Breaking Rank (3 page)

As my former colleagues will happily attest, I was never a cop's cop. But throughout my career I witnessed many officers who consistently performed the job with inspiring mastery. They're the kind of police officers who make a difference in the lives of the people they were hired to serve. My love for these cops is a major motivation behind this book. That they continue to get the job done lawfully and humanely, in spite of senseless laws, dim-witted policies, and childish workplace pressures, is something of a minor miracle.

It's a thing of beauty to watch these cops work with kids and parents, the homeless, the mentally ill. To observe their creativity and enthusiasm for community policing, and their talent and courage as they track down and capture the genuinely dangerous among us. Rarely did a day pass in my career that I didn't register the humor, humanity, and compassion of these officers. Or their willingness to sacrifice all for a risky and delicate mission: in my thirty-four years I helped bury more than two dozen police officers slain in the line of duty.

Who are the instructors I remember most vividly from my academy days? The ones who told stories. You couldn't get those guys (not a woman among them) to cough up a theory or a principle if their lives depended on it. Not that I wished for them to turn academic on us: Their tales made the streets come alive. They educated, amused, frightened, and inspired us with images of what we'd face in the real world when we'd finally hit the streets. The instruction may have lacked a tidy theoretical foundation but it was compelling, entertaining, and unforgettable.

Today, the best academy instructors still tell tales, but they weave relevant theories into those stories, helping new cops understand
why
they're expected to do, and not do, certain things. These instructors also get their students out of the classroom and into “mock scenes,” simulations that help recruits get a taste of what it's going to be like to collect evidence at a robbery, make a felony hot stop, or enter a stranger's living room to interrupt family violence. In this book I set out to do something of that for you: to help you
imagine
what it's like to be a beat cop, or a police chief.

I've approached
Breaking Rank
not only as a memoir but thematically and polemically, introducing in each chapter a critical issue facing community-police relations and the justice system.

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people,” wrote the philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno. “I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”
Breaking Rank
provides “yeast” for those who seek to help this country move toward more effective, humane, and progressive policing.

*
We dealt in pukes and assholes in those days. A puke was a longhaired youth who flipped you off, called you a pig, or simply had that “anti-establishment” look about him. An asshole, on the other hand, was a doctor, a lawyer, or a clean-cut blue-collar worker who gave you lip as you wrote him a ticket–or who disagreed with your informed take on current events. The world was conveniently divided into “good people” vs. pukes and assholes. There were, of course, regional, as well as generational, differences in the vocabulary of the cop culture. In the eighties, for example,
Hill Street Blues
Detective Mick Belker's, “Sit, hairball!” or “Freeze, dogbreath!” was drawn directly from the streets of New York (and widely copied in PDs throughout the country).

*
Removing Managerial Barriers to Effective Police Leadership
. Police Executive Research Forum, 1992.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER 1

AN OPEN LETTER TO A BAD COP

On April 26, 2003, Tacoma Police Chief David Brame shot and killed his estranged wife, then turned the gun on himself. His eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son witnessed the event.

Dear David:

What was it like just before you did it, inside that cocoon you'd spun around your brain? Had you convinced yourself it was a private matter, nobody else's business? Were you at peace? I want to understand, David, I really do, as one ex–police chief to another. One ex-spouse abuser to another.

You were angry, I get that. Crystal had filed for divorce. It made headlines. You saw your name attached not to the talented, visionary police chief you imagined yourself to be, but to the portrait of a monster. Unlike thousands of other abusive men in high places and/or respected positions, you got outed. Until that Saturday afternoon your public persona had been that of a sophisticated, well-mannered civic leader.

The murder-suicide was hardly private, as you would have known all too well. It shook your city to the core, David. Women's groups are demanding answers and sweeping reforms. The mayor and city council are scrambling to cover their tails. The guy who made you chief, the city manager? He's been fired. Crystal's family is suing the city for $75 million. Tacoma's insurance company is threatening not to pay (remember, Chief, those premiums don't buy coverage for the
criminal
actions of our employees). The FBI is investigating charges of impropriety in your hiring, as well as your ascension to the chief's office. Your beloved hometown is reeling, people are saying it'll take years to recover. Of course, you don't have to worry about the “collateral damage” you caused.

