Breaking Rank (72 page)

In 1993 I spoke to a business group in Orange County, California. I'd given what I thought was an inspired, rousing talk on community policing, denouncing particularly the mentality behind guarded and gated communities.

I'd told a hypothetical story of a “wealthy male head of household” (whom we'll call WMHH) who every morning slides behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes S-Class, pulls out of his four-car garage, waves goodbye to Sammy the Guard as Sammy the Guard salutes him and raises the gate. WMHH then motors toward his manufacturing business in the inner city.

The streets he travels undergo a striking transformation: from broad, winding, and shaded to clogged, treeless, smog-filled. Now, they're bordered by apartment buildings and small stores, some shuttered, most sporting bars over the windows, all awash in graffiti. WMHH passes youngsters on the way to school, drunks passed out in doorways, homeless people with their shopping carts, their cardboard pleas for spare change. Crack houses abound. Bangers and drug dealers control the streets.
Hookers cover all three shifts, syringes and used condoms at their feet. Knots of seniors sit outside mom-and-pop grocery stores in plastic and aluminum lawn chairs, shaking their heads, clucking their teeth, telling each other how it didn't use to be like this.

WMHH pulls up to his place of business. An employee jumps up, rushes over to push open the ten-foot cyclone gate. WMHH pulls in, parks in his designated space. Another safe trip into the heart of the jungle. In the evening, before dark if he can manage it, he reverses the journey. And sighs deeply, relieved, as Sammy the Guard opens then shuts the gate behind the S-Class. WMHH clicks open the garage door to his palace, drives in, punches the security code to the house, strides into the kitchen, shakes and pours himself a martini, walks out to the deep aqua pool in the backyard, and decompresses.

“Wouldn't it be swell,” I concluded, “if each of us took responsibility for improving conditions in the communities where we
work
as well as where we live? Questions?”

The first came from a tan, balding, decidedly rich-looking man who'd been giving me the stinkeye from the moment I started my talk. He didn't have a question but he wanted me to know that he pays taxes, a lot of taxes, for police protection, and that it is the job of the police to protect him and his family. The Gates offense. He was afire with anger (and only in part because I'd unknowingly described the man to a T, all the way down to the make and model of his automobile).

We made zero progress, WMHH and I. I just wanted to eat my free lunch and get back on 1-5 as soon as possible.

What would I have
liked
WMHH to do in his community? Simple. Turn over the deed of his faux-Tudor mansion to a battered women's shelter and grant them his fleet of luxury vehicles—or sell them and donate the proceeds to charity or give one each to his gardener, housekeeper, nanny, and personal trainer. I'd have him, his spouse, and their 2.5 children move into the inner city, to within a few blocks of his business. Think of the convenience! They wouldn't need a car; they could take the bus, like so many of their neighbors—sometimes transferring as many as three or four times to get to work in the morning then home again at night. They could rent an apartment or a house, perhaps one formerly used as a meth lab (they
could get it for a song). They could send their kids to the neighborhood school where the average eighth grader reads at third-grade level, and the whole family could take advantage of the community health clinic for all their medical needs. Oh, and I'd have him sell his boat and his vacation home in Palm Springs, cash in his stocks, bonds, annuities, and other paper assets, then transfer the money directly into the accounts of organizations like the Boys and Girls Club and Big Brothers, Big Sisters.

Okay, that's fantasy. But what if Mr. WMHH—motivated by guilt or genuine concern for his community decided he
wanted
to get involved? He'd be limited only by his imagination.

He could introduce himself to the neighbors around his business, get to know them. Let them get to know him. He could slip into his grubbies on a Saturday and pick up litter, paint over graffiti. He might even organize a work party to paint that decrepit old house on the corner—the one occupied by the elderly woman whose arthritis is so advanced she can hardly pour herself a cup of tea, much less wield a paintbrush. Maybe the plumbing or the wiring or the heating or the yard needs work. WMHH could create a neighborhood/business watch program, invite neighbors into his conference room, serve refreshments, launch a citizens patrol. He could donate time to the school's or the library's reading program (few things brought me greater joy as a chief in Seattle than reading stories to schoolkids in poor neighborhoods). He could become a Big Brother. Or a mentor, teaching some lucky kid how to become a thriving capitalist. He could walk a couple of blocks over to the Boys and Girls Club, volunteer his services, write them a shockingly big check. He could do the same for the battered women's shelter and/or the little league and/or the neighborhood health clinic and/or the center for services to immigrants and/or the ex-offender reentry program and/or the city's rec center and/or . . .

The point is that community police is really
community building.
And community building is character building.

