Breaking Rank (67 page)
Authors: Norm Stamper
An epiphany, sprung on you in public like that, can produce kind of a meltdown, especially when you've been wedded all your career to a truth that no longer rings true. But I kept it together, thanked Tank-top, seconded his “motion,” and asked him what his police department could do to help. Thus was born America's first PD-sponsored citizen's patrol.
The following day I received a call from John Witt, San Diego's city attorney. “Tell me it's not true,” he said. “Tell me you didn't authorize a âcitizens' patrol' last night.”
“Well, I'm not sure what you mean by âauthorize.' A group of citizens told me that if the PD couldn't catch the bastards who killed that kid, they would. I just figured they had that right. It's their community.”
“Did you tell the group you'd provide training?”
“Yes.”
“Did you allow them to schedule their âpatrols' out of that big police van?”
“Yes.”
“Did you promise to broker the donation of cell phones for them to use?”
“Yes.”
“And have you found those phones?”
“Well, I called PacBell who referred me to PacTel who sent me to Pac-Cell, and, yes, I found them six phones.”
“Do you realize you've just made these, these
. . . lay
people, these
citizens
our agents?” That meant the City would be liable for anything that might go wrong.
“Hmm. I thought
we
were
their
agents.”
“What?”
“Don't we belong to them? Aren't we the
people's
police?”
“Ah, cut the political craptrap, will ya? Do you have any idea what our exposure is on this?”
“Yeah, I think so.” The city was self-insured, meaning if we screwed up and it cost us in civil damages the money would come out of the city budget, most likely the PD's. The
people's
budget.
“Well, I'm putting you on notice. I can't order you to cease and desist; I don't have that authority. But,” he paused. “I plan to take this up with the city manager and the city council. In the meantime, consider yourself
officially advised.”
“Thanks, John. I hereby consider myself officially advised.”
Today, many San Diegans patrol their own streets, some of them using SDPD vehicles, many of them carrying SDPD radios. Citizens with disabilities write parking citations to selfish, arrogant citizens who park illegally in “handicapped” zones. Seniors patrol retirement communities, doing security checks, writing parking tickets, checking on shut-ins. Up to a thousand others are scurrying about the city or working in the department's various divisions, engaged in all kinds of “self-policing.” (For an exquisite example of community policing in unexpected places, see sidebar.)
COMMUNITY POLICING AT 36,000 FEET
Three days after 9/11, with commercial flights resuming and passengers and crews understandably skittish, if not terrified, a remarkable thing happened on United Flight #564 from Denver International to Washington Dulles. Widely reported at the time (and replicated, in essence, on other flights), I've drawn this account from David Remnick's “Talk of the Town” column in
The New Yorker
posted on October 8, 2001. He cites the pilot's speech, as transcribed by passenger Kathy Rockel of Virginia:
“First, I want to thank you for being brave enough to fly today. The doors are now closed and we have no help from outside for any problems that might occur inside this plane. [The pilot was quoted by other passengers as saying,
“If you have a bomb no need to tell me or anyone else; you are already in control.”] As you could tell when you checked in, the government has made some changes to increase security in the airports. They have not, however, made any rules about what happens after those doors close. Until they do that, we have made our own rules and I want to share them with you . . . .
“Here is our plan and our rules. If someone or several people stand up and say they are hijacking this plane, I want you all to stand up together. Then take whatever you have available to you and throw it at them. Throw it at their faces and heads so they will have to raise their hands to protect themselves. The very best protection you have against knives are the pillows and blankets. Whoever is close to these people should then try to get a blanket over their heads. Then they won't be able to see. Once that is done, get them down and keep them there. Do not let them up. I will then land the plane at the closest place and we
will
take care of them. After all, there are usually only a few of them and we are two-hundred-plus strong. We will not allow them to take over this plane. I find it interesting that the U.S. Constitution begins with the words âWe, the people.' That's who we are, the people, and we will not be defeated.”
A flight attendant “then asked the passengers . . . to turn to their neighbors on either side and introduce themselves, and to tell one another something about themselves and their families. For today, we consider you family . . . . We will treat you as such and ask that you do the same with us.”
Community policing at 36,000 feet? Why not?
In the early 1970s, Police Chief Ray Hoobler was under intense attack from many San Diegansâespecially people of color, whom he'd offended repeatedly with his less than sensitive public remarks about “stoop laborers” and “wetbacks” (along with more discreet references to “niggers”). His popularity had plummeted within City Hall in direct proportion to the antagonisms he fostered between the PD and the politicians' constituencies. His job at risk, Hoobler was desperate to be seen as more community “orientated.”
As luck would have it, I'd just finished writing a proposal that would at least in theory bring about a shift in Hoobler's image: a kinder, gentler, more “community-orientated” chief. I was a lieutenant at the time, heading up Planning, Research & Systems Analysis.
