Breaking Rank (68 page)

The new law stipulated that police officers had to be “morally fit,” with no hint of past wrongdoings. Explicit policies and procedures would be
formulated to
control
the police, to make them responsive, accountable, courteous and nonthreatening to the people they would serve. British police would carry no firearms. And all one thousand of the first “Peelers,” later to become Sir Robert's “Bobbies,” had to be at least six feet in height. Their tall hats, still worn today, were designed to make Bobbies literally “stand tall” in the eyes of the citizenry so that they might patrol their beats with psychological versus physical force. Britain's cops were intended from the beginning to serve as role models, exemplars of good government and civility. Not mercenaries, or thugs in uniform.

Cut to the Yanks who traveled to Great Britain. These city officials and civic leaders fell in love with this new approach to social control. They returned to their respective cities with tremendous enthusiasm for it—but with little or no regard for the precautions Peel and Parliament had so painstakingly built into the British model.

Predictably, from their birth as full-time police forces in the mid-1880s the New York, Boston, and Philadelphia police departments were instant havens for corrupt beat cops—and for the fathers, uncles, in-laws, cousins, and ethnic ward lackeys who “supervised” them. The process of becoming a nineteenth-century police officer in New York was straightforward: You simply went to the local ward leader or alderman with the requisite sum of money. The same was generally true for every other city police force of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Seattle Police Department (established 1869) and the San Diego Police Department (1889).

Having endured police abuses into the 1890s, “progressive elites” began what Robert M. Fogelson called the first of two “waves” of police reform.
*
The first, culminating in the Wickersham Commission report (1931), was aimed at wresting control of the police from local political machines.
Appointed by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 (pursuant to an act of Congress), and headed by former U.S. Attorney General George Wickersham, the blue-ribbon panel was charged with “studying exhaustively the entire problem of the enforcement of our laws and the improvement of our judicial system, including the special problems and abuses growing out of the prohibition laws.” The commission's principal finding, which led to widespread adoption of civil service merit systems, was that incompetent agency leadership was responsible for “police lawlessness.”

Fogelson's second wave of police reform, begun in the 1930s, was generated within the law enforcement community itself—and was largely a response to initiatives pushed for years by August Vollmer (who wrote most of the Wickersham Commission's final report).

A former letter-carrier with a sixth-grade education, Vollmer became police chief (originally city marshal) of Berkeley, California, in 1905. The uncontested “father of modern policing,” he pioneered automobile, bicycle, and motorcycle patrols, the police radio, record-keeping, polygraph exams, crime and fingerprint analysis. His was the first department to employ a scientist to help the police prevent and solve crimes. And he developed a program of police-community relations. But it was his attitude about police education, and police behavior toward citizens, including criminals and ethnic minorities (he was said to hate prejudice) that won him the support of progressives of the era. (These included his pal, Alameda County district attorney Earl Warren, who would go on to become the state's attorney general, three-term governor, and, finally, chief justice of the Supreme Court.) Vollmer wrote, “The policeman's job is the highest calling in the world. The men who do that job should be the finest men. They should be the best educated. They should be college graduates . . . And what are they? Dumbbells.”

One of Vollmer's cops in Berkeley (and one of his students when Vollmer became a professor at U.C. Berkeley) was Orlando Winfield Wilson, who went on to become superintendent of police of the Chicago Police Department from 1960 to 1971. “O.W.” Wilson is probably the better known of the two men within police circles because he essentially wrote the book on how PDs should be organized—bureaucratically, with an
emphasis on centralization, specialized units, and a steep hierarchy of “command and control.”
*

Wilson's reforms, focused as they were on efficiency and anticorruption, had the effect of helping to clean up a lot of dirty police departments. But they also functioned to distance police officers from the communities they served—the inevitable effect of a civil service mentality, the paramilitary-bureaucratic structure, and the “professional” model. Call it the law of
intended
consequences: Reformers at least through the mid-1960s did not
want
police officers getting close to the community. They correctly saw that coziness with business interests and with ward politicians would be a slippery slope to corruption.

Clean or dirty, cops in America have always served the elites: white, moneyed, propertied, the politically entrenched. It's not hard to understand why people of color, the poor, and younger Americans did not, and do not, look upon the police as “theirs.”