All your chiefly chatter about “valuing diversity,” treating citizens and your employees with dignity and respect—that wasn't the real you, was it? I mean you
raped
a woman, for crying out loud. Someone you dated back in 1988. True, you got off on some bogus “he said/she said” internal affairs finding (and the inexplicable failure of your boss to submit the case to the prosecutor)—but you
confessed
to the crime. I heard that you broke down in a face-to-face meeting with your victim, sobbed to her that you were a “born-again Christian,” that you were “very truly, terribly sorry” and would “never, ever do that again.”

But there were other women. Your own employees. One had begun making noises about your having sexually harassed her; it seems you promised her a promotion if she'd share the sheets with you. You pestered another female employee to join you and your protesting wife in a threesome. That would have been more recent, well after you'd pinned on your chief's badge in January 2002.

Wife beating, rape, sexual harassment. You couldn't live with it, could you? Being disgraced publicly. Most likely losing the job you'd politicked so hard to win. Possibly going to prison. You weren't just angry, were you? You were scared—to death.

I'm curious, David. Where did you get your attitudes about women? About wives? Employees? Dates? Was it from your parents? Are you aware a therapist convinced a judge that your children shouldn't be left in the care of their paternal grandparents? They're afraid of your mother. They say she's been violent with them. What do you make of that? Did Mom beat you when you were a kid? Not to get
too
psychological, but did she help turn you into a misogynist?

How about your dad? Did he mistreat you? If so, I can relate. My old man beat me often. Usually it was with his belt but sometimes it was his fists or his foot or the back of his meaty construction worker's hand. I remember the worst beating as if it happened this morning. It left me bloodied and cowed. Not until my forties did I come to realize that my father was a criminal, his “discipline” a felony.

That's my story, David. Not all of it, of course. (I haven't told you how Mom would send my brothers and me out to the apricot tree to pick a switch when we'd been bad. It hurt like the devil, I can tell you that, against
our bare backs and bare legs. And she'd have this absolutely
ferocious
look on her face when she lit into us. But I choose to believe she did it to protect us from Dad. It was like they'd cut this deal between them: If she did it during the day he wouldn't be required to do it that night.) Anyway, like I said, that's
my
story. I wish you could tell me yours.

I wish I knew whether, like so many of us, you were beaten as a boy. Was your dad, the Tacoma policeman, physically violent with your mom? With you? I know I'm dwelling on it here, but answers to these questions are of consequence, they really are.

Research over the past three decades supports the conventional wisdom: Witness your parents fighting? Statistically, you're likely to grow into a batterer yourself. Beaten as a child? Odds are you'll beat your own kids. If you're both a witness to and a victim of family abuse, your chances of becoming a partner beater and a child abuser, unless you have some remarkable coping skills or some other adult to turn to for support, are off the charts. And, God forbid you should grow up in a household where violence is the norm—spousal assault, child abuse, an everyday vocabulary of violence (“Eat those peas or I'll kick your ass,” “Wipe that smirk off your face or I'll slap it off”), and, yes, megadoses of TV and video game violence. If you come from that kind of home, the chances are slight that you'll
not
settle differences with your fists or a hammer or a gun. (Either that, says the research, or you'll turn out pathologically passive.)

So, those questions about your upbringing are important, David. But the answers, no matter how heart-wrenching, don't let us off the hook. Not for how we behave as grown-ups. They'll never excuse what you did to Crystal, even before April 2003. Let's talk about your behavior first. Then we can compare notes.

The pushing, the threats to kill her, the choking (four episodes in the year before you murdered her), the angry display of your firearm—I hate to say it but that stuff's not all that uncommon among male cops, or men in general. But you did some certifiably weird things, too. You sent her flowers with no card . . . so you could study her reaction. You timed her every trip from the house. You checked the odometer on her car. You accompanied her to the bathroom, and into her gynecological exams. You weighed her daily. You handled all the money, giving her a miserly
allowance then accounting for it like a cross between Scrooge and Attila the Hun. I wonder, David, if you also: