Breaking Rank (43 page)

*
Davis was, in fact, a member of the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the American Communist Party.

POLICING THE POLICE

CHAPTER 20

TREATING COPS LIKE KIDS: POLICE DISCIPLINE

You're the chief. What do you do with a cop who:

       
1.
 
Uses profanity while ordering a suspect to the ground?

       
2.
 
Sideswipes a fixed object, causing major damage to a brand-new police car?

       
3.
 
Smashes his heavy flashlight into the skull of a suspect?

       
4.
 
Runs a records check on the new boyfriend of his ex-wife?

       
5.
 
Fires a warning shot, in direct violation of department policy?

       
6.
 
Drives her police car into the back of a semi?

       
7.
 
Shoots and kills an unarmed man?

I
N
S
CENARIO
O
NE
, O
FFICER
Dana Jackson is attempting to arrest an auto thief. Ignoring her warnings, the suspect advances, threatening to knock her on her ass. The man is not armed but Jackson has no doubt about his intentions, and his ability to carry them out. She shouts, “I told you to get your fucking ass on the ground!
Now!”
Not exactly proper language, and you've made it clear to your cops that that kind of talk is unacceptable. But the man drops to the ground, spread-eagles himself, and presents his wrists for cuffing.

In
Scenario Two,
it's one in the morning, foggy, quiet, not another car on the road. Officer Rob Brown has been out shaking doors, flashing his light around some of Balboa Park's most popular attractions: the Old Globe, the Aerospace Museum, the Museum of Modern Art. A nighttime arsonist has been torching combustibles in the vestibules of these civic treasures and Brown is eager to nab the guy before he burns one to the ground. The officer returns to his car and glides out onto El Prado. A second later he
hears a loud explosion—followed immediately by the sound of glass shattering. Thinking he's been shot at, he ducks down in the seat, cuts the wheel sharply to the left, and hits the accelerator. His car sideswipes one of those aggregate-stone, concrete-encased trashcans. His shiny black-and-white Crown Vic, delivered just that day, has a long, ugly crease in its side. It's going to cost a thousand bucks to repair it. (The shot? Turns out Brown ran over a pop bottle.)

The man Officer David Ruiz has just arrested in
Scenario Three—
a fugitive with several out-of-state warrants, is sitting atop the officer's chest. He's already knocked Ruiz to the ground and pummeled him with his fists. Now he reaches for the cop's gun. Ruiz gets a hand free, grabs his weighted flashlight, and smashes it against the guy's skull. The suspect slumps, dazed. Ruiz handcuffs him and hauls him off to jail via County Hospital.

Scenario Four:
Officer Jonathan Davies uses the mobile data terminal in his car to run a check on his ex-wife's boyfriend. He discovers the man has been convicted in the past of theft and disturbing the peace. He provides this information to his ex-wife.

Surrounded by a hostile crowd bent on lynching his prisoner,
*
Officer Kevin Stuart in
Scenario Five
pulls his gun and cranks off a round into the air. Insupportable, states your policy: Warning shots are dangerous (bullets that go up tend to come down). The crowd scatters long enough for Stuart to shove his prisoner into his police car and fishtail it out of the area.

In
Scenario Six,
Officer Deborah Clancy drives out of the Eastern substation at dawn to begin her shift. She turns east onto Aero Drive. As she crests a hill, traveling well under the posted speed limit, she's met by a big orange orb, bright enough to temporarily but completely blind her—and an eighteen-wheeler, stalled in the middle of the traffic lane. The collision puts Clancy in the hospital for weeks.

Edward Anderson had been beating his girlfriend off and on throughout the day. Now, in
Scenario Seven,
he's threatening to kill her and their baby. Officer Bill Edwards shows up at the house in response to
a 911 call, just after midnight. It's cold and blustery, the rain coming down in horizontal sheets. Edwards sees Anderson jump from a first-floor window of a house and flee across a rubble-strewn backyard. The officer bails out of his car and gives chase. Aware of the suspect's threat to kill, and not knowing whether the man is armed, Edwards pulls his .40 Glock. He gains ground on Anderson, and is only a second or two behind when the suspect suddenly trips and falls. Edwards reaches for Anderson to lift him to his feet. The officer's gun “goes off.” Accidentally. The bullet enters the suspect's throat, exits the back of his head. He's DOA at Harborview Medical Center. (Edwards is white, Anderson, black. The suspect had no gun. It's Martin Luther King Day, and you're scheduled to speak to a thousand people at Garfield High later that day.)

