Two things are true at the same time in Columbus, Georgia right now, and they belong in the same conversation even though no one has officially put them there yet.
The first: a police captain warned, in writing, that the department’s own productivity system was pushing officers toward violating citizens’ civil rights. The second: independent data on Columbus policing shows Black residents are arrested for low-level, nonviolent offenses at roughly 2.3 times the rate of white residents. Read separately, one is a personnel dispute and the other is a statistic. Read together, they look like a warning label that arrived a little late — and a community that has every reason to take it seriously now.
The Warning – In February 2025, Capt. Gregory Touchberry emailed fellow captains and the deputy chief about CPD’s “Stat Tracker” system, the metric used to measure officer productivity. His message was blunt: the “Stat Tracker culture” was flawed, and if the department wanted to keep using it, leadership needed to “completely start over.” His core concern was that ranking and rewarding officers by output creates pressure to hit numbers — and that pressure, he warned, could result in violations of citizens’ civil rights.
Chief Stoney Mathis fired him for insubordination. A city review board reinstated Touchberry in July 2026, and in that hearing, Mathis conceded he agreed with the substance of the warning — his objection was about who received the email, not whether the concern was legitimate…