A Captain Warned Us. Now Columbus's Black Community Needs to Listen.

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.

Touchberry also testified to what this looks like in practice. He and two lieutenants had built a squad by pulling the highest-ranked officers off the Stat Tracker leaderboard, aiming to find illegal weapons, wanted people, and narcotics. When he reviewed what the squad actually produced, it wasn't guns or fugitives. It was a high volume of warnings and citations. In other words: when officers were ranked and rewarded by volume, the system generated volume — stops and paper, not the serious cases it was supposedly built to surface.

The Numbers - That pattern — a metrics system that rewards stops over substance — lands somewhere. In Columbus, the Police Scorecard project's analysis of local arrest data shows Black residents are arrested for low-level, nonviolent offenses at 2.3 times the rate of white residents, a gap wider than the Georgia statewide average. Low-level, nonviolent offenses are precisely the kind of enforcement that shows up easily on a productivity tracker — tickets, minor citations, discretionary stops — and precisely the kind of enforcement a captain from inside the department says the system incentivizes.

No investigation has formally traced that 2.3x gap to Stat Tracker specifically, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise as settled fact. But that's the point, not a reason to look away: a department insider says a metrics system creates pressure that risks people's rights, and the department's own arrest data already shows exactly the kind of racial gap that pressure would predict. That combination doesn't need a courtroom finding to justify community attention. It needs the community asking the question before it's answered for them.

The Other Side - Chief Mathis has said Stat Tracker wasn't built to punish anyone — it was meant to measure officers on the full range of their work, not just arrests and citations, including things like helping stranded motorists or checking on people during extreme heat. It's a legitimate goal, and it complicates any version of this story that wants a clean villain.

What Black Columbus should be asking for

• Data broken out by race, precinct, and offense type — not just aggregate productivity scores — so the community isn't left guessing whether the gap Touchberry warned about is visible in the numbers.
• An independent audit of whether Stat Tracker rankings correlate with stop, citation, and arrest patterns by neighborhood and race, separate from the personnel case that has absorbed most of the public attention.
• Real protection for officers who raise this internally. Touchberry went through the chain of command and was fired for it. If the city wants the next warning caught before it becomes a headline, someone inside the department has to be able to give it safely.

Touchberry's job is settled. The question he raised isn't. Columbus has an internal warning that a metrics system pressures officers toward rights violations, and it has data showing Black residents already bear a disproportionate share of exactly the kind of enforcement that pressure produces. Those two facts sitting side by side, unconnected by anyone in an official capacity, is not a reason for the community to wait. It's the reason to ask the question now.