These are not hypothetical cases. They all happened on my watch as a patrol chief in San Diego or as chief of the Seattle Police Department. With the exception of the last incident, a well-publicized Seattle case, I've used fictitious names. So, if they were
your
cops, what would you do? Should they all be disciplined?

Only one of these cops deserved to be punished. If you picked Jonathan Davies in Scenario Four you picked right. Without official justification for prying into the lives of private citizens, Davies is hanging out a mile. He should be (and was) fired. The rest of the cops were doing their jobs, under trying if not dangerous circumstances. A couple of them could have wound up dead but for their quick thinking and decisive action.

Sadly, most chiefs would have punished the cops you just read about. They regularly and systematically penalize police officers based not on the cops' intentions, or their state of mind, or even their actions, but on the
impact—
the unhappy or tragic or politically embarrassing effect of their actions.
*

I've seen it in police departments across the country, large and small: police administrators acting like bad parents when it comes to internal discipline. They treat their cops like dependent or misbehaving children—then puzzle themselves silly trying to figure out why some cops
act
like juvenile delinquents.

One of the major reasons police misconduct is so common and so predictable is because of
administrative
misconduct. Inappropriate, overly harsh discipline creates a paranoid, angry, childish police force. And it's the community that pays the stiffest price.

The theory that leads to such hypercritical, draconian discipline is seductive: If you punish cops who screw up, you'll (1) prevent bigger problems; (2) hold officers “accountable” for their mistakes; (3) send a message to other cops that policy violations will not be tolerated; and (4) satisfy the public (and your boss, the mayor or the city manager) that you're the kind of chief who “takes care of business.” It's a pretty theory, one that animates the philosophy of many “accountability-oriented” chiefs, but it's hogwash.

If you want to build trust in your officers and help them get their dangerous and demanding jobs done safely and effectively, you don't
punish
them when they make an honest mistake—or a conscious, defensible choice to violate policy in order to save a life.

Punitive
discipline for inadvertent (or transparently excusable) violations of SOPs triggers a passive-aggressive response from affected officers, and that includes every cop who learns of the discipline. Cops stop working as hard; they refuse to take risks; they lie about or cover up future transgressions. This is especially true if said “discipline” is handed down in an insulting, paternalistic, regimented fashion that is all too common in most agencies. Treating cops like kids tends to produce childish behavior. It's not rocket science, even though it took me a good while to figure it out.

I'm a patrol sergeant in 1970. “Cal Peters,” one of my young cops, a white male, has stopped a black youth to issue him a traffic citation. It starts badly and goes downhill from there, culminating with the young man tossing a
lit cigarette at Peters who pulls the young man out of his car—through the window—prompting the young man to file a complaint. I investigate the complaint, sustain it, and secure, with approvals up the chain of command, a four-day suspension for my officer along with a transfer out of the black community.

Looking back, I made a
huge
mistake.

I'm not saying the cop was right, far from it. The discipline on the face of it was appropriate, if not too light. But what lesson did Peters come away with? I acted throughout the process like a nasty drill sergeant, scolding the cop, rubbing his face in it, not listening to his belief that his actions were justified. I took four days' earnings out of his paycheck, and shooed him off to some other part of the city—where he seethed at the injustice of it all. And likely took it out on the unsuspecting citizens of his new beat.

I should have listened to the guy. Peters's rationale for his actions was that being hit with a lit cigarette (which landed on his heavy jacket and fell harmlessly to the ground) constituted an assault on a police officer. True, his method of extracting the kid from the car was . . . unorthodox. Yet this was a terrific learning moment at this early stage of his career, and I blew it. I could have reprimanded him, kept him in the squad, and worked with him. I could sense all along that he was far from a lost cause, that he had potential to become an excellent police officer. But he'd acted like a kid, so I treated him like one.

One thing I certainly should not have done? The suspension. Those four docked days came right out of his family's budget, hurt his wife and children and only added to his resentment toward me, and toward the brass in general. If a cop has earned that level of punishment why not go all the way and fire him? Which is exactly what I'd do today,
if
I thought the officer was beyond redemption.