Hoobler and I flew to Washington, D.C.âhe sat in first class while I was wedged into a center seat in coachâto ask for money from the Police Foundation. The Foundation is a private organization established in the early seventies by the Ford Foundation to stimulate, sponsor, and evaluate reforms in American policing. “Remember,” said Hoobler as we walked into a hotel suite of academic heavies the next morning. “No running off at the mouth with your liberal bullshit. Just stick to the plan.”
The “plan” was to randomly select twenty-four patrol cops from our Northern Division, put them through an intensive (and ongoing) training program in methods of community analysis, community organizing, interpersonal communication, and problem-solving skills, then have them “profile”
*
their beats. The officers would then apply their ongoing learning over a one-year period, exercising far greater decision-making authority and coming up with innovative approaches to fighting crime and solving problems. Their accomplishments would be judged against a control group of twenty-four other patrol cops. Hoobler had warned me against “team policing,” against “letting the community dictate police actions,” against anything “smacking of communism” (he actually said it) or, his pet bugbear, “rule by committee.”
Hoobler was a traditional cop, brought up under a system that, while nominally valuing “teamwork,” was invested in a highly centralized system of authority. It was a system that defined good cops as those who kept their noses clean, shoes shined, hair trimmed, and their police cars free of Jack-in-the Box trash, sunflower seeds, and cigar butts; wrote legible reports; generated lots of “activity” (principally traffic tickets, field interrogations, and arrests); and met an assortment of other bureaucratic requirements. It
was a rigidly traditional, “Lone Ranger” system, a mentality that placed no valueâin fact it placed a
minus
valueâon beat cops' involvement in the
prevention
of crime, or in teaming up with other officers or, heaven forbid, the community itself to solve problems. The rule: Chase calls, harvest numbers, please your sergeant (and, by implication, the rest of the chain of command), and to hell with
results.
Hoobler's administration saw to it that those who exceeded these internal, bureaucratic standards went to dicks or got promoted, thus perpetuating the system.
I, on the other hand, was passionately committed to opening up the PD to the community, engaging department personnel and citizens in joint crime fighting and problem solving, encouraging collaboration, experimentation, and innovation within the ranks, and ending the PD's “quota system”âwhich I saw as an instrument for perpetuating “attitude” arrests and other oppressive police tactics. I'd read George E. Berkley's
The Democratic Policeman
(1969), and had written a senior thesis at SDSU on the need to replace the police paramilitary bureaucracy. My motive in proposing the profile project was to launch a campaign, subversive by necessity, that would fundamentally reorient policing and the community-police relationship. I envisioned San Diego cops working in authentic partnership with the communityâwith the latter as senior partner. I believed that police performance and conduct should be evaluated not solely by department supervisors but by the community, and that the community should be involved in helping to set policies and priorities and in helping to design programs and procedures.
The chief and I were on a collision course.
Hoobler went first during our presentation in D.C. He told the research experts that unlike other cities experimenting with such concepts as preventive patrol (Kansas City) or “team policing” (Cincinnati), which brought detectives, traffic officers, and beat cops together as a team to police specific geographical areas, San Diego would offer a “back-to-basics” approach to police work.
“Our officers will continue to do the all the same things cops have done for years,” he said. “We'll just do it much more efficiently.” The remark sent shivers down my spine. We would become more efficient in our unilateral approach to police work, more efficient at oppressing people of
color, youth, our critics. “The project I'm asking you to fund,” he continued, “is an âold-fashioned, cop-on-the-beat' approach to police work. It will emphasize
individual
beat accountability. There will be no venturing off into nontraditional,
non-cop
activities . . .”
If he only knew.
When it came time for me to speak, I echoed Hoobler's “back to basics” theme, but offered as diplomatically as I could a fundamentally different, ideologically freighted definition of the term: police work with a more open, democratic,
publicly accountable
flavor.
In the early 1830s, official contingents of New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians crossed the Atlantic to examine Great Britain's “Metropolitan Police Act.” At that moment in history, U.S. cities were suffering the same social problems that led the English to form the first organized, nonmilitary police force in a democratic society.
The brainchild of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, such a force was urgently needed to contend with an explosion of lawlessness in and around Londonâhighway robbery, burglary, theft, rape, arson, stranger-on-stranger killings. Spawned by the Industrial Revolution (and the vast migration that accompanied the transition from rural to urban, farming to manufacturing), it was starting to look like the country's crime “spree” would become a permanent condition in Great Britain.
Yet even in the face of unprecedented crime and the elevated fears of its people, Parliament balked at Peel's proposal. They feared that an organized police force would bring about its own onerous social problems. That it would spawn police nepotism and corruption, heavy-handedness, intrusions into the private lives of individual citizens, and other violations of British civil liberties. Peel, who entertained these same reservations, worked hard to engineer critical safeguards into the act. Even so, it took the home secretary seven years of intense political maneuvering to convince British lawmakers to enact the legislation.