There are understandable reasons why some people don't want to get involved in policing their own communities. Families are busy. They spend
their days and nights juggling multiple and colliding priorities—Sarah's soccer, Mark's orthodontia, Lucy's clarinet lessons, choir practice, PTA meetings. Both parents, or the solo parent, work long hours, often at more than one job. The last thing they have time for is patrolling the streets or volunteering at an after-school program for teens or hosting a neighborhood watch program.

Or, like me—they simply don't
want
to get involved with neighborhood watch or citizen patrols. Personally, I've had enough of it. I guess I've overdosed on crime. The less I have to think about it, the less often I see a police car (as a reminder of crime—or, depending on my mood, of government oppression), the happier I am. I live in a cabin on a mountain on an island. I neither see nor hear my neighbors. My “community” is the woods, its diverse wildlife, and Gunther, my long-haired miniature dachshund. This is a painful confession, coming from a lifelong advocate of community organizing, and a man who still loves big-city diversity and amenities. But it is what it is.

Yet, if someone steals my street sign down by the main road
one more time . . .

Most of us have, I suspect, an “involvement threshold” which, if crossed, would motivate us to get involved. A series of home-invasion robberies the next block over. Your car stolen out of your driveway. The rape or murder of a neighbor's child. The theft of a sign. Whether we stick it out for months, years, a lifetime, or merely until the immediate threat has ended, we'll come together as community. Organizing, mobilizing, and working with one another and with the police to make our homes, schools, workplaces, and streets safe.

No matter how much money we make, how steep our police-supporting taxes, how busy our lives, or how “alone” we prefer to be there are times when we just must act—together.

That citizens patrol we formed to help catch the murdering skinheads? Well, they did it! Trained by some outstanding police officers (and having been vetted by voluntary criminal records checks), they reported for duty at
our command van. They received their assignments, donned orange vests, and patrolled Hillcrest and North Park in VWs, Camrys, and Ford Fiestas. Armed with cell phones, suspect information, and instructions on how to avoid recklessly endangering themselves or violating the rights of their fellow citizens, they worked night after night, observing and collecting information. They prevented (simply by their highly publicized, conspicuous presence) untold crimes. And they caught, in the act, several muggers—which is to say they got on those cell phones immediately, followed the suspects, and called us to swoop in and make the arrests.

And it was information provided by the citizens patrol that led to the arrests and convictions of the suspects who killed that kid.

*
A term with unfortunate implications today. To the project, it meant police officers becoming increasingly,
systematically
more well educated about demographic, socioeconomic, crime, traffic, and other community issues, particularly the
trends
and
patterns
in their assigned communities. To guard against understandable fears that our “profile cops” would build dossiers or otherwise pry into the private lives of individual citizens, we formed a citizens' advisory group of university professors, a student activist, a business representative, and an ACLU attorney—and gave them complete access to
everything
. They read profile reports, had unfettered access to the officers' daily journals, rode along with the cops, and without supervision questioned individual project officers. Their report at the end of the project was glowing: not a single abuse of police authority did they find.

*
Fogelson, Robert M.
Big-City Police
. Harvard University Press, 1977.

*
I was fortunate to inherit O. W. Wilson's personal library, and kept it in my office in San Diego for years. It was full of his and others' writings on these cutting-edge management theories. (It also contained a first edition of LeMoyne Snyder's classic
Homicide Investigation
[1945], replete with page after page of the most gruesome murder scenes you'd ever want to see.)

*
Embraced by most states and cities, and many other countries, the code was written in the late 1950s by a former San Diego police captain. Gene Muehleisen, who later became the first executive director of the California state commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.

*
A dear friend, Joe Brann, insists that Santa Ana beat San Diego to the punch in institutionalizing community policing (he's been wrong before). I'd met Brann when he was a lieutenant in Santa Ana. We've maintained our friendship through his work as Hayward (Calif.) chief of police and in his role, during the Clinton years, as director of the Justice Department's Community Oriented Policing Services (the “COPS Office”) in Washington, D.C. A consultant these days, Brann is much in demand not only because he knows community policing inside and out but because he backs the theory with dozens of real-world success stories culled from hundreds of on-site visits.

*
It has invested over $3 billion in 1,700 local “community development corporations” in forty-one cities. It's helped build or rehabilitate 100,000 affordable homes, and created over eleven million square feet of commercial and community space.

*
The work can be privately financed but usually involves mandated community service. Street and graffiti cleanups, restoration of watersheds, filing and other clerical work for social service agencies, building homes for Habitat for Humanity are but a few examples of the kind of work performed by ex-offenders.

CHAPTER 30

CULTIVATING FEARLESS LEADERSHIP

Y
OU'RE A POLICE CHIEF
.
You want to move your department from where it is today to a better place. What do you do? You surround yourself with good people, set the agency on the right course, and establish and enforce tough standards of performance and conduct. Then you do everything in your power to make sure that, when your time comes, you are replaced by someone who'll do the job better than you.