Policing,
in theory
, is a neutral, nonaligned institution, existing,
in theory,
to serve the legitimate interests of public safety and criminal justice. But even today it serves the interests of politicians over “the people,” landlords over tenants, merchants over consumers, whites over blacks, husbands over wives, management over labor—except when “labor” is the police union. Never, as an institution, has policing lived up to the lofty language of its Code of Ethics:

            
As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind, to safeguard lives and property, to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation,
and the peaceful against violence or disorder . . . and to respect the Constitutional rights of all men to liberty, equality, and justice . . . .
*

Compare and contrast: Are the police,
as an institution
, known for their protection of “the innocent against deception” or do they deceive the innocent? Do the police protect “the weak against oppression or intimidation” or do they oppress and intimidate the very people they're sworn to protect?

The Police Foundation gave us our money, and with it an opportunity to usher in a “third wave” of police reform. Hoobler was ebullient. He slapped me on the back and upgraded my ticket for a boozy, shoulder-to-shoulder, first-class return trip to San Diego.

A few months later we kicked off the “community policing” training program for twenty-four randomly selected cops—whose view of and approach to police work would never again be the same again. They worked beats north of Interstate 8, from upscale La Jolla on the west to the Wild Animal Park in the northeast corner of the city. They patrolled Mission Valley, with its long strip of hotels, golf courses, car dealerships, and sprawling shopping malls; Linda Vista, an economically depressed, densely populated community and home to the division's only significant black population; the wall-to-wall industrial parks of Sorrento Valley; a part of Clairemont known for its intractable landlord-tenant problems at huge low-income apartment complexes; Rancho Bernardo, a sprawling suburban retirement community; and Mission Beach, where hordes of “Zonies” descend each summer from Phoenix and Tucson to escape the heat, guzzle beer by the keg, fight with the locals, and throw rocks and bottles at the police. The vast, diverse area gave us a superb lab within which to test the theory of community policing.

The officers discovered on the first day of training that they were in for something quite different from their academy days. I'd hired research associates who, while amiable and sociable and able to get along marvelously with cops, were unyielding political progressives. They were wary of the authority of the police and critical of many department practices. (It was from one of them, Rubén Rumbaut, a brilliant sociologist, that I picked up the term “people's police.”) Together, we'd spent months designing an exceptional educational experience that we believed would capture the imaginations of our officers and challenge them to rethink some of the most basic preconceptions of their work.

It was critical that our cops question the assumption that policing was something you do
to
the community, rather than
with
it. We wanted them to challenge the notion that their superiors knew better than they what to do about problems on their beats, that they had to raise their hands for permission to try something different in order to fight crime or solve a problem.

If we were to attack these assumptions in a training setting, we knew we'd have to make that setting comfortable and nonthreatening, and populate it with extraordinary instructors armed with persuasive ideas—and an ability to relate to cops.

We brought in some of the finest minds, and most approachable teachers, in the country. Among them were Professor Egon Bittner of Brandeis University (who spent a day talking with our cops about the unsustainable role of police officers as “soldier bureaucrats”) and Professor Nicos Mouratides of San Diego State (who talked about the “sociology of work,” helping our officers see that theirs was a truly noble calling, and not “shit work,” as many of them had come to view their craft). We did the initial training in a weeklong session—morning, afternoon, and evening blocks each day—in a “residential retreat” format at a resort (directly across the street from the Del Mar racetrack).

Our cops appreciated being treated with respect, living like the “big boys” in the corner pocket, and being given an opportunity to reexamine their daily work, and to make it more productive, more satisfying. It was one of those transformative, “mountaintop” experiences. The kind that leaves you praying that reentry into the
real
world won't be
too
jarring for the cops.

At the end of the week Gene Chouinard, our most senior police officer with more than thirty years on the job, shared with me privately what the experience had meant to him. We'd just finished the last evening session and were sitting in the bar. “Unbelievable!” he said, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

“What's that?”

“This
is what I hired on to do, over thirty years ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But I've spent my whole career chasing calls and collecting numbers. And thinking all that time I was doing police work. But
this
is police work—what we've been talking about all week. It's almost like a dream come true. The chance before I retire to actually make a difference in people's lives. And to think for myself.”