or the department acts to revisit them. That gap between political criticism and administrative power defines the moment: the council can fund processes and publicize results, but the authority over the department’s ranks runs through the mayor’s office and the chief’s desk.
The letter’s release also lands in a city where police-community relations have been a standing item on the civic agenda, from neighborhood association meetings to the council’s own chambers. Command diversity is one of the few departmental issues on which neighborhood groups, clergy and elected officials have long been aligned, which is why the promotions drew a response from three of the council’s seven members rather than a single critic. The administration’s next promotion cycle will answer the question the letter poses — whether the reform is judged by its design or its results.