Breaking Rank (73 page)

This means promoting the
personal growth
and
professional development
of each and every employee. (That's why you delegate responsibility and authority, not because it's the fashionable thing to do.) You want your cops, and all your employees, to make the right decision, for the right reasons—when you're not around.

In one of the all-time best books on the subject,
Leadership
(1978), James MacGregor Burns draws a distinction between
transactional
and
transformational
leadership.
*
The transactional form, common in political and corporate leadership—and pervasive in policing—is all about “brokering” deals, e.g., vote for me, I'll rezone your property; do a good job for me, I'll recommend you for dicks; lie for me, I'll lie for you . . . . Transactional leadership is efficient, and it's often enough to get the job done—if you're satisfied with barely adequate (or barely ethical) performance, and the preservation of the status quo.

Transformational leadership, on the other hand, promises profound change “. . . so comprehensive and pervasive . . . that
new cultures and value
systems take the place of old
” (emphasis added). It sets out, consciously and deliberately, to transform followers into leaders and leaders into moral agents.

“Moral agents”? Individuals who are deeply, demonstrably committed to liberty, justice, and equality. A police department that embraces these values would, by definition, reject racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other brand of bigotry. It would work
with
the community to achieve safe streets and social justice. It would nurture a workplace in which diversity of opinion is appreciated, and whose employees treat one another with dignity and respect, regardless of rank or status.

It should be apparent why this kind of leadership is so arresting to me, given my conviction that American policing—its culture, value system, and structure—is in need of “comprehensive and pervasive” change.

In Seattle, I taught these and other leadership principles in classes open to all employees, as well as members of the community. The theory of transformational leadership was embraced enthusiastically. In fact, my cops hungered for such a workplace—even as they acknowledged the gaping chasm between classroom theory and the real world. What then, stood in our way? In a word,
fear.

Fear (or at least the expression of it) is a socially unacceptable emotion in the police culture, something you learn the first day on the job. It's okay to tell your buddies in the cop bar how you almost peed your pants when you came face-to-face with the gunman. But that's just a figure of speech. Your peers must experience you as the ass-kicking, fearless hombre you've worked so hard to personify. It's the same persona that many cops bring along with them as they ascend the promotional ladder, thereby creating a police leadership culture of fake fearlessness.

Looking back, I wouldn't trade my own fears for anything. I hurt people because of them, and I feel shame for many of my actions. But the struggle to understand my behavior taught me, as it continues to teach me, that most abuses of power flow from fear.

I've talked about the need for police officers to be tough and gentle at the same time. They can't do that if they're living and working in a state of perpetual fear. In my leadership class I diagrammed how fear works in the body.
*
To develop fearlessness you have to
lean into your fears.
You have to become a
warrior.

When I picture warriors I don't see the “jarheads” described in Anthony Swofford's 2003 chronicle of the Gulf War. I see: Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Vaclav Havel, Eleanor Roosevelt, Viktor Frankl, Sojourner Truth, Branch Rickey, Rosa Parks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Anne Frank. Men and women who who went into battle armed only with a moral compass and a passion for justice. They changed the world, these warriors.

As have warriors armed with more conventional weapons of war—and the requisite skills, tactical wisdom, and capacity for physical violence: the samurai of Japan who fought valiantly, without regard for personal glory. Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chief who, with the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, prevailed at the Battle of Little Bighorn. (“
Hoka Hey,
” said Chief Sitting Bull, appropriating the Sioux war cry—“It is a good day to die.” Which I take to mean:
I've lived honorably, told the truth, taken a stand against evil and injustice. I am at peace.
) I think of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: the “band of brothers” who in darkness parachuted into Normandy and fought their way through France, including an implausible stand at frigid Bastogne (where, according to Stephen Ambrose, the rallying cry was, “They got us surrounded, the poor bastards”), all the way to Hitler's Eagle's Nest atop Obersalzberg.

Common to these armed warriors is uncommon grace. Gentle of spirit, but capable of astonishing ferocity. Peace-lovers, but not pacifists. Some warriors fight out of love of humanity, for social justice, for human rights. But many fight and die not for their “homeland” (and certainly not for pusillanimous politicians who, over the centuries, have sent them to fight unwise or immoral wars), but for the love of their fellow warriors.

Police officers in Japan are modern-day samurai. Carefully selected for their interpersonal competence as well as their physical prowess, Japanese cops receive instruction in Confucianism, Bushido (the way of the samurai), and psychology to promote their “social skills and moral judgment.”
*
It is the tradition of the samurai to learn flower arranging before swordsmanship.

How do we get American cops, and police chiefs, to abandon
fake
fearlessness—bravado and/or cruelty—in order to achieve genuine warriorlike courage? It begins, I believe, with a decision to think about and to experience fear in a fundamentally different way, a conscious choice not to dread fear, but to embrace it. An illustration from “Meeting the Demons,” from
No Enemies Within
by Dawna Markove:

            
Once upon a time, a long time ago, and very far from here, a great Tibetan poet named Milarepa studied and meditated for decades. He traveled the countryside, teaching the practice of compassion and mercy to the villagers he met. He faced many hardships, difficulties, and sorrows, and transformed them into the path of his awakening.

                
Finally, it was time to return to the small hut he called home. He had carried its memory in his heart through all the years of
his journey. Much to his surprise, upon entering, he found it filled with enemies of every kind. Terrifying, horrifying, monstrous demons that would make most people run. But Milarepa was not most people.

                
Inhaling and exhaling slowly three times, he turned towards the demons, fully present and aware. He looked deeply into the eyes of each, bowing in respect, and said, “You are here in my home now. I honor you, and open myself to what you have to teach me.”

                
As soon as he uttered these words, all the enemies save five disappeared. The ones that remained were grisly, raw, huge monsters. Milarepa bowed once more and began to sing a song to them, a sweet melody resonant with caring for the ways these beasts had suffered, and curiosity about what they needed and how he could help them. As the last notes left his lips, four of the demons disappeared into thin air.

                
Now only the one nasty creature was left, fangs dripping evil, nostrils flaming, opened jaws revealing a dark, foul, black throat. Milarepa stepped closer to this huge demon, breathed deeply into his own belly, and said with quiet compassion, “I must understand your pain and what it is you need in order to be healed.” Then he put his head in the mouth of the enemy.

                
In that instant, the demon disappeared and Milarepa was home at last.

To my comrades in blue: Whether facing peril on the streets, untoward peer pressure in the squad room, a bully of a boss, or tough political choices at headquarters, lean into your fears. Strengthen your skills, build emotional resilience, keep your sense of humor, strive for balance in life. As Anne O'Dell, of domestic violence prevention fame, appends to her e-mails,
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like you do when nobody's watching.

When a fear-inducing situation presents itself, embrace it. Reject the methods I employed in the past: burrowing under your fear, vaulting over it, weaseling around it. Open your body and soul to the fear. Keep your eyes open, your mind alert, the goal always in sight. Soon, you'll reach the “half-life” of that fear. As you step into the daylight on the other side, you will have been rendered
fearless.
You are a warrior.

America's cities need warrior mothers and fathers, warrior teachers, warrior role models of all types to help make our streets, our schools, our homes safe. We need warrior cops and warrior police chiefs who fight as hard to uphold civil liberties as they do to fight crime, who treasure human decency and social justice as much as they love catching crooks.

*
He has updated the work in
Transforming Leadership: The Pursuit of Happiness.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.

*
In
Arianna Online
(“Appealing to Our Lizard Brains: Why Bush is Still Standing,” October 13, 2004), Arianna Huffington cites the work of Dr. Daniel Siegel who describes the physiological origins of fear. Whether we're conscious of it or not, when a fear-inducing stimulus presents itself to the amygdala (an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain) the most primordial of all questions is raised:
Is it safe?
If the answer is “no”—and we have not learned to be fully conscious of, or
in touch with
our fears—the less fully evolved part of our brain, the reptilian “old brain,” will simply take over, and rule our reactions. The essential strategy of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, says Huffington, was to create a relentlessly reinforced image of the terrible things that would happen to us if we didn't vote for them. As she wrote, “Fear paralyzes our reasoning and literally makes it impossible to think straight.” Sure worked for Bush-Cheney in 